Conjecture

Two communities without shared terms of discourse cannot even disagree: each reads the same transaction inside its own story, and the gap stays invisible to both until it has already decided the outcome. Ansary's ch. 21 on Europeans trading into the Mughal and Ottoman world: they "inhabited different social constellations, so they took different meanings from the same events. It wasn't that they disagreed. Rather, they didn't share enough terms of discourse to disagree in any meaningful way." Local elites saw "potential patrons"; the Europeans saw buying and selling, where "Honorable behavior could be measured in numbers." Clay's step: the first job of a shared map is to make disagreement statable, so a claim base serves rivals only if their disputes can be located on it.

Stories that make people act