In a little suburban neighborhood, the children play on the sidewalk. The parents, standing together to watch, play a different game. This game takes the form of a conversation.

The moves in this game may include telling a story about your child that the other parents will appreciate, or talking about the sport you know another parent also enjoys. The potential moves are too many to list, and the boundary around them is vague and indistinct. You know you’ve made a legitimate move only when your conversation partners recognize it as such. You know you’re a member of the same community when the group of you are capable of sustaining a series of mutually recognized moves in familiar games.

Our membership is always incomplete. More crucially, the game is always in the process of being developed. So we will all make moves that are not recognized by anyone. This lack of recognition is isolating; it highlights the existential gulf that exists even between the closest of friends in the most tight nit of communities.

This lack of recognition is akin to what Gadamer called the hermeneutic problem: we begin to think about the discipline, as opposed to the everyday practice, of interpretation, only when something has gone wrong. When we come up against the otherness, the opacity of a text. We seek the fusion of horizons between text and reader to overcome that otherness, to the extent we historical, finite creatures can do such a thing. And communities form and fuse the horizons of their members as they continually seek to overcome the isolation of unrecognized moves and even unrecognized games.

There is another aspect of recognition which is also a crucial feature of communities. Its absence does not have its origin in misunderstanding; it is driven by a desire to exclude. A clique may form among the sidewalk parent group, and they may refuse to recognize one of their neighbors as a member of their little community. So merely knowing how to play the games is no guarantee of membership in a community.