CONCEPT
Conversation Theory
Gordon Pask’s formal account of learning and understanding as a two-sided conversational process—in which knowledge is not a stored possession but a live achievement between participants, and meaning exists properly in the gap between them, not inside either one.
Conversation theory is Gordon Pask’s reversal of the standard picture of mind: where most accounts locate cognition inside an individual system and treat communication as a secondary channel, Pask made the conversation itself primary. In his framework, to understand a topic is to be able to regenerate its procedure and teach it back to another participant who can rebuild it—understanding is a public, two-sided achievement certified by the dialogue, not a private glow inside one head. The theory was developed across Pask’s fifty-year career and formalized in his 1976 work
Conversation Theory, grounding earlier artifacts like the
SAKI adaptive teaching machine and Musicolour in a principled account of what makes a conversational loop genuine rather than simulated. Applied to
large language models, it supplies the most precise available formulation of a question the field has not managed to state well: not whether the model produces the surface of understanding, which it clearly does, but whether