 The downgrading of the importance of the name in philosophy, for Rosenstock-Huessy, has as its counterpart the downgrading of the vocative case and hence the dialogical component of truth. For Rosenstock-Huessy, the vocative is the condition of dialogue and hence the real condition of a new truth. Unlike philosophers, who generally begin with the nominative case, he argues that a case such as the nominative is dependent upon, and hence subordinate to, the vocative. ‘Vocatives create the preconditions for reciprocal communication; whereas nominatives and other cases take their place inside of communication. The vocative provokes the conversation’, he says in Ja und Nein (1968, 25). And: