Imagination and pretense

Abstract

Pretend play (sometimes called “symbolic play”) is early to develop and universal among humans (Haight et al. 1999). Around the middle of the second year of life all typically developing children start to pretend that one thing is another. They pretend that a banana is a telephone, for example, and act accordingly; or they pretend that they themselves are Superman, and rush around the room wearing a cape – and so on. In Section 3 we will consider whether such behavior is not only universal to humans, but unique to humans. At the very least it can be said that human children are unique in the extent and variety of their pretend play. In the present section we attempt to characterize what pretense itself is. If one is to pretend that one thing is another, then of course one should not believe that it is the other. This is what distinguishes pretense from delusion. Someone who rushes around wearing a cape because he believes he is Superman is not pretending, but delusional. One might propose, then, that pretense that P is behavior as if P, or behavior that resembles the behavior of someone who believes P, but where the agent does not believe that P. One thing this proposal gets right is that it characterizes pretense as embodied. In our view, you cannot pretend without overtly doing anything. Someone who is imagining hiking in the Smoky Mountains purely internally (without her bodily actions making any contribution to the imaginative episode) is indeed imagining hiking or supposing that she is in the Smoky Mountains; but she is not pretending to be there. However, it is not necessary that one actually moves one’s body to pretend; it may suffice to adopt a certain bodily posture. Someone who is pretending may hold her body perfectly still, such as the child who pretends to be a dead cat (see Nichols and Stich 2003). Sometimes exhausted parents will initiate a game for their children by saying, “Let’s pretend to be sleeping lions.” Presumably the motionless children are pretending to be sleeping lions (until they actually – and mercifully – fall asleep). Accounts of pretense as behavior as if P in the absence of a belief that P or behavior that resembles P in the absence of a belief that P are too simple, however (Friedman et al. 2010). The bodily actions and postures of a person pretending X do not need to resemble the bodily actions of someone doing X. A child who enacts a family dinner scene with dolls is not moving her body as she would if she were eating dinner. She is using her body to manipulate external