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This paper explores a distinctive form of social interaction—interpersonal inquiry—in which two or more people attempt to understand one another by engaging in conversation. Like many modes of inquiry into human beings, interpersonal inquiry partly shapes its own objects. Thus in deciding how to conduct it we are also, to some extent, deciding who to become. The paper presents an ethical ideal of conversation to which, I argue, at least some of our interpersonal inquiry ought to aspire. It then explores the implications of this ideal for our thinking about the self.