Abstract
Our lives are commonly involved with fictionality, an activity that adults share with children. After providing a brief reconstruction of the most important cognitive theories on pretence, we will argue that pretence has to do with metarepresentations, albeit in a rather weakened sense. In our view, pretending entails being aware that a certain representation does not fit in the very same representational model as another representation. This is a minimal metarepresentationalism, for normally metarepresentationalism on pretense claims that pretending is or entails representing a representation qua representation, i.e. as conceptualised as a representation, in its very content. In the final section we will try to draw some consequences of our view as to the debate in cognitive science on mindreading. Given this minimal metarepresentationalism, the two main positions on mindreading, the ‘theory theory’ and the ‘simulation theory’, turn out to be closer than one would have originally supposed.
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Notes
We limit ourselves to saying that Perner’s distinction between different representational models gives rise to the philosophical treatment of fictionality in question for, according to Recanati (2000), linguistic representations of a fictional reality undergo a contextual meaning shift—expressions within those representations are given meaning in a fictional, rather than in a real, context—whereas for Perner no such shift occurs (1991:55). In his view, the pretend model arises from the fact that a certain representation originally belonging to the real model yet which turns out to be false when evaluated with respect to the real world, is simply displaced into a new model in which it is true with respect to the fictional world of that model (1991:27–28, 30–31).
In point of fact, it is controversial whether the world in which the story is set really shrinks to just one world or whether there are many worlds which can be taken as such worlds. For the discussion on this point, see Lewis (1978). It is, however, irrelevant for our purposes.
As our examples should make clear, we are speaking of simple sentences occurring in texts, not of complex metarepresentational sentences of the form “According to David Copperfield, Uriah Heep is arrogant” or “Mummy pretends that the banana is a telephone”. Normally, these latter sentences are used outside fiction in order to speak of the fiction itself, so they are not typically ascribed fictional truth-conditions. (Of course, there may be cases of second-order fictions in which a story is told which is about an(other) story, but for simplicity’s sake we rule out these cases here.).
To be sure, someone not persuaded by the importance of introducing ‘creative props’ could observe that the experiment still elicit imitation. Yet, since imitation can be performed at different levels of complexity, Rakoczy et al. might precisely retort that the imitation in question does not regard the mere behaviour of the experimenter, but the imitation of his/her intentional actions.
Incidentally, since for Leslie a metarepresentation is a computational relation between an agent and other representation, is also subpersonal. On the contrary Perner is not committed to this idea.
According to Leslie, each semantic property of mental states’ ascriptions has a correspondence in one of the three basic forms of pretence: referential opacity corresponds to object substitution; nonentailment of truth or falsehood corresponds to attribution of pretend properties; and nonentailment of existence corresponds to creation of imaginary objects (see 1997:416 for details).
This seems to escape Currie (1995:144–145, 148), who equates pretending with imagining. To be sure, Currie is well aware that there is a difference between a pretending mind and an imaginative mind such as that of a daydreamer, if not also that of a hallucinatory subject. Yet he describes this distinction as an unconscious switch from having pretend to having real beliefs (ibid:162-3 and fn. 26).
Lillard (2002a:104) takes this awareness as one of the defining feature of pretence. Thus, one may take her as another supporter of the minimal metarepresentationalist view we are defending. This is not however very clear. For the text we have quoted in the text can be also interpreted either as an alternative formulation of the Pernerian point of view (with “being aware of” as simply meaning “representing”) or as an alternative formulation of the point of view standardly (after Perner) ascribed to Leslie (with “being aware of” as meaning “representing to oneself the (actual or nonactual) representation of a situation”).
Walton, for one, would be skeptical about that. He says (1990) that the first object, what the first representation is about, is a prop in a make-believe game, which is not the same as being proxy for another object, what the second representation is about. For him, even expressions in literary texts are props in the make-believe game, which definitely does not mean that they stand for the (imaginary) characters whose vicissitudes are recounted in such texts.
Someone might also be perplexed yet for the opposite reason, namely that it is the very notion of x standing for y that must be reconstructed in terms of the notion of pretending. In this respect, it would not be the case that, as Perner maintains, pretending that x is such and such and pretending that x is y are distinct notions; the latter would simply be a specification of the former. On this hypothesis we want here to remain neutral; but it seems at least that symbolic capacity presupposes comprehension of pretence. See Lillard (2002b:200).
See also the texts quoted in Lillard (2002a:112).
Curiously enough, this seems to be acknowledged by Perner himself (1991:37–38); see also Suddendorf (1999:245).
See Perner: “a representation is something that stands in a representing relation to something else” (1991:18).
Although sometimes singular thoughts are also labeled de re thoughts (cf. e.g. Recanati 1993), it is better to stick to our terminology. For the distinction between general and singular metarepresentations does not match the close distinction between de dicto and de re readings of pretence reports. This not only because the latter is a distinction concerning language, notably the way a reporter reports someone’s intentional states, not intentional states themselves—a point often stressed in the literature, cf. e.g. Bonomi (1995)—but also because if there were anything like a genuinely de re metarepresentation, unlike a singular metarepresentation this might well be causally inert (cf. e.g. Oedipus’ belief of his mother that she has married him). Moreover, the distinction between general and singular metarepresentations has to do with a difference in their content—a general versus a singular content. Note finally that this distinction can be drawn independently of assessing a further issue regarding whether a singular metarepresentation simply contains its primary object, that is, the first-order representation it is about, or it also, or rather, contains a non-conceptual content picking up that very first-order representation. For positions maintaining these latter options cf. respectively Schiffer (1978) and Fodor (2007). This issue is relevant when one addresses the question of whether a singular metarepresentation also has a perspectival nature. Perspectivality indeed comes into the fore when, unbenownst to a person, two singular metarepresentations may be about the very same representation, so that that very subject may endorse the first while rejecting the second metarepresentation. (Here we simply have at a second-order level the well-known problem Frege (1892) originally raised for first-order representations, or thoughts). For the purposes of this paper, however, this question can be put aside (but see footnote 17 below).
One—typically, a naturalist about aboutness—might maintain that being in a causal relation with a certain object is a necessary condition of aboutness. Yet even strict naturalists would agree that it cannot be a sufficient condition of aboutness—as, for example, Fodor (1990:91) says: thoughts may be caused “in all sorts of ways”, and yet all these ways do not make those thoughts be about those causes.
Following Leslie (1997:416), one might still rejoin that in order for pretence to involve metarepresentations, their reports must be opaque (for any pair of such reports which merely differ in coreferential expressions figuring in their embedded sentences, these sentences cannot be substituted in such reports salva veritate), and reports of singular metarepresentations are not such. To begin with, it is not clear in which sense the reports that pretence would involve are opaque. Perhaps the singular terms “the banana” and “the telephone” are not substitutable salva veritate; but this does not depend on the fact that they occur as embedded in reports different only in ordinarily coreferential expressions figuring in their embedded sentences. For there is no such fact—the reports “Mummy pretends that the banana rings” and “Mummy pretends that the telephone rings” are not such since “the banana” and “the telephone” do not ordinarily corefer. It depends rather on the fact that such terms occur in the expression of the primary representation and in what reports the metarepresentation respectively as standing for distinct objects—the real object and the imaginary object. But even putting this problem aside, it is still the case that certainly reports of general metarepresentations are ordinarily taken to be opaque, yet what has still to be proved is that pretence must involve such reports.
For the different representational models can easily contain both true and false representations with respect to the world of the model. Hence, it may well be the case that by means of a representation in a model the representing subject focuses no situation, for insofar as the representation is false with respect to the world of the model, that world contains no corresponding situation. This point probably escapes Perner as the way he construes his models leads him to think that models only contain representations that are true with respect to the world of the model (cf. fn. 1).
Even though in his well-articulated theory (2006) Goldman proposes a way to minimise the role of first-person psychological knowledge, he agrees that he is defending a hybrid approach, in which simulation co-occurs with metarepresentational processes. In point of fact, Goldman thus defends his metarepresentationalist version of a simulation theory by also appealing to introspection. Yet this is not essential. A simulation theorist may be both metarepresentationalist and non-introspectionist, as Fuller (1995) and Heal (1995) claim.
It is interesting to quote Gordon: “To simulate Mr Tees (i.e. someone who has missed his flight) in his situation requires an egocentric shift, a recentering of my egocentric map on Mr Tees. He becomes in my imagination the referent of the first person pronoun ‘I’, and the time and place of his missing the plane become the referent of ‘now’ and ‘here’. And I, Gordon, cease to be the referent of the first person pronoun: what is imagined is not the truth of the counter-identical ‘RMG is Mr Tees’. Such recentering is the prelude to transforming myself in imagination into Mr Tees much as actors become the characters they play. Although some actors (‘method’ actors, for example) occasionally step back from the role they are playing and ask ‘What would I, myself do, think, and feel in this situation?’, and then transfer their answer (with or without adjustments) to the character, the typical stance of modern actors is that of being, not actors pretending to be characters in a play, but the characters themselves.” (1995b: 55; italics in the original text). This idea has famous predecessors. See for instance this passage by Wollheim, in which he accounts for a form of imagination enabling one to understand a picture pictorially: “What then happens is that the suitable spectator, the suitable external spectator we might say, starts to identify with the internal spectator: that is, to imagine him, the internal spectator, centrally, or from the inside, interacting with the represented scene as the repertoire assigned to him allows or constrains him to.” (1998:225).
The real problem with Gordon’s account is another, which has to do with his behaviouristic stance: see Meini (2007).
In reality, Jacob and Jeannerod talk about “social intentions”, but we can equally refer to prior intentions.
This paper has been presented at the 2006 Conference of the European Society of Philosophy and Psychology, Belfast, August 24–27, 2006, and at the Workshop on Mental Simulation, December 11, 2008, Venice. We thank the participants for their important comments and criticisms. Although the paper has been discussed and elaborated together by the two authors, Cristina Meini is specifically responsible for Sects. 2, 3, and 6, Alberto Voltolini for Sects. 4 and 5.
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Meini, C., Voltolini, A. How pretence can really be metarepresentational. Mind Soc 9, 31–58 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11299-009-0068-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11299-009-0068-z