Enactive Mechanism of Make-Belief Games

Abstract

Make-belief games, such as pretend play games, are typically considered to require mental representations. Mental representations are considered indispensable to explain how one can ‘act as if’ one thing was another. Mental representations, in turn, are features of cognitivist approaches to make-believe, and cognitivists (Leslie 1987; Nichols and Stich 2000, 2003) propose a mechanistic explanation of pretence. This chapter shows that pretence can be redescribed in enactivist terms without the use of mental representations. It uses a particular conception of affordances from ecological psychology (Turvey 1992) to show how else might it be possible to explain pretending that one thing is another. The chapter further shows that with the conception of affordances, we can consider pretence affordances to be present possibilities for play (instead of absent entities that need to be represented). Finally, the chapter argues that even enactivist explanation of pretence is compatible with a type of mechanistic explanation: wide and situated mechanism (Bechtel 2009; Zednik 2011).