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Public Charades, or How the Enactivist Can Tell Apart Pretense from Non-pretense

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Abstract

Enactive approaches to cognition argue that cognition, including pretense, comes about through the dynamical interaction of agent and environment. Applied to cognition, these approaches cast cognition as an activity an agent performs interacting in specific ways with her environment. This view is now under significant pressure: in a series of recent publications, Peter Langland-Hassan has proposed a number of arguments which purportedly should lead us to conclude that enactive approaches are unable to account for pretense without paying a way too severe theoretical price. In this paper, we will defend enactive approaches to pretense, arguing that they can in fact explain pretense without incurring in the negative theoretical consequences Peter Langland-Hassan fears. To this effect, we start by exposing Langland-Hassan’s challenge (§2), to then highlight its core assumptions and demonstrate their falsity (§3). Having done so, we argue that none of the theoretical consequences Langland-Hassan fears follow (§4), and in fact enactive approaches to cognition may be explanatorily superior to the one Langland-Hassan favors (§5). A brief conclusion will then follow (§6).

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Notes

  1. We will be using “enactive approaches”, “enactivism” and the like as collective names to refer to anti-representational 4E approaches. For more information on those, see (Gallagher, 2023; Ward et al., 2017).

  2. Langland-Hassan refers here to Angelique Lillard’s (1993, 1998) psychological experiments, which featured showing children a troll called ‘Moe’.

  3. Other representational recipes involve, i.e., recourse to imagining counterfactual scenarios such as being a bird in flight (Picciuto & Carruthers, 2016; van Leeuwen, 2011), or to a specialized cognitive architecture that allows for making inferences about birds (Nichols & Stich, 2003; for an overview, see Rucińska and Weichold (2022a). Our answer will stay neutral on this matter—its success will thus be independent from the success of any representationalist recipe.

  4. And that we will show to be highly problematic in Sect. 5.

  5. We’d like to thank the anonymous reviewer for this useful phrasing.

  6. One may fear our proposed definition is too demanding: couldn't the cases offered by Langland-Hassan pose a problem for enactivists, even if S and S* weren't complete kinematic duplicates – for example, if they behave only very similarly (but not identically), or if they act in slightly different environments? The answer is negative: if such differences – no matter how minuscule – are present in the examples, then the enactivist is free to appeal to those to tell apart pretense from other types of behavior. And notice that it would not be an ad hoc move: for the enactivist, cognitive phenomena are forms of agent-environment interaction: change interaction (or the environment) and the cognitive phenomenon will change too.

  7. Our argument has been largely inspired by Hurley’s (1998) attack on the “duplication assumption”.

  8. We prefer the (fairly ancient) nomenclature of “corollary discharge” rather than the more novel terminology based on pairs of (inverse and forward) models (e.g. Pickering & Clark, 2014), as the latter comes with a cognitivist and representationalist gloss that we prefer to avoid. For a way to replace it with an alternative, enactivism-friendly conceptualization (see Facchin, 2021).

  9. Notice that, at least when it comes to fine grained, “purely kinematic” aspects of movement, this view is widespread and well-accepted even among representationalists (Bongard & Pfeiffer, 2007; Clark, 1997).

  10. Many thanks to Shaun Gallagher for having suggested this scenario, and to one reviewer for indicating how to use it.

  11. Another way to frame the problem is this: enactivists want to explain various types of psychological phenomena in our world. What may happen in other possible worlds—especially distant ones—does not matter for their theorizing.

  12. A tree trunk, for example, affords different actions to a tired wanderer (e.g., leaning against it to rest), a bird-watcher (e.g., climbing on it) and an ant (e.g., searching for food). Of course, this isn’t to deny that the “material” features of the affordances do not matter: a tree trunk won’t afford flying or cooking, even to the world’s best pilot or chef. But the affective state of the person, or the context they are in, also influence what affordances are picked out. Both of the agential and environmental aspects will be important in understanding how affordances allow us to tell apart pretense games from other games.

  13. We write ‘seem to’, as we are not convinced that such ‘stepping away from the canonical affordances’ is required. As the context modulates which affordance calls forth our action, it is likely that in the context of play (e.g., playing a ‘calling game’), the object (the banana) immediately affords the alternative sense (pretend ‘telephoning’), without first affording eating that needs to be suppressed (Picciuto & Carruthers, 2016). For an elaboration of this argument, see Rucińska (2017).

  14. We suspect he would extend the complaint to canonical affordances of pretense-affording props (as opposed to other-games affording props).

  15. Does this mean that affordances are unanalyzable black boxes? No, it doesn't. Affordances can be qualitatively modeled (e.g. Jiang & Mark, 1994; Lopresti-Goodman et al., 2011; Warren, 1984), and their presence can be explained pointing to a variety of factors, including the physical properties of the environment and the objects therein, the embodiment of the agent and her skills.

  16. One of the three biblical Magi.

  17. Notice that Langland-Hassan puts his challenge in terms of best explanation. He’s not committed to the claim that an account of pretense must involve folk psychological attitudes (say, as a matter of conceptual necessity, see Langland-Hassan, 2022a, p. 1005).

  18. That is the case even if enactivists’ commitments to architectural details vary. For instance, radical enactivists’ (cf. Hutto & Myin, 2013, 2017) commitments to the cognitive architecture will be very minimal: they just commit to it being non-representational. In turn, autopoietic enactivists commit to a fairly specific and biologically inspired cognitive architecture based on autopoiesis (e.g. Di Paolo et al., 2016; Thompson, 2007).

  19. Notice that “reduction” does not indicate a relation holding between two theories, one of which is more fundamental than the other (cf. Nagel, 1961). Here, the reduction happens within the same theory (or at least the same linguistic framework), namely that of folk psychology.

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Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank the participants of the WIP meeting in Antwerp University, Belgium, and the participants of the conference 'New Work in the Theory of Mind', University of Bucharest, Romania, for the very stimulating discussions on the earlier versions of this paper.

Funding

MF’s research is founded by the FWO grant “Towards a globally non-representational theory of the mind” (grant number 1202824N); ZR’s research was funded by the FWO grant “Enactive Approaches to Pretending” (grant number 12J0419N) and “Understanding virtual reality through ongoing embodied imagining” (grant number 12J0423N).

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  1. Centre for Philosophical Psychology, University of Antwerp, Rodestraat 14, 200, Antwerp, Belgium

    Marco Facchin & Zuzanna Rucińska

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Facchin, M., Rucińska, Z. Public Charades, or How the Enactivist Can Tell Apart Pretense from Non-pretense. Erkenn (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-024-00787-7

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