Characters meet at a conference

Andrew Collier has written:

I once attended a conference of literary critics at which one speaker was talking about Jean-Paul Sartre’s account of his own childhood. A deconstructionist asked her, in a pained and patronizing tone, whether she was claiming that there really had existed such a person as Jean-Paul Sartre, independently of what we may say of him. When she said yes, she at once lost the attention of the deconstructionist contingent. Now had I been rude enough to suggest that, while I agreed that Jean-Paul Sartre had most likely existed, I was not at all sure that there was anything that the deconstructionists were saying, I suspect they would have been upset. They were naïve realists about their own discourse, naïve idealists about dead French philosophers.

Write a story about characters who meet at a conference.