Talking past each other

Talking past each other is an idiom.

The phrase describes a situation in which people communicate at cross purposes.

The idiom explains what happens when there is a mismatch.The English phrase is like the Chinese idiom about a "chicken talking to a duck" (鸡同鸭讲 or 雞同鴨講).  Idioms are a common stumbling block for learners of a language.

The idiom applies to disputes in which neither side addressed any of the issues raised by the other.  In talking past each other, two different concepts which need not have been disputed are somehow confused or conflated.Gallie, W.B. "Essentially Contested Concepts," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Vol. 56, (1956), p.168.

In fictional dialogue, when characters talk past each other, the result is an exchange with flaws or defects.Fleisser, Marieluise et al. (1992).  Pioniere in Ingolstadt, p. 25.

 In common use 
The phrase is used in many contexts.  For example,

1917 — Albert Einstein and David Hilbert had dawn-to-dusk discussions of physics; and they continued their debate in writing, although Felix Klein records that they talked past each other, as happens not infrequently between simultaneously producing mathematicians."Mehra, Jagdish. (1974). Einstein, Hilbert, and the Theory of Gravitation, p. 84.(italics added)
2009 — After U.S. President Barack Obama's 2009 speech in Cairo, PBS experts discussed the President's words:
According to David Brooks:  "... I liked it on the whole. You know, if you cover the Middle East, you know that there's a lot of shouting there, a lot of people talking past each other. Famously, every group has their own historical narrative which they emphasize while ignoring everyone else's narrative. And I thought Obama did the right thing, which was to go there and give everybody -- everybody's narratives melded into one. Now, it meant he had to squeeze history here and there, but that's fine. He melded it into one so everyone could have a common conversation." "Obama's Cairo Speech, Sotomayor Top Week's News,"  PBS News Hour. June 6, 2009. (italics added)

References

More reading
 Anderson, Philip Warren.  "Twenty years of talking past each other: The theory of high Tc," Physica C: Superconductivity and its Applications, v. 460-462, iss. 0, p. 3-6.
 Fleisser, Marieluise and David Horton. (1992). Pioniere in Ingolstadt. Manchester, New York: Manchester University Press. ; ;  OCLC 24376759
 Gutting, Gary. (1980). Paradigms and Revolutions: Appraisals and Applications of Thomas Kuhn's Philosophy of Science. South Bend, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press. OCLC 163461098

Category:Idioms