Social and Enactive Perspectives on Pretending

Avant, Vol. X, No. 3/2019, doi: 10.26913/avant.2019.03.15
published under license CC BY-NC-ND 3.0

Zuzanna Rucińska
Centre for Philosophical Psychology
University of Antwerp, Belgium
zuzannaaleksandra.rucinska @ uantwerpen.be

Published Online First 11 October 2019 Download full text

Abstract: This paper presents pretending as an enacted and fundamentally social activity. First, it demonstrates why we should think of pretense as inherently social. Then, it shows how that fact affects our theory in terms of what is needed in order to pretend. Standardly, pretense is seen as requiring a mechanism that allows one to bypass the ‘obvious’ response to the environment in order to opt for a symbolic response; that mechanism is imaginative and representational.
This paper shows that the Enactive Account of Pretense reconsiders the idea that one needs to respond to an absent environment when pretending, proposing instead that socially constituted perceptual affordances for play allow for non-obvious ways of responding to the present environment. The enactive account of pretense suggests that one need not posit special cognitive pretense mechanisms and mental scripts in order to account for pretending, as available capacities for active perception and re-enactment of routines suffice.
This paper concludes with suggestions for the kinds of cognitive skills that should be sought out to explain pretense.

Keywords: pretending; pretense; enactivism; social cognition; perception; imagination; scripts

References

Anderson V., Northam E., Wrennall J., & Hendy J. (2001). Developmental Neuropsychology: A Clinical Approach. Hove: Psychology Press

Astington, J. W. (1994). The Child’s Discovery of the Mind. London: Fontana Press.

Baron-Cohen, S., Leslie, A.M. and Frith, U. (1985). “Does the autistic child have a ‘theory of mind’?” Cognition 21 (1): 37-46. https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0277(85)90022-8

Beaney, M. (2010). Imagination and Creativity. Milton Keynes, UK: The Open University.

Bruineberg, J., Kiverstein, J., & Rietveld, E. (2016). The anticipating brain is not a scientist: The free-energy principle from an ecological-enactive perspective. Synthese, 1-28. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-016-1239-1

De Jaegher, H. & Di Paolo, E. (2007). Participatory sense-making: An enactive approach to social cognition. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 6 (4), 485-507. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-007-9076-9

De Jaegher, H., Di Paolo, E., & Gallagher, S. (2010). Can social interaction constitute social cognition? Trends in cognitive sciences, 14(10), 441-447. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2010.06.009

Di Paolo, E. (2016). Participatory object perception. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 23(5-6), 228-258.

Chemero, A. (2009). Radical Embodied Cognitive Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/8367.001.0001

Clark, A. (2016). Surfing uncertainty: Prediction, action, and the embodied mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190217013.001.0001

Costall, A. (2012). Canonical affordances in context. AVANT 3 (2), 85-93.

Currie, G. (2004). Arts and Minds. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/0199256284.001.0001

Currie, G. (2006). Rationality, decentring, and the evidence for pretence in non-human animals. In Hurley, S., Nudds, M. (eds.) Rational Animals? (pp. 275-290). Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198528272.003.0013

Currie, G. and Ravenscroft, I. (2002). Recreative Minds: Imagination in Philosophy and Psychology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198238089.001.0001

Farver, J. M., & Howes, C. (1993). Cultural differences in American and Mexican mother-child pretend play. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, 39 (3), 344-358.

Funkhouser, E. and Spaulding, S. (2009). Imagination and other scripts. Philosophical Studies 143 (3), 291-314. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-009-9348-z

Gallagher, S. (2017). Enactivist interventions: Rethinking the mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198794325.001.0001

Gendler, T. (2011). Imagination. Standard Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Accessed on 9 October 2011. (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/imagination/).

Geurts, B. (2018). Making sense of self talk. Review of philosophy and psychology, 9(2), 271- 285. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-017-0375-y

Gibson, J.J. (1979). The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Gies, A. (2016). Unraveling Folk Psychology: Mindshaping and Plural Frameworks of Rational Agency in Human Social Cognition (Doctoral dissertation, The New School).

Gleason, T. R. (2013). Imaginary Relationships. In M. Taylor (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Development of Imagination (pp. 251-271). Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195395761.013.0017

Hacker, P. M. S. (2013). The intellectual powers: A study of human nature. London, UK: John Wiley & Sons. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118609033

Harris, P.L. (1994). Understanding pretense. In C. Lewis, & P. Mitchell (eds.), Children’s early understanding of mind: origins and development (pp. 235-259). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Harris, P. L. (2000). The work of the imagination. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.

Harris, P.L. & Kavanaugh, R.D. (1993). Young Children’s Understanding of Pretense. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development 58 (1) (Serial No. 231). https://doi.org/10.2307/1166074

Heras-Escribano, M. (2019). Pragmatism, enactivism, and ecological psychology: towards a unified approach to post-cognitivism. Synthese, 1-27. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-019-02111-1

Hutto, D. D. (2008). Folk-Psychological Narratives, The Sociocultural Basis of Understanding Reasons. Cambridge: MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/7525.001.0001

Hutto, D. D., & Peeters, A. (2018). The roots of remembering: Radically enactive recollecting. In K. Michaelian, D. Debus & D. Perrin (eds.), New directions in the philosophy of memory (pp. 97-118). London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315159591-6

Klinnert, M. D., Campos, J. J., Sorce, J. F., Emde, R. N., & Svejda, M. (1983). Emotions as behavior regulators: Social referencing in infancy, in R. Plutchik and H. Kellerman (Eds.), Emotion: Theory, Research and Experience, Vol. 2. Emotions in early development. New York: Academic Press. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-558702-0.50009-1

Leslie, A. (1987). Pretense and representation: The origins of “theory of mind.” Psychological Review 94(4), 412-426. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.94.4.412

Lewis, M., & Brooks-Gunn J. (1979). Toward a theory of social cognition: the development of self. In I. Uzgiris (Ed.) New Directions in Child Development: Social Interaction and Communication During Infancy (pp. 23-33). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass:. https://doi.org/10.1002/cd.23219790403

Liao, S. and Gendler, T. (2010). Pretence and Imagination. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science, 2 (1), 79-94. https://doi.org/10.1002/wcs.91

Lillard, A. (1994). Making sense of pretense. In C. Lewis and P. Mitchell, (Eds.), Children’s early understanding of mind: Origins and Development (pp. 211-234). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

McKitrick, J. (2003). A Case for Extrinsic Dispositions. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 81 (2), 155-174. https://doi.org/10.1080/713659629

Miłkowski, M., Clowes, R.W., Rucińska, Z., Przegalińska, A., Zawidzki, T., Gies, A., Krueger, J., McGann, M., Afeltowicz, Ł., Wachowski, W.M., Stjernberg, F., Loughlin, V., Hohol, M. (2018). From Wide Cognition to Mechanisms: A Silent Revolution. Frontiers in Psychology 2393 (9), 1-17. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02393

Mitchell, R.W. (Ed.) (2002). Pretending and Imagination in Animals and Children. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511542282

Nichols, S. & Stich, S. (2000). A cognitive theory of pretense. Cognition 74 (2), 115-147. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0010-0277(99)00070-0

Nichols, S. & Stich, S. (2003). Mindreading: An Integrated Account of Pretence, Self-Awareness and Understanding of Other Minds. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/0198236107.001.0001

Noë, A. (2004). Action in Perception. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press,.

O’Regan, J. K. & Noë, A. (2001). A sensorimotor account of vision and visual consciousness. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 24(5), 939-1031. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X01000115

Piaget, J. (1962). Play, dreams, and imitation in childhood. New York: Norton.

Picciuto, E., & Carruthers, P. (2016). Imagination and pretense. In A. Kind, The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Imagination (pp. 334-345). London, UK: Routledge.

Reddy, V. & Morris, P. (2004). Participants don’t need theories: Knowing minds in engagement. Theory & Psychology 14(5), 647-665. https://doi.org/10.1177/0959354304046177

Rucińska, Z. (2017). The Role of Affordances in Pretend Play. In C. Durt, T. Fuchs, & C. Tewes (Eds.), Embodiment, Enaction, and Culture: Investigating the Constitution of the Shared World (pp. 257-277). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/9780262035552.003.0015

Rucińska, Z. (2016). What Guides Pretence? Towards the Interactive and the Narrative Approaches. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 15 (1), 117-133. doi:10.1007/s11097-014-9381-z https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-014-9381-z

Rucińska, Z. (2014). Basic Pretending as Sensorimotor Engagement? Lessons from Sensorimotor Theory for the Debate on Pretence. In J.M. Bishop & A.O. Martin (Eds.) Contemporary Sensorimotor Theory: A brief introduction (pp. 175-187). Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-05107-9_12

Rucińska, Z. & Reijmers, E. (2014). Between Philosophy and Therapy: Understanding Systemic Play Therapy through Embodied and Enactive Cognition (EEC). InterAction: the journal of Solution Focus in organisations 6(1), 37-52. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00175

Russon, A. E. (2002). Pretending in free-ranging rehabilitant orangutans. In Mitchell (Ed.), Pretending and Imagination in Animals and Children, (pp. 229-240). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511542282.018

Ryle, G. (1949). The Concept of Mind. London: Hutchinson.

Szokolszky, A. (2006). Object Use in Pretend Play: Symbolic or Functional? In A. Costall & O. Dreier, Doing Things with Things: The Design and Use of Everyday Objects (pp. 67-86). London, UK: Ashgate Publishing Limited.

Taylor, M. (1999). Imaginary companions and the children who create them. New York, NY, US: Oxford University Press.

Tomasello, M. (1999). The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Travieso, D., Gomila, A., & Lobo, L. (2014). From Systematicity to Interactive Regularities: Grounding Cognition at the Sensorimotor Level. In P. Calvo & J. Symons (Eds.), The Architecture of Cognition (pp. 371-396). Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/9780262027236.003.0015

Varela, F. J., Thompson, E., & Rosch, E. (1991). The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/6730.001.0001

Varga, S. (2011). Pretence, Social Cognition and Self-Knowledge in Autism. Psychopathology 44 (1), 46-52. https://doi.org/10.1159/000317777

Veneziano, E. (2002). Language in pretence during the second year: What it can tell us about “pretending” in pretense and the “know-how” about the mind. In Mitchell (Ed.), Pretending and Imagination in Animals and Children (pp. 59-72). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511542282.006

Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Zawidzki, T. W. (2013). Mindshaping: A new framework for understanding human social cognition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/8441.001.0001 “Avant” journal – the task financed under the contract 711/P-DUN/2019 from the funds of the Minister of Science and Higher Education for the dissemination of science. Czasopismo „Avant” – zadanie finansowane w ramach umowy 711/P-DUN/2019 ze środków Ministra Nauki i Szkolnictwa Wyższego przeznaczonych na działalność upowszechniającą naukę.

Social and Enactive Perspectives on Pretending

“Avant” journal – the task financed under the contract 711/P-DUN/2019 from the funds of the Minister of Science and Higher Education for the dissemination of science.

Czasopismo „Avant” – zadanie finansowane w ramach umowy 711/P-DUN/2019 ze środków Ministra Nauki i Szkolnictwa Wyższego przeznaczonych na działalność upowszechniającą naukę.