Imaginative Dimensions of Reality: Pretense, Knowledge, and Sociality

Abstract

Pretense, and notably non-deceptive pretense like pretend play, is an important topic of research in developmental psychology. Notably, in the last decades, studies in this field have concentrated on how children become engaged in pretend play from very early on, generally around 18 months of age; on how they apparently understand others and their intentions in pretense contexts even before passing the false-belief task (Leslie 1987; Lillard 1993, 2004; Perner 1991; Perner et al. 2004); and on how social competences, including the awareness of normativity in social contexts (Rakoczy 2006, 2008; Rakoczy et al. 2006), develop in pretend play. In recent years, the analysis of pretense has also been addressed by philosophers coming from different traditions. Besides being interested in the cognitive underpinnings of pretense (Carruthers 2006; Currie 1990, 1998; Jarrold et al. 1994; Nichols and Stich 2000), in its creative nature (Carruthers 2007, 2011; Picciuto and Carruthers 2014), and in the role that different mental capacities play in pretense,¹ philosophers, like psychologists, have been focusing on how understanding pretense and consistently engaging in pretense activities relate to social cognition. Thus, it comes as no surprise that pretense has also progressively become one of the central topics in the interdisciplinary theory of mind-debate on mutual understanding and social cognition. Apart from some exceptions (e.g., Fuchs 2013), however, the inquiry into pretense seems to have been rather neglected by contemporary researchers in phenomenology, who are active in the debate on social cognition. This is probably due to the argumentative strategy in the controversy between current phenomenologists and simulationists: whereas the latter suggest that imagination is constitutive for our knowledge of others, and therefore, also pay attention to imaginative contexts like pretense,² the former tend to deny that imagination has such a constitutive role for mutual understanding,³ and therefore, also pay less attention to those activities, like pretense, in which imagination is so prominently involved. Yet, I believe that phenomenology has a strong methodological and conceptual potential for the investigation of pretense and may also shed new light on the relation between pretense and social cognition.