Abstract
In this text, we will introduce the reader to the special issue on Pretense and Imagination from the Perspective of 4E Cognitive Science. To do so, we will introduce the concept of 4E cognition and showcase what the available 4E approaches to pretense and imagination look like, in particular if they are contrasted with current cognitivist accounts. Against this background, we provide an overview of the articles included in this special issue.
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Notes
For a useful overview of the meanings behind each ‘E’, see Newen, de Bruin & Gallagher (2018).
While 4E approaches to pretense and imagination are novel to current trends in philosophy and cognitive science, they are often inspired by the works of analytic philosophers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein or Gilbert Ryle, phenomenologists Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean-Paul Sartre, pragmatists Herbert Mead and John Dewey, or psychologists Leo Vygotsky and Herbert Mead, whose views in many ways prefigure the current 4E trends to pretense and imagination. Providing a further historical grounding of 4E thought on imagination and pretense is beyond the scope of this introduction.
In this section, we will focus mainly on pretense to showcase the differences between the orthodox cognitivist proposals and available embodied and enactive proposals of accounting for pretense. After all, while some imaginings are accepted to be embodied, non-propositional, and possibly non-representational, this is not the case with pretense, which is seen as necessarily a representational phenomenon for the reasons presented in this section.
There are many notions of mental representation available in the literature, and much discussion over the roles they play in philosophy and in cognitive science (for a recent edited volume, see Smortchkova et al., (2020)). However, to explain pretense and imagination, not any notion of mental representation will do. The notion of representation most likely to play a relevant role in the abovementioned theories is one that refers to a mental object with semantic properties (content, reference, truth-conditions, truth-value) and fulfils some conditions of satisfaction, because in pretend play one ‘replaces one thought content for another’, or specifies one thing under a new description. Conversely, any weak notion of mental representation (e.g., environmentally-correlated inner states or mappings) is not the notion of representation that carries the relevant weight to explain pretense as a representational phenomenon, and is not thereby a notion that 4E cognition would necessarily take issue with.
Such proposal finds support in Gilbert Ryle’s (1949) anti-Cartesian philosophical position targeting the taking of the ‘mental’ to the realm of the ‘inner’. Ryle argues that pretending does not require additional operations such as “seeing things in the mind’s eye, hearing things in one’s head and so on, i.e. some piece of fancied perceiving” (1949, pp. 233–234).
This view finds ground in Jean-Paul Sartre’s (2004) view that “[t]he expression ‘mental image’ gives rise to confusion” (p. 7), as mental imagery is better thought of as a process of consciousness, and not a ‘picture’ found in consciousness.
These articles focus mainly on pretense. Imagination is only discussed in the context of pretense engagements, such as play or performance.
For more on the discussion about the compatibility of 4E cognition with ecological psychology, see McGann et al., (2020).
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Acknowledgements
The special issue is based on the themes of the international conference “Pretend Play and E-Cognition”, hosted at the University of Antwerp, Belgium, on 19 and 20 September 2019. We would like to thank Erik Myin, Shaun Gallagher, Erik Rietveld and the participants of this conference who inspired the themes of this special issue, as well as the anonymous reviewers who reviewed the manuscripts submitted to this special issue.
Funding
ZR’s research was funded by FWO grant “Enactive Approaches to Pretending”, grant number 12J0419N.
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Rucińska, Z., Weichold, M. Pretense and imagination from the perspective of 4E cognitive science: introduction to the special issue. Phenom Cogn Sci 21, 989–1001 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-022-09856-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-022-09856-0