Phenomenology, a constantly renewed effort to see the world in a nonreductive and originative way, is useful in bringing about radical reflection on the phenomenon of communication as a human science. A human science is both a scientific and a humanistic endeavor; it is necessary to return to the phenomena under investigation and to permit them to guide methodological designs to guard against the primacy and absolutization of method. The human sciences must be kept from being severed from their prescientific origins in the concrete life-world of experience. Among human sciences, communication enjoys a favored position to maintain its grasp on the human point of view. The common ground of philosophy and communication science is communicative behavior as this finds its point of origin in the concrete dialogic encounter. Through the dialectical interchange between partners in a communication, shared meanings are produced. Meaning comes to presence in the world in the event of an undivided concreteness of one self with another. Winning arguments and collecting information are secondary to the function of language on the originative level as an object to which conversational partners are directed, considering the weight of one another's opinion. (DF)