Conversational adequacy: mistakes are the essence

We argue that meta-dialog and meta-reasoning, far from being of only occasional use, are the very essence of conversation and communication between agents. We give four paradigm examples of massive use of meta-dialog where only limited object dialog may be present, and use these to bolster our claim of centrality for meta-dialog. We further illustrate this with related work in active logics. We argue moreover 1 that there may be a core set of meta-dialog principles that is in some sense complete, and that may correspond to the human ability to engage in \free-ranging" conversation. If we are right, then implementing such a set would be of considerable interest. We give examples of existing computer programs that converse inadequately according to our guidelines.