In Richard Rorty's philosophy, conversation stoppers are invoked when a final vocabulary is used to shut down further dialogue. The Communitarium Project expands on this idea by introducing conversation deflectors, mechanisms that shift the tone of a conversation, diverting it away from its original trajectory without halting it entirely.

Conversation stoppers occur when a person invokes a set of terms that cannot be questioned, effectively ending the conversation. This is often used to police boundaries in dialogue.

Conversation deflectors subtly change the tone of a discussion, often through humor or disgust, so that the topic is no longer treated with the seriousness it might warrant. This limits the potential for the topic to generate meaningful conclusions.

For more on how this fits into the Communitarium's structure, see: Solidarity in the Communitarium.