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I've enjoyed and learned from the records of both Rorty's and Grobstein's travels--but find myself surprised and puzzled by this most recent Serendipish conversation with a dead friend. Why desire, on the one hand, to "get as much intersubjective agreement as we can manage," if on the other hand, "nothing makes the shared automatically better than the unshared"? If shared experience or understanding is not more valuable than unshared, why is it encouraging to find stories that are "not only compatible but mutually reinforcing"? How do "different people getting to a place in different ways" provide "reassurance that there is some kind of meaningful there there"--if (as it seems) there is no there there anywhere?