Pretending and disbelieving

ABSTRACT

I formulate and criticise a condition that captures some recent ideas on the nature of pretence, namely, the disbelief condition. According to an initial understanding of this condition, an agent who is pretending that P must also disbelieve that P. I criticise this idea by proposing a counterexample showing that an agent may be in a state of pretence that does not imply disbelief in what is pretended. I also draw some general conclusions about the nature of pretence.

KEYWORDS:

• Pretence
• imagination
• meta-representation
• acting
• identity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This approach has been debated in many places, e.g., Friedman and Leslie (2007). Funkhouser and Spaulding (2009) discusses its relevance to the debate on action, and Goldman (2006) addresses issues related to mindreading. Gomez (2008), Jarrold et al. (1994), Lillard (1993, 2001), and Lillard, Pinkham, and Smith (2011) offer criticisms, as do Stich and Tarzia (2015).

2 I follow Jarrold et al. (1994, 448) on the notions of representation and metarepresentation. A mental representation (sometimes also called ‘a concept’) can refer to an object in the world, but the way in which the representation represents its content may also be a component of such a representation. A metarepresentation is a representation of one or more representations – a way in which a representation is represented or, a concept of a mental concept. See Currie (1998) and Sperber (2000) for essays on the topic.

3 See Stich and Tarzia (2015, 3–5) for a summary of an early version of this approach, and Gomez (2008). Friedman and Leslie (2007) offers a persuasive criticism of one version of the behaviourist view, to which Stich and Tarzia (2015) is a reply.

4 The metarepresentational and behaviourist views are not the only two families of theories discussed in the current literature on pretence. For instance, Hannes Rakoczy and collaborators have proposed a model according to which the development and understanding of pretend episodes as such involves an initial (at approximately 2 years of age) understanding of the basic intentional structure of pretending. Such an understanding is taken to involve intentions not reducible to acting-as-if. See Rakoczy (2008) for details. See Bogdan (2005) for a discussion of the evolutionary role of pretence play.

5 I have found in the current literature uses of both ‘pretend episode’ and ‘pretence (pretense) episode’. In this paper, I use them interchangeably.

6 A similar account is Neil Van Leeuwen’s integrated imagination theory. A central claim of this theory is that imaginings may generate action (pretence behaviour) without the mediation of belief – that is, it is not necessarily the case that in order to influence pretence behaviour, an imagining has to produce a belief through which action is then influenced. According to Van Leeuwen, in fact, imaginative and veridical representations can be integrated and can thus influence action directly (Van Leeuwen 2011, 2016).

7 See Woodward (2011) for an overview of the literature on truth in fiction and D’Alessandro (2016) for a criticism of implicitism.

8 In determining what is true according to a story, one challenge is to identify principles and inferential patterns adequate to the task of sorting out what can reasonably be regarded as part of the story (in the case where author stipulation does not resolve the question). I will not pursue this issue any further here but see Walton (1990) and Stock (2017) for discussion.

9 Thanks to an anonymous referee of this journal for raising the issue.

10 Notice that the DC is only a necessary condition, whereas Langland-Hassan provides a necessary and sufficient condition for what it is to be an episode of pretence.

11 In the Odyssey, the Proci are men who sought the attention of Penelope, Ulysses’ wife, while he was away.

12 As an anonymous referee for this journal has noticed, perhaps the first scenario, if properly modified could also be transformed into a counterexample to the DC. For example, we can imagine a scenario in which AS pretends to be himself as an actor and in which the director is AS himself. In the movie, which consists only of AS*, AS follows the script that AS himself prepared – a script detailing accurately what AS would have done. We might argue that, in this case, AS is pretending to be himself, and that AS* is doing exactly what AS would be doing in that situation– a violation of the DC and of Langland-Hassan’s definition of a pretence episode. For reasons of space, I will focus my discussion only on my second scenario.

13 Many thanks to Neil Van Leeuwen for raising this issue.

14 I do not have the space to offer a systematic account of the connection between pretence and deception. See Martin (2009), for various definitions of deception.