What’s in a name: Personal identity and Linguistic Diversity in a Cosmopolitan World João de Pina-Cabral Institute of Social Sciences University of Lisbon December 2008 Preliminary version of paper written for the symposium on “Multilingualism and Intercultural Dialogue in Globalization” New Delhi, December 2008 Cosmopolitanism and relativism In the course of the 20 th century, the social sciences have had to adapt to the fact that the world has become increasingly cosmopolitan and, during the second half of the century in particular, with the fact that science could no longer be seen as associated exclusively to one cultural and linguistic tradition – European civilization, as it used to be called. The growing communicational integration of the world meant that people had to develop strategies of mutual communication since their life worlds were increasingly confronted with other life worlds that were patently incompatible or, in any case, that could not be mutually reducible. As modern scientific higher education spread throughout the world in the post-colonial period and as universities started to