The article insists on the notion of meta-language as it was theorized and used by Alberto M. Cirese. The universalist re-evaluation of ethno-centrism (the whole world is a country) could be set as the philosophical objective of an extraordinarily dense intellectual project only thanks to an act of faith not surrogated by any evidence: that communication between humans occurs by means of some cognitive meta-level, and not within the history of concrete ascertained interactions. Translation, for Cirese, could only pass through a theoretical meta-language that could be formalized at least in principle, and it was by appealing to the logical necessity of that meta-language that Reason (or Mind, in its unity and universality) was placed at the center of his anthropological project.