Zuzanna Rucinska is a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Philosophical Psychology at the University of Antwerp, Belgium. Her research interests include pretend and imaginative play, forms of creativity, and embodied and enactive cognition. She will act as a guest editor for Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences journal, for the special issue called "Pretense and Imagination from the Perspective of 4E Cognitive Science" (call for papers due 1 August 2020).
A post by Zuzanna Rucinska.
What is the child doing when she is pretending that a banana is a 'telephone', a pen is a 'rocket', or an empty chair is occupied by an 'imaginary friend'?
The enactive approach to cognition offers a new way to answer these questions. According to enactivism, cognition is constituted by a dynamic interaction between agents and their physical and social environments, and perception and action are inextricably linked together. This will hold for pretense as well.
Pretense is part of children's cognitive development, and belongs to many cultural repertoires. As it encompasses many distinct activities, from object-substitution play to complex role-play and imaginary play (see Liao & Gendler 2010, for an overview), I think of it as a broad and non-standardized practice, with capacities for representational thought gradually emerging from, as opposed to presupposing, it.
Yet, pretending is said to be indicative of already possessing representational capacities. Enactivism wants to avoid reference to mental representations,[1] but as cognitive abilities seem to require representations, enactivism is often challenged on its capacity to explain cognition.
In this post I will bring up two challenges relevant to pretense: 1) the bypassing challenge, and 2) the absence challenge. I will suggest how enactivists can deal with these challenges. An important role will be played by re-formulating the explanandum and really looking at what children are doing when engaging in pretend play.
1. The bypassing challenge
The first challenge is inspired by Picciuto & Carruthers' (2016) question: "How do children bypass the obvious response and select an unobvious response?" They write:
“If a child looking at a banana is to pretend that the banana is a telephone, (…) her sensory systems will all be informing her that what she is looking at is a banana. Instead, she must suppress the obvious tendency to see the object as a banana, and select the option of seeing it as a telephone instead" (p. 323, italics added).
Notice that the bypassing challenge is motivated by an assumption about what is perceptually given: we see the banana 'as a banana' first. But consider an alternative conception of perception: the sensory-motor, dynamic and ecological account of perception in and for action (Gibson 1979; O’Regan & Noë 2001). It proposes that what we see is what we can do with objects, and what we can do is determined by: our moods, skills, other people, social practices. What I see, then, is what I can do - determined by my needs and interactions.
For example, if I'm very hungry, a banana will afford eating it; but when I'm artistically inspired - painting; when playful - exploring; when philosophically inclined - contemplating over its properties; when disinterested - packing it away. In play, the last thing the banana might afford is peeling it and consuming.
So what does it mean to say that one sees the object 'as a banana' first? Seeing a banana 'as a banana' refers to seeing it as an object of contemplation. Were I asked: "what is this?", I could give an answer that is appropriate for the practice of establishing identities: "it is a banana". But in a play practice, we establish new identities, and so other meanings are afforded. Creative responses are the appropriate ones. In play, there is no 'obvious' response that needs to be bypassed, as it is a context where meanings get to be negotiated. Presumably, this is part of what makes playing fun.
That various meanings are available and negotiated in action resonates, I believe, with the way children actually play. Consider a hypothetical case of a girl playing with a pen as if it is a "rocket". What might be happening in such play? I expect the girl to pick up the pen and start moving it up, but eventually, to also move it down, around, left and right (even though that is not how rockets really move - which the girl, upon questioning about how rockets really move, could confirm). As the extent of her arm limits how high the "rocket" flies, maybe she gets up and runs around the room, enabling the "rocket" to fly elsewhere. Maybe she throws the pen up in the air.
Now, in doing these things, must she "suppress her tendency" to write with that pen, assuming that writing follows from seeing pens "as pens"? Does that tendency even come forth in a play context? My intuition is no. Much of her play is a result of the material constraints of the pen and her embodiment (see The Junkyard posts by Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei and Max Jones and Tom Schoonen). Her play is also guided by affect, or being in a playful state, which precludes her from keeping the pen still and moving it slowly, in vertical trajectory - even if such play matched her imaginings of rockets or beliefs about how rockets really move. Why? Because such play would simply be too boring.
What then determines that her play is in fact rocket play? The pretend act will have different conditions of satisfaction in different contexts. In group play, satisfactory "rocket play" conditions will be subject to negotiation, often reflecting an accepted practice.[2] An individual play can also follow a practice, but sometimes, the grounds for determining conditions that satisfy 'rocket' play will be vague.
Importantly, I think that it is with the moving of the pen that the-girl-with-the-pen dynamically represents “rocket”. The representation is not stored somewhere prior to the act, “selected” to see the pen as a rocket and give meaning to play.
In my view, pretending is highly expressive and fundamentally intersubjective: rather than being inside one’s head, it involves manipulations of objects in the world and exploring new diverse possibilities for action, such as metaphorical ones (Rucinska 2019). The ability to see affordances for playful engagements is also in part co-created by acting with other people, whose responses (acceptance, negation, modelling, verbal and non-verbal feedback, reassurances, gestures and other metacommunicative acts) further shape our metaphoric engagements.
2. The absence challenge
What happens when there is no object to be manipulated? What happens in the absence of environmental stimuli? How can enactivists deal with “items of thought that are less immediate, wholly absent, or nonexistent” (Hutto & Myin 2017, pp. 177-178)? This is the absence challenge. Even if object-substitution play can be accounted for, the enactivist seems to have a problem explaining a phenomenon like playing with imaginary friends.
Playing with imaginary friends is portrayed in the popular media as playing with an “absent entity”, similar to interacting with a ghost, a hallucination, or an alter ego, like the tiger Hobbes (from Calvin and Hobbes comic strip, 1985-1995), or Harvey the rabbit from Harvey (1950). But instead of focusing on the metaphysical nature of the imaginary friend, the enactivist focuses on the ‘play’ part. I ask again: what is the child doing when she is playing like that?
From psychological literature (Singer & Singer 1990; Taylor 1999, 2013), we learn that in imaginary friend play, children like to control imaginary friends and boss them around, direct their activities. They talk to the imaginary friends aloud, give detailed descriptions of their fantasies, and control how others around them interact with the imaginary friend. They resist the attempts of parents to dictate the actions of the imaginary friends and are known to even clarify to the others: “It’s just pretend, you know” or “She isn't real”. Imaginary friend play is situated, social and interactive.
It is also known to be dependent on social acceptance: children’s engagement in this specific play is strongly affected by parental reaction to, and cultural acceptance of, the play, much like their knowledge of the distinction between reality and fantasy. For instance, Farver & Howes (1993) explained that the low number of imaginary friend play of Mexican children relative to high number of imaginary friend play of American children is likely to be due to different cultural acceptances of what is real and not real, or what counts as creative vs. deceitful behavior, not so much the imaginative skills of individual children.
According to Singer & Singer (1990), very ‘non-mental’ ingredients foster imaginary friend play:
There must be a key person in a child's life who inspires and sanctions play and accepts the child's inventions with respect and delight. There must be a place for play, a "sacred space" (no matter how small), and time, open-ended and unstructured. And there must be simple objects or props to help inspire the adventure... (pp. 3-4).
In this respect, even an empty chair serves as a prop for imaginary friend play, as one can re-enact norms about seat-taking (e.g., what it is to reserve a seat).
I understand the imaginary friend to be a fiction we create in imaginary friend play. The imaginary friend is not the explanandum, the explanatory unit is the play: the person-in-action achieving imaginary friend pretense. Changing the explanandum from a static mental representation to a practice, the enactivist conception of imaginary friend play is that such play can be immediate, in the sense of immediately afforded in the environment by the objects and situations in the world. The imaginary friend is presented in action and in speech to the other, as much as to oneself. Talking to the friend out loud, pointing at the space the friend occupies, correcting the others not to sit on the chair where the friend is sitting, and so on, is to participate in the practice of imaginary friend play.[3] Also, we are not in a situation of dealing with an absent friend but of a present possibility to re-enact friendship routines. Imaginary friend play exists as a real practice (a real pattern of engagements) that reflects social norms like friendship. The pretender is engaged in a fiction that makes a practical difference in her and her family's life.
To summarize, I think we should be interested in the doing involved in pretense. Enactivist explanatory reversal proposes that instead of explaining pretense in terms of mental representations, it is the representational activity that is to be explained thanks to the doing involved in pretending. If the explanatory reversal holds, the bypassing challenge and the absence challenge are to be dismissed.
[1] I distinguish mental representations from representational capacities, and refer to mental representations as information-bearing structures that store mental contents with conditions of satisfaction (they are about ‘Y’). They serve as internal symbols that stand for, but are largely independent of, the world, and are treated as the base of all or genuine mentality. While other, less demanding notions of mental representation are available in the literature, this is the one most referred to in the context of pretense, where one object (X) stands for another (Y) by specifying the content (‘Y’).
[2] For example, there is an accepted way of playing "phone" by putting an object to one's ear, or playing "birds" by stretching and moving one's arms, but there is no accepted way of playing "ladybugs" that I am aware of - the success and accuracy of that play will be subject to negotiation. When playing "ladybugs", some of us will be more lenient than others in accepting each others' play.
[3] I subscribe to Rylean (1949) position where, similarly, the 'gnashing of the teeth' and 'walking on all fours' just is to pretend to be bears (p. 243). The action is not a manifestation of the pretense done in the head first.
References
Farver, J. M., & Howes, C. (1993). Cultural differences in American and Mexican mother-child pretend play. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, 39 (3), 344-358.
Gibson, J.J. (1979). The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Hutto, D. D., & Myin, E. (2017). Evolving enactivism: Basic minds meet content. MIT Press.
Liao, S. and Gendler, T. (2010). Pretence and Imagination. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science, 2 (1), 79-94.
O’Regan, J. K. & Noë, A. (2001). A sensorimotor account of vision and visual consciousness. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 24(5), 939–1031.
Picciuto, E., & Carruthers, P. (2016). Imagination and pretense. In A. Kind, The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Imagination (pp. 334-345). London, UK: Routledge.
Rucinska, Z. (2019). Social and Enactive Perspectives on Pretending. Avant, Vol. X, No. 3, DOI: 10.26913/avant.2019.03.15
Singer, D. G., & Singer, J. L. (1990). The house of make-believe. Harvard University Press.
Taylor, M. (1999). Imaginary companions and the children who create them. New York: Oxford University Press.
Taylor, M. (Ed.). (2013). The Oxford Handbook of the Development of Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press.