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P4C and Playfulness: Are Games and Playfulness Important 

for Communities of Philosophical Inquiry?1 

 
 

Jason Taylor   
 
 

“The very essence of playfulness is an openness to anything that may happen” 

- John Cleese 

  
n the summer of 2011—the third year in which Eurekamp2 provided programming—I sat in the 
shade of one of the rare maple trees on the University of Alberta campus, casually eating my 

lunch while 2 of the 40 or so children played in the dirt beside me. It was a Wednesday of our third 
week that year—at the time Eurekamp offered four weeks of camps for children in the grades 1 
through 9; we welcomed nearly 150 children that year—and so the children had already had a few days 
to acclimate to one-another socially, to be encouraged to ask questions about a range of activities, and 
to really listen to what other children were saying. The two—one boy, one girl—were both 6 years old 
(our youngest participants) and were pensively pushing sticks into the dirt. Then, as if it were obvious, 
the little boy said aloud3: 

 
Noah: I wonder how people counted before there were numbers. 
Abby: What do you mean “Before there were numbers”? Numbers are real! There have 

always been numbers. 
Noah: No, God made them. 
Abby: No, God didn't make numbers. They go 1-2-3-4. He can't make them go 1-2-3-5, 

so he didn't make them. 
Noah: Why not? God made Godzilla, so he can make numbers go “1, 2, 3, 5”. 
Abby: But Godzilla is cooler than God. I mean, like, he wrecks cities and stuff… 

 
We do not have to look very hard to see interesting themes and genuine philosophical questions 

arising entirely naturally (for 6 year olds!) in areas philosophers would identify as metaphysics and 

                                                 
1 The author wishes to thank anonymous reviewers of Analytic Teaching and Philosophical Praxis for their helpful comments 
on earlier drafts; gratitude is due, also, to Natalie Fletcher, for her assistance with earlier drafts, and to the youth from 
Brila who agreed to play at some of the Eurekamp activities discussed below. 
2 Eurekamp was founded in 2009 by John Simpson, Rob Wilson and the author; its last summer of operation was 2017. It 
aimed to merge the pedagogical approach to P4C developed and defended by the IAPC with play and games. The result 
was a large collection of distinct week-long programs directed at youth as young as 6 years (grade 1) to as old as 14 years 
(grade 9); each five-day camp program had distinct themes which engaged youth, inviting them to take up various 
interrelated philosophical ideas. The highest enrollment Eurekamp saw was 350 youth (in 2016). 
3 These and all other names are pseudonyms to protect the privacy of the children involved. 
 

I 



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philosophy of religion: Noah is clearly curious about whether numbers are necessary entities—he 
thinks they are not: they are created (by God); and Abby clearly thinks that such a position is not 
possible. To support her objection, Abby relies on an argument with unstated assumptions, drawing 
into question the extent of God’s omnipotence: because created things could have been created 
differently (one assumption), and because it is impossible for numbers to be ordered differently 
(another assumption), it follows that numbers were not created by God. 

 
Though this interaction arises from Noah’s independent thought during a lunch hour (which 

are informal and unplanned), its nature is typical of the kind of dialogue that arises from the planned 
activities and games featured at Eurekamp. During later parts of the same discussion—which were not 
actively tracked—there was a playful contention about the greatness of Godzilla as eclipsing the 
greatness of God with various appeals to features of God(zilla) that appeared to tip the scales one way 
or the other. In other words, they collaborated to present and evaluate various properties of each as 
candidates for establishing their implicit claims. The unfolding of this part of the discussion actually 
sparked our interest in responding to the assumption that playfulness and the use of games are 
unsuited for philosophical inquiry; we hope here to suggest that view is mistaken. 

 
It is by reflecting on experiences at Eurekamp that we aim in this discussion to establish two 

related claims: first, that the features of games provide fertile grounds on which long term 
philosophical engagement can be fostered; and second, that the attitude of playfulness is a happy 
bedfellow for the attitude and dispositions that dialogical inquiry is designed to foster in both 
participants and facilitators. In other words, we hope to show how the incorporation of play—qua 
games and qua the disposition of playfulness—into various activities, approaches, and iterations of P4C 
promises to enrich the CPI experience. To the extent that this demonstration is plausible, it can be 
understood as an argument that games, play, and playfulness should be incorporated.  

 
To establish the article’s arguments, we will look at some of the literature on games (specifically 

that literature discussing the importance of rules) and playfulness (specifically that literature that 
presents playfulness as “responsive openness”) in an attempt to extract some features of those concepts 
which will help to theorize more carefully about the (admittedly anecdotal) insights drawn from 
Eurekamp experiences. We shall try to draw both from the literature on the philosophy of sport, as 
well as the literature from the philosophy of education—including John Dewey’s claims surrounding 
experiential learning and the “forked road of doubt,” as well as Tim Sprod’s more recent concerns 
about seeing the results of CPI dialogues applied to everyday life. 

 
Games, the Importance of Rules, and Philosophical Engagement 

 
In this section we shall examine some literature on games to try to establish the claim that the 

features of games provide fertile grounds on which long-term philosophical engagement can be 
fostered. We shall start by canvassing seminal work by Bernard Suits who captures one central 
understanding of games. Suits establishes that a game is defined by its rules in at least two ways: first, 
the aim of the activity, the purpose of the game, are set out by the game’s rules which establish the 
winning conditions; second, rules define the very activity in which participants are involved. In his 
words, “to play a game is to engage in an activity directed towards bringing about a specific state of 



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affairs, using only means permitted by the rules, where the rules prohibit more efficient in favour of 
less efficient means, and where such rules are accepted just because they make possible such activities” 
(Suits, 1978, pp. 34). Thus, for example, winning a soccer game requires scoring more goals than our 
opponent, and what it means to “score a goal” is defined by the rules.4 Moreover, if we were to change 
the rules we would be changing the game: if we allow players to pick up the ball and run with it down 
field, the players are no longer playing soccer.5  Importantly, the limits which rules place on players are 
embraced by the players for the sake of the game. No doubt competitors realize that it would be easier 
to get a soccer ball to some set point on the field if they picked it up; nevertheless, players accept those 
rules and do so just for the sake of taking part in the game. Recent authors have called this feature the 
“autotelicity” of games.6 Autotelic activities are pursued “as ends in themselves,” (Suits, 1977, pp. 17-
8) or, in other words, as “intrinsic, noninstrumental, self-contained enterprise[s]” (Meier, 1995, pp. 
121). 

 
We can illustrate how this discussion applies to Eurekamp by examining one game, Clayorama. 

Clayorama—a game which is feely available on the internet—is played as follows: each participant is 
given an equal amount of modelling clay and instructed to build a creature of any shape and size, just 
as long as its construction allows it to be moved without falling apart. The creature is named by 
participants and is assigned statistics by an impartial party who is explicit about the rationale for the 
assignments made. Thus, the more legs the creature has the further it can move; the more arms, more 
attacks; whether it has “ranged” attacks with fewer hit-points, or no ranged attacks but full hit-points; 
etc.7 Children then pit these creatures in battle against one another. Coupled with dice rolling (and a 
little luck), ultimately only one creature is left standing victorious. The losers are crushed with screams 
(literally) of agony (not literally) as the modelling clay gods (campers) flatten the creatures.  

 
The philosophically interesting aspects arise when Eurekamp facilitators allow players to play a 

second round with newly created creatures. During this second round we allow children to make new 
creatures who will be assigned characteristics in the same manner, but we inform them that creatures 

                                                 
4 Suits (1978, pp. 44-45) distinguishes between ‘pre-lusory goals’ and ‘lusory goals’. A pre-lusory goal is one describing a 
state of affairs without reference to the ends of a game. Thus, a pre-lusory goal might be maneuvering a puck past a certain 
line, or running a certain distance as fast as possible (e.g., 400 meters); the lusory goal in these cases, would be, respectively 
winning the hockey game by outscoring one’s opponent or winning the race.  
5 Of course, there are stronger or weaker commitments to this second claim regarding the constitutive nature of rules for a 
game. On strong accounts, any change whatsoever (no matter the magnitude) constitutes the creation of a new game (even 
though we might be inclined to speak as though the game is the same); weaker accounts allow that only some rule changes 
produce new games (e.g., just changes in the ‘central’ or ‘core’ rules). For more on this issue, known in the literature as a 
question of “Formalism”, see D’Agostino et al. (1995). The author ascribes to the weaker view, though no claims made 
here depend on that stance. 
6 See, for example, Carlson (2013). A quick note that Carlson (2013) addresses the nature of ‘play’ not ‘games’; the author 
recognizes the slide from ‘games’ to ‘play’, and makes it despite the fact that Bernard Suits (1978) has gone to some length 
to try to distinguish play and games in ways that show games are not a subspecies of play. While some of what Suits says is 
interesting, it is pertinent to bear in mind the objections raised to this account (cf. Morgan (2008) which strongly suggest 
that his line is too firm. 
7 Various rule versions can be found online. The following link has been cited as “the original”: 
http://www.portcommodore.com/dokuwiki/lib/exe/fetch.php?media=larry:gaming:clayorama.pdf. Links to a full list of 
characteristics as well as a full set of rules for Clay-o-rama can be found at 
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/9300/clay-o-rama. Original rules can be found in Dragon Magazine Issue 125. 

http://www.portcommodore.com/dokuwiki/lib/exe/fetch.php?media=larry:gaming:clayorama.pdf
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/9300/clay-o-rama


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will be randomly assigned to participants. So, even though a child creates a creature, they may (very 
likely) end up fighting the battle with someone else’s creation. Though there are many adjustments to 
Clayorama that might be made, this variant for the second round of playing often prompts an inquiry 
on fairness.8 

 
In the six years that we have run this activity at least one child every year chooses to make a 

character that has a poor attack value, low life points, or little to no ability to move: they choose to 
make a character which suffers from some obvious deficiency. During CPI sessions, they reveal their 
reasoning to be (similar to) the following: 

 
Stanley: Well, there are 16 other [players], so it’s really unlikely that I will have to use 

my creature. If I get paired up against [my creature], it’s better for me if it’s 
weaker. And it’s really likely that I will have to fight it. And, I’d rather fight a 
weak creature than a strong one so I should make a weak one.  

 
Of course, either because of the odds or because of the will of facilitators, creatures often do end 

up with someone other than those who made them, so playing the game nearly always results in some 
discontent, expressed mid-game, or in CPI sessions. Here is an example of one complaint:  

 
Hina: But my creature is terrible. It can hardly move and it has only one very weak 

attack; everyone else has way more. I don’t have a chance. I didn’t choose this 
creature and it wasn’t as fun this time.  

 
Depending on the severity of the complaint, we stop the contest mid-game to address the 

concerns, which when distilled can be understood as a question about fairness.  
 
Note though that the commitment to addressing the question of what makes something fair 

seems to arise from the child’s commitment to the game of Clayorama (as defined by the rules) and 
the larger context of the activity of random character assignment. That is, it arises from the child’s 
acceptance of the game’s autotelicity. The goal of Clayorama is not intrinsically valuable: maneuvering 
and rolling better than one’s opponent such that one’s opponent is the first to have his life-points 
reduced to zero is not something that has value in and of itself; it is not even something that makes 
much sense outside the confines of the rules of the game. Yet, by committing to the playing of the 
game, children “buy in” to the game and thus are especially concerned with the lived experience of 
unfairness that arises when confronted with the task of playing with a deficient creature. The rules, 
and commitment to them, promise to set the grounds for commitment to P4C-style inquiry. (More on 
this in the next section.) 

                                                 
8 Those with a philosophical background will notice the analogue to John Rawls’ (1971) musings on the principles of 
justice. Rawls asks us to consider which principles of justice we would accept, if we were to choose them from a position of 
self-interest, but where we are unaware of the place we will fill in that society. Thus, he asks us to consider principles of 
justice from the Original Position, behind the veil of ignorance. At Eurekamp, we put participants in the Clay-o-rama 
Original Position of choosing how to build a creature, behind the Playdoh-Creature Veil of Ignorance—not knowing which 
creature one will be assigned. Note that the choice campers often make to create a weak creature parallels the exact choice 
that Rawls’ says the rational observer would not make from behind the veil of ignorance. 



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Engagement and Dewey on Doubt 

 
To deepen our understanding of the value of games for fostering engagement in CPI sessions, 

we can draw on John Dewey’s “forked road of doubt” which we take as one way to understand the 
theoretical underpinning for P4C. In CPI sessions, philosophical questions arise from a point within 
the experience of the stimuli which can be identified as moments of “forked roads of doubt” (Deans, 
1999, pp. 16-7). Here we allude to the first stage of John Dewey’s (1938) five stage learning model of 
reflective inquiry, which suggests that educators provide experiences that see students i) experience 
some form of doubt, ii) offer tentative interpretations of the experience, culminating in a hypothesis, 
iii) (re-)consider the facts at hand for further clarification, iv) adjust the hypothesis formulated and v) 
test and apply the firmed hypothesis as appropriate (Deans, 1999).9  

 
For our purposes here, the role of doubt in this process needs to be emphasized. For Dewey, 

learning begins when the agent is snapped from her daily habit; she goes about her day, expecting 
things to unfold as she has seen them unfold before. When sequences diverge from those 
expectations—when her non-reflective state is broken—she can interpret that divergence, examine it, 
and hypothesize about differences in ways that help her to understand it. As Dewey says, doubt arises 
with the occurrence of “jars, hitches, breaks, blocks… [that occasion] an interruption of the smooth 
straightforward course of behavior” (Dewey, 1949, pp. 315). Ultimately, successful hypothesizing (in 
communities of philosophical inquiry, for instance) will allow her to modify what she expects, her 
habit, and thus learn from the experience.10 

 
As we see it, in the story-approach to P4C which are typical of historical approaches (e.g., those 

using the IAPC novels) the doubt raised is constrained within the stimulus-story. Thus, children are 
invited to experience doubt but they do so one step removed from the experiencing subject—a kind of 
“second-order doubting.” It is not the child who first wonders whether she can love animals and eat 
them, but Lisa; it is not the participant’s experience of the teasing—that visceral, phenomenologically 
rich experience—which prompts the query on its difference from bullying, but the fictional character, 
Sam, from the picture book Leonardo the Terrible Monster.  

 
In this sense, the doubt arises from an experience which is fundamentally grounded in the 

vicarious; it is a vicarious experience around which our discussion is based and from which it is drawn. 
And, while answers to questions prompted by stories are often linked quickly to the children’s 
experiences as they personalize the question, the source of the doubt and of the question is vicarious. 
Any engagement with the question—however strong—seems then to have to combat the “once 
removed” nature it acquires from its source. 

 
The situation, we suggest, is notably different with the use of games and other activities as 

stimuli. In light of this discussion, games might change the P4C experience for children, adding to the 
wrinkles of engagement. First, an activity stimulus like a game has the capacity to move children 
beyond—or perhaps better, into—the vicarious experience. While with the story-based approach the 
                                                 
9 From our perspective the entire proposed model is one that captures the CPI process, with the question formation 
‘hidden’ between steps one and two, and the inquiry captured by stages two through four. 
10 This is comparable to what Gregory (2007) says regarding the inquiry process. 



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pertinent happening, which gives rise to the moment of doubt, is essentially a happening to someone 
else, with the activity-based approach children take part directly in, and are committed directly to the 
outcomes of, the activity that gives rise to the central question. The child’s commitment to the 
autotelic features of the game firmly grounds the discussion. They do not merely read about Harry 
discovering (or inventing!) his rule; they do not merely witness a potential case of unfairness. Instead, 
they invent the rule (or discover it!) themselves; they feel the unfairness it as it is evoked from the 
game to which they have committed. Insofar as this is true, we can say that the “forked road of doubt” 
is a lived forked road of doubt: the experience of doubt is no longer vicarious, but felt and sometimes 
vividly (as anecdotes suggest), just because of the commitment to the activity from which it arises. 

 
Admittedly, in the case of fairness in Clayorama, there appears to be a spectrum of experiences. 

The child who is given the statistically deficient character (and perhaps the child who created the 
creature in question) will be confronted with stronger visceral feelings (generally) than those who did 
not. And, while those who face off against the poor character might share some of the discontent 
because of their capacity to empathise, it seems reasonable to suggest that they will feel the unfairness 
less than the slighted participant. Insofar as this is true, it would seem that the experience is a 
vicarious one (to some extent) for some and not others. Nevertheless, this spectrum seems at least in 
part to depend on the actual activity and how it unfolds. So, for example, if the creature creation 
process was riddled with randomness (as would be present were the counselor to assign statistics 
randomly) it would seem to be more likely to produce the required impetus in more (if not all) 
participants who had committed to the aims of the game. Moreover, it is not clear that this concern 
undercuts the general point being made—namely, that there is something significantly different about 
the experiences (for some) which lead up to inquiry, even if it clarifies that these experiences 
themselves sit on a spectrum.11 

 
One way to further cash out these differences is as follows: with the more traditional story-based 

approach it is often the case that children can be confronted with some dilemma while nevertheless 
unproblematically choosing to continue to read more of the story, ignoring the dilemma. They are 
confronted with an interesting point—invited to consider it—but are not obligated to do so. Yet, with 
the activity-based approach typical to summer camp programs, the immediacy with which these 
objections arise is so compelling that completion of the game is often no longer an option: the very 
pursuit of the game itself is called into question and it cannot be completed satisfactorily without 
addressing the concern that has reared its head.12  

 
While primarily a phenomenological claim about how stimuli are experienced, this lived doubt—

or so we speculate—might serve to bridge the gap between what Tim Sprod has called “discourses of 
justification” and “discourses of application” (Sprod, 2001, 155). Discourses of justification are 
discussions wherein participants puzzle through largely conceptual troubles on an issue while paying 

                                                 
11 Here I would like to thank Jordan Sifeldeen for insisting that I take these issues seriously. 
12 Of course, this line of argument reveals a pressing issue which needs to be held firmly in view when using activity-based 
stimuli: we are dealing with actual feelings as the impetus for philosophical discussion, so care has to be taken when 
employing activity-based approaches. Thanks to our friends at Brila—including their youth board—for reiterating the 
importance of this point. 



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careful attention to the guiding ideals of dialogue.13 Participants “attempt to redeem a contested 
norm, a highly abstract, generalized principle which, ignoring questions of application, can gain 
consensus” (Sprod, 2001, 107). Discourses of application, however, are those conversations that arise 
when participants take the conclusions of the former discourses and aim to apply them in the real 
world. With questions of application, children must begin to weigh how their conclusions might fit 
into less than ideal circumstances; that is, how the justification fits the real world, rather than merely 
the insulated atmosphere of the inquiry. 

 
Living the experience which gives rise to a dialogue anchors the ensuing discourse of 

justification into the discourse of application. In the case of Clayorama, no response to the question 
“What makes a game fair?” can pass muster without applying directly to the game from which it arose. 
If it fails to make sense of that phenomenon, if it does not fit with the “icky-goo” of the real-world 
particularities, the conclusions to the discourses of justification rarely have merit for the children. In 
the face of the objection “But Clayorama was already equal when we started so equality can’t be what 
counts as fairness!” is a driving, central concern to participants that simply cannot be ignored when a 
child proposes that equality is fairness.14 

 
The second way in which games can change the P4C experience arises from the much-

emphasized role that rules play in games (in the previous section). Rules create artificial structures—
arbitrary confines—within which children are actors or agents. And, when agents actively flout those 
confines, or act in ways that reveal they have a different understanding of those confines, this gives 
rise to moments of doubt. Flouting the rules breaks the propensity—or habit—that children quickly 
develop to act within the rules of the game: an opponent (or sometimes a teammate) seems to 
understand the confines differently, so differently that it is becomes impossible to carry on without 
addressing this seeming divergence in understanding. Or, even more jarring, there are cases where 
others might simply refuse to accept the rules of the game entirely: my opponent rejects the presumed 
autotelic feature of the game. Playing requires “buying in” to the game, thereby accepting the 
limitation of one’s own actions to the less efficient means of completing the task just for the sake of 
the game. Without this, there can be no game at all. Anyone who has experienced, in grade school 
perhaps, another’s active resistance to a proposed game can likely recall the disturbances produced as 
the resistor actively flouted the rules in play. With such actions, the resistor makes an implicit call for 
justification of the value of the game itself. In our experience, this is often the most engaging feature 
that arises from considerations of rules.15 

 

                                                 
13 Sprod discusses two ideals, drawing from Habermas: “[1] universal moral respect (everyone has a right to be included in 
the discourse) and [2] egalitarian reciprocity (there is an equal right to make assertions, ask questions of others, introduce 
new subject matter, call the validity of claims into question and so on)” (2001, 61). 
14 This cannot be ignored in two senses: first, participants in a CPI are compelled to respond to the complainant just 
because the concept of fairness is up for debate; second, they cannot be ignored because the circumstances and properties 
of the game (i.e., its ‘autotelicity’) are also up for debate. 
15 Simpson (2013) references one such example of a youth at Eurekamp who resists the activity that had the campers 
building bat houses. The off-hand comments, which rejected the value of the activity, grew into a larger discussion about 
what obligations, if any, we have to care for the environment. (Simpson, however, uses the example to illustrate the 
importance of a kind of inquiry—what we have termed ‘micro-philosophy’—which is typical of an informal learning 
environment.) 



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In both ways, we can see how the edifice of games helps to address a concern noticed by Dewey—
namely that we need to establish “conditions that will arouse and guide curiosity; [we need to set up] the 
connections in things experienced that will on later occasions promote the flow of suggestions, create 
problems and purposes that will favor consecutiveness in the succession of ideas” (Dewey, 1933, pp. 
56-7). These conditions, the rules, are the kind of structures that, because they require commitments 
by the participants to even have the game commence (i.e., are autotelic), lend themselves very easily to 
the impetus needed to drive dialogue to deep meaningful levels (i.e., bridge the justification-
application gap).16 

 
Play and Activity-Based Philosophy 

 
In this section we shall turn our attention towards the concept of play to explore its importance 

for CPI sessions. Our exploration will focus on the disposition of playfulness, rather than the act of 
playing, to distinguish our discussion from the preceding section on games. The hope will be to draw 
out how infusing P4C with the attitude of playfulness can improve the practice of CPI with children. 
As an attitude, playfulness indicates a particular disposition towards the activity we are undertaking: 
given that we can play in a variety of situations (e.g., we can play at work), and given that we can work 
at tasks that might prima facie appear to be prime grounds for play (e.g., professional athletes work at 
their craft, despite that most of us play at them), it should be clear that playfulness is more a matter of 
our stance towards an activity than of the particularities of any activity itself. And yet, though 
playfulness is importantly linked to a desire to have fun, it is not merely this desire. Instead, “it is a 
mode of comportment towards things, a mode of being-in-the-world which, although not utterly 
peculiar, is nevertheless different from our mode of comportment when we consider ourselves to be 
not playing” (Hyland, 1980, pp. 88). When we are not playing, we toil, work, or strive; we rest or 
recuperate. Each of these involves a stance that is in many ways different from being playful.17 

 
One important feature of playfulness is captured by what Drew Hyland (1980) has called 

“responsive openness” (1980, pp 90).18 When we are “open,” we have an increased sensitivity and 
awareness of what might otherwise go overlooked. The open soccer player is acutely aware of the size 
of the pitch, the movement of other players, and the variations in the pitch itself, all of which are 
constitutive of how the match unfolds. New opportunities continually present themselves as others are 
closed off and he is aware of these opportunities to the extent that he is open. 

 

                                                 
16 Participants can actually resist dialogue in similar ways as they resist games. This is perhaps more likely in informal 
learning contexts such as at summer camp programs, especially when participants are often signed up by their parents and 
do not have full understanding of the nature of the Eurekamp programming. Nevertheless, even those situations of doubt 
(perhaps better described as ‘active resistance’) can be harnessed successfully. One instance arose at Eurekamp where one 
youth asked “Why are we having all these discussions, anyways?”. What followed was a very productive inquiry session on 
the value of thinking with others, which even managed to change the resister’s mind. 
17 Of course, we are not asserting that these are incompatible with the attitude of playfulness. We can play at our work, for 
instance; and when we do, dispositions from both stances will overlap. 
18 We echo, here, Hyland’s insistence that this not be understood as a formal definition of ‘play’. 



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The modifier “responsive,” however, indicates that mere openness is insufficient as an 
understanding of playfulness:19 instead, “I [also] have to be capable of responding to that openness in 
a way called for by the situation” (Hyland, 1980, pp. 89). If possibilities present themselves but the 
soccer player is unable to take advantage of any of them, as Hyland says, the athlete can hardly be 
taken to be playing the game of soccer (Hyland, 1980, pp. 90). In fact, in that case, he is not much 
different than an alert spectator of the game. 

 
Importantly for both our purposes as well as a general understanding of playfulness, it is this 

capacity to respond to the openness which grounds our success as individuals who play: “my success as 
a player, my very status as a player, demands that I respond as best I can to whatever possibilities my 
openness to the game elicits” (Hyland, 1980, pp. 90). It is perhaps fruitful, then, to picture responsive 
openness as both an awareness of the challenges, puzzles, or queries with respect to the aim of the 
activity that we are currently undertaking, as well as a capacity (to try) to respond to the unfolding 
situation that one faces. Each situation we approach playfully presents a task, a bar to be cleared, a 
marker to pass which implicitly asks us to confront it as we become aware of it and in relation to our 
overall aims.  

 
To see how this might apply to P4C, consider an activity from Eurekamp we have dubbed 

Imagineering. In Imagineering, we task children with using all or some provided equipment to produce 
a novel or unique activity or game. Typical equipment includes things you might (at least peripherally) 
associate with games—like baskets, Tupperware containers, over-sized cardboard tubes, balls, and 
pylons—but also items which, at first glance you would not, such as bubble wrap plastic, a lemon, 
cardboard boxes, a household plant, and the like. After working in small groups to create their 
project, participants are tasked with finding a way to pitch it to others—a process which includes 
explaining the rules (if any), purpose (if any), and use of the items (if any). Children then take part in 
the most popular creation. This activity has resulted in the creation of competitive games with clearly 
defined win conditions (like “wide games” resembling capture the flag or team-bowling20) as well as 
cooperative tasks where the groups struggle together to make something semi-permanent that is also a 
piece of art.21  

 
The direction of the CPI following Imagineering is dependent on the type of activities that the 

children make. Thus, unlike Clayorama (for example) we do not have preset themes we anticipate 
discussing after the activity. However, we can often predict them: sometimes the CPI explores whether 
a proposal really counts as novel (either because it closely resembles some other game already in 
existence or because two sub-groups created something very similar to one another); or the CPI 
explores the value of playing games in general; or the CPI explores how we can effectively articulate 
the aim of a game to others (which usually arises because the creators of the task had something in 

                                                 
19 In fact, mere openness might even be a detriment in some cases. Consider, for instance, the issue of home-field 
advantage: presumably it is this heightened awareness which plays a role in allowing the home-field crowd (putatively) to 
influence play on the field in favour of the home team. 
20 A “wide game” is one which uses a field or large space. These are games like capture the flag, soccer, or hide-and-go-seek. 
21 We occasionally assign to groups labels or roles with primary and secondary objectives that need to be fulfilled in the 
creation of the novel item. Thus, one group might be “capitalists”, another “engineers”, or another “pacificists”. This, 
obviously, changes the approach and results fairly significantly. 



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mind when relaying it, but that something was not properly conveyed, which lead to something 
dramatically different than intended); or, finally—given the way the groups may have worked or failed 
to work together—it has prompted a larger dialogue about teamwork and leadership. 

 
It should be clear that Imagineering provides ripe grounds for fostering and exercising the 

disposition of playfulness. When presented with a pool noodle, a house plant, and medium-sized 
Tupperware bin, for example, a child is asked to have an increased sense of openness to these objects, 
to her group’s suggestions, and even to her surroundings. She is asked to be creative in how these 
might be implemented in the fulfillment of the task she has been given, including how the very nature 
of the task might be interpreted. Moreover, the group’s success at advocating for the game or task that 
they have created hinges on their capacity to capitalize on their own openness to the objects, 
presenting them in a novel and compelling light to others. And, the task’s successful presentation 
depends on the openness of others to the proposal that each group puts forward. Playfulness, as a 
disposition adopted during the period when the stimulus is experienced, is crucial. 

 
We should, however, look beyond the importance of the stimuli as a source of playfulness to 

consider its role as an attitude during a CPI dialogue. In brief, we want to suggest that playfulness qua 
responsive openness is a characteristic which, when it is embodied, can be very beneficial to the CPI 
for both participants as well as facilitators. Broadly speaking, one larger purpose of implementing the 
CPI is to foster in participants a set of dispositions related to thinking. Consider just two authors on 
the issue: Lipman (1991, pp. 15-25) speaks of the CPI as fostering creative and critical thinking in a 
shared social context with a special interest in developing higher-order thinking skills, whereas Sprod 
(2001, pp. 21-43) speaks of using the CPI to develop the five aspects of reasonableness, including 
critical, creative, committed, contextual and embodied thinking. For both, successful development of 
the respective skills requires dialogue with other thinkers: in dialogue with others, children are able to 
engage with ideas, arguments, and perspectives to which they might otherwise not have had access. 
Sometimes they are even able to think through questions and issues which they would not have been 
able to think through on their own.22  

 
To be playful in a CPI is to be responsively open to the content of the dialogue. It would be to 

see examples, arguments and perspectives presented by others in the dialogue as salient or important 
in ways that other mind-sets (e.g., one of work) might prevent. To be playful would be to view the 
content of each person’s contributions as presenting a challenge, task, or bar to be considered and 
addressed; to be worked with and built upon; to be assessed and represented. Each sets some 
standard; and, as players in the dialogue it is our task to meet that challenge in ways that are 
consistent with achieving the goal of the inquiry, determining reasonable belief. Thus, success as a 
participant in the dialogue requires that we respond in the best ways possible, insofar as those 
challenges are ones which somehow contribute to determining what is most reasonable to believe. In 
this light, children should aim to advance the dialogue by taking those examples, stances, and 
proposals as serious attempts to examine the quality of the position(s) under consideration in our 
mutual pursuit of reasonable belief. 

 

                                                 
22 Lev Vygotsky (1962) labels this conceptual space the ‘zone of proximal development’. 



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We can see responsive openness in the following CPI session, which followed a session of 
Imagineering. During that activity, one group of children created a fictional machine called ‘The 
Upcycler’ which received the most votes for the best creation. That machine “takes recycling and 
makes something new”.23 As the children considered their reasons for their votes, the conversation 
turned to discussion of the criterion for their choices. 

 
Emily: Well I chose the Upcycler because there’s never been a machine that can recycle 

things like this […] and it could be possible [… to make] in 20 years. […] It’s a 
good reason to make it! It’s a good cause. 

Facilitator: Okay so for you it’s not just that it’s innovative, it’s that it’s, one, the most 
possible and, two, the best cause. Thank you! You can pick someone else to 
speak. 

[…] 
Marie-Eve: I chose the Upcycler as well because with all the other inventions, it’s just 

convenient. It’s convenient for the consumer, the person buying it, but it’s only 
for that one person and it doesn’t actually contribute to something bigger than 
just that one person using it. 

Facilitator: So, for you what makes it stand out from all the other inventions is that it is 
for a bigger cause than just the one consumer’s convenience. 
Salman: Hmm... well now I changed my mind... I am choosing the Upcycler now too 
because I agree with Emily and Marie-Eve, and because I can do upcycling too so I know 
it is possible.24  

 
In this instance, Salman is responsively open to the contributions of Emily and Marie-Eve to 

such an extent that their contributions are legitimate answers to the question of which invention is 
the best. These are so legitimate in fact that when coupled with his genuine commitment to the 
discovering reasonable belief he is persuaded to change his own view (presumably reevaluating the 
weight or force of his own reasons) about what counts as best. 

 
For P4C facilitators, playfulness can also serve a useful role as they strive to gain insight into the 

over-arching process of the dialogue.25 During facilitator trainings on successful dialogue, one point 
stressed at Eurekamp is that facilitators are not always able—at first pass at least—to discern what a child 
intends by her comment or to perceive how her contribution fits into the overall structure. It might 
be, for instance, that she is not really answering the question; instead, she is recounting an anecdote. 
However, as often happens in dialogue with all ages (not just the very young), our initial impression of 
what is being said or of how some contribution fits into the overall scope of the dialogue, can be 

                                                 
23 The dialogue which follows was recorded by friends at Brila, who agreed to run the activity and share the results for this 
chapter. 
24 In fact, as this dialogue progressed the discussion became so complex, with a number of competing incompatible criteria 
to which the children appealed, that eventually all the children’s votes were moved off their original placements. 
25 We distinguish the participant role from the facilitator role roughly along these lines. The participant strives primarily to 
add content in an attempt to answer the question and learn what is reasonable to believe. The facilitator, on the other 
hand, focuses her contributions on the process—clarifying contributions, connecting participants, asking for reasons, etc. 
 



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mistaken. An attitude of responsive openness would combat the inclination that some facilitators and 
participants have to shut down or discount proposals of this nature. It would encourage a view that 
takes each contribution to be a candidate for serious consideration as an attempt to advance the 
conversation. And, while some will eventually be ruled out, discarded, or deemed to be off topic, the 
attitude that helps to lend these prima facie plausibility is one that P4C facilitators ought to have. 

 
Alternatively, a facilitator who is responsively open to the dialogue finds herself more willing to 

follow the discussion where children want to take it, rather than direct it towards questions of answers 
that she herself has already deemed worthy of acceptance or consideration. One instance of this kind 
of failure to show appropriate responsive openness to the dialogue occurred at Eurekamp in the 
summer of 2013. Working with a group of grades 1-3 attending Eurekamp’s art-camp, one facilitator 
used The Dot by Peter H. Reynolds (2013), to prompt discussion after over-hearing one child claim 
that he (that camper) could not draw. The story features a girl named Vashti who laments a similar 
shortcoming: She is not able to draw either! Encouraged by her teacher, Vashti puts a simple dot with 
a felt pen in the middle of a blank page; the teacher asks Vashti to sign the picture and then hangs it 
on the wall after framing it. Vashti, inspired, explores all the different ways to draw dots—big; small; 
different colors; dots made of dots; and dots made by not drawing a dot, but by drawing everything 
but the dot. 

 
After reading the book to about 20 children, a dialogue started. As the conversation unfolded, 

the children began to talk about dots and different ways to draw them—including the controversial 
“drawing the dot by drawing everything but the dot”. As the discussion progressed there was some 
question about whether this ‘not-drawing’ both counted as drawing, but also counted as drawing a dot; 
the group sat in (what was perceived to be) quiet contemplation about this issue. Then, the facilitator 
interjected in ways which were neither open nor responsive to the dialogue: she gently asked “Can I 
ask a question? Did you notice that the teacher asked Vashti to sign the picture? [The children 
assented.] Do you think that makes it art?”. Here the facilitator proposed a shift towards a new 
question that, independently, might have been a great discussion question given that it asked the 
youth to assess whether the act of signing was a legitimate “art-making” criterion, but which had not 
registered as relevant to the children involved. This move changed the entire tenure of the dialogue to 
that point. 

 
From here the conversation became something of a forced reflection and interchange from the 

children. The responses tried to address the shift in focus, but it was clear that they were still hung up 
on the previous “non-dot drawing” issue—often voicing opinions about that concern in ways that were 
unconnected to the previous child’s comments, who herself had tried diligently to address the 
facilitator’s new question. Of course, the insistence by the facilitator here illustrates a lack of 
playfulness—a lack of responsive openness—to the issue that was central for the children. Given this, 
the children quickly became restless with the shifting back and forth of the conversation between 
topics; they seemed to find the facilitator’s requests to connect responses to the previous speaker a 
hindrance, given the bifurcation of the discussion’s focus. As such, the discussion fizzled as a direct 
result of the lack of the appropriate playful disposition in this instance which, were it present, might 
have helped the facilitator to engage in the topic that the children were themselves more interested. 

 



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Playfulness and Philosophy as a “Serious Business” 

 
As a way of concluding, let us revisit the underlying assumption of the current discussion, viz., 

that playfulness and games are inappropriate for P4C. In light of the above discussion, we can see the 
sketch of a possible objection which roughly is that to include playfulness and games within an 
inquiry process—either as a stimulus or as a larger attitude adopted when approaching an inquiry 
question—is a prescription which invites danger. Playfulness and games are not happy bed-fellows with 
the P4C approach, the objection might run, because they fail to take the CPI method as seriously as it 
should be taken. Consider playfulness: to be playful in dialogue might seem to imply a kind of 
flippancy towards others and the content of the dialogue itself. As the objection might run, CPI 
dialogue is serious business: children are tasked with determining reasonable beliefs from among all 
the hypotheses on the table and finding reasonable beliefs is no playground undertaking; it is serious 
business for serious interlocutors. Thus, playfulness is not for dialogue. 

 
There are other ways to express this concern. For instance, objectors might see the call for 

playfulness as a call for too much creativity. Playfulness, as a free flow attitude inseparable from the 
notion of responsive openness, invites a sort of randomness from children. In the comic Calvin and 
Hobbes, when Calvin participates in Calvinball, he is playful with Hobbes to the extent that they are 
open to the drastic changes and challenges that the other proposes while seeking to counteract that 
change to their own advantage.26 For instance, Hobbes may run the football in for a touchdown and 
declare it as such, but is met with Calvin’s clever retort that the rules dictate touchdowns be scored in 
alternating ends throughout the game; thus, Hobbes has just given up six points, not earned them. 
Hobbes, of course, quickly notes that winning the game requires having the fewest points—not the 
most—on Tuesday, today. And so, the (so called) playfulness would continue. 

 
Returning to CPI, we can see that this kind of creativity is not desirable in dialogue: we do not 

desire this kind of randomness, no matter how creative. We do not want to invite any and all 
contributions. Instead, we require a more careful serious disposition than this type of playfulness 
admits, which bears in mind the ends of dialogue. Thus, the assumption and coupling objections are 
pressing and need to be addressed if the current position is plausible. And we can begin to find a 
foothold by first noting that even if we accept the proposed objection, it does not extend so far as to 
undercut the points made about games which primarily highlight the usefulness of their autotelic 
nature and of the restrictions of rules, both of which promise to engage children more fully in CPI 
sessions.27  

 
Still, the objection itself presumes that playfulness is itself incompatible with a recognition of 

seriousness or gravitas. In our view, this assumption is mistaken. Adopting an attitude of playfulness 
need not open the door to rampant creativity. An analogy here might be helpful: the athlete 
(professional, collegiate, or recreational) who playfully undertakes her sport need not be, ipso facto, 

                                                 
26 If you are unfamiliar with the details of Calvinball see http://calvinandhobbes.wikia.com/wiki/Calvinball; or, better, 
read some Calvin and Hobbes! 
27 In fact, if games are played—that is, if they are approached playfully—we might even make the case that such occurrences 
are likely to make engagement even stronger, given the role that playfulness has in producing the phenomenon of 
immersion in an activity. For more on this, see Hyland (1980). 

http://calvinandhobbes.wikia.com/wiki/Calvinball


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flippant with respect to that undertaking. Nor, it should be noted, is she wise to give free reign to her 
creativity, trying any shot she can conceive of in any particular instance. Though playful, she must 
seriously, and within set confines, consider all the options that her playful disposition makes salient to 
her; she genuinely weighs each possible response as a viable option to pursue in seeking a successful 
athletic outing. And, she does so with due consideration of the rules and purpose of the game itself. 
In this way, her creativity ought to be bound by the confines of game and thus limited from the 
problematic form of rampant creativity. Without this recognition she would be being flippant, not 
taking seriously the standards for success at that pursuit; she would be being destructively creative. 
Thus, while she might toy with options creatively, her focus is on making successful athletic moves 
with respect to those options which are realized through her playfulness.  

 
So too in dialogue. Rampant creativity as a result of playfulness is not what is being encouraged 

in this instance. Children must always consider the participant proposals on hand from the 
perspective of success in dialogue—finding reasonable belief. In other words, it would seem that 
flippancy arises from a sense of openness that is not at the same time responsive to the goals of the 
pursuit in question. It is with responsiveness that playfulness becomes something different than mere 
flippancy towards the act. Thus, it would seem that those in CPI dialogue are only flippant if they flout 
the full sense of what it means to be playful. If they are merely open but non-responsive, then they are 
not taking the dialogue itself seriously. And, of course, inquirers who are open but not responsive are 
not uncommon. In our experience both at the university level implementing P4C methodology as well 
as in the setting of Eurekamp, we have had very smart children who played the role of devil’s advocate, 
testing each idea just to see how robust it is, or how versatile another child is at accounting for the 
deluge of counter examples to proposals.28 But, again, these inquirers are open without the 
appropriate responsiveness to the aim of inquiry: reasonable belief.   

 
If all of this is correct, the implications for P4C in general seem to be that practitioners in 

traditional classroom settings can gain important insights from informal learning contexts that infuse 
their P4C methods with games and an attitude of playfulness. These additions promise to enrich the 
CPI dialogue experience in ways that will may perhaps generate more engagement on the part of 
children.29  

 
 

 

 

                                                 
28 The most striking case arises from the author’s practice in the university setting where one astute first year student, early 
in the year, loved inquiry sessions as a means to “play the game” of philosophy. But for him the aim of “the game” was not 
reasonable belief, because he took there to be no wrong answers (a common plight of first year philosophy courses). 
Instead, he wanted only to flex his philosophical capacities on ideas (and perhaps others). To his credit, as the year 
progressed, his approach changed and he strove with the group to identify reasonable beliefs; and, he subsequently went 
on to be a very valuable facilitator at Eurekamp for a few camp seasons. 
29 Indeed, if the forgoing is correct then the argument can be seen as one which supports the call for further empirical 
research to determine if the theoretical suggestions track expectations in the practical unfolding of the program. 
 



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Address Correspondences to:  
Jason Taylor, Independent Scholar 
Email: jason.dale.taylor@gmail.com  

mailto:jason.dale.taylor@gmail.com

