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The essence of conversational energy can perhaps be captured by a finite series of conversational schemata. Kant appears to have believed as much, and in his first Critique he was at pains to describe a schematism of the categories of the understanding. For example, reality, he decided, is recognized in everyone’s understanding as a primitive gesture or schema in the mind he described as “a continuous and uniform production of a quantity in time as we successively descend from a sensation which has a certain degree to its vanishing point, or progressively ascend from its negation to some magnitude of it.” Perhaps there really is such a schematism in the conversational spirit. Perhaps we will learn to recognize it consensually.