Play in Conversation: The Cognitive Import of Gadamer's Theory of Play

This chapter presents a conception of understanding where understanding emerges out of the joint experience of conversation. On this conception, understanding requires more than the pre-reflective acquisition of shared social meanings – a conception of understanding historically highlighted by existential phenomenologists. Beyond this, it requires what occurs in genuine conversation, namely, that one put one’s pre-reflective social meanings at risk in the process of critical self-reflection. Drawing from the hermeneutic phenomenology of Hans-Georg Gadamer, I argue that conversation is that joint experience that gives rise to such critical self-reflection and that it is conversation’s play-structure in particular that makes it a source of understanding in this sense.