Neil is a guy who does philosophy and a few other things.
A post by Neil Van Leeuwen
I'd like to use this blog as an opportunity to raise a puzzle about pretense and imagination.
Many theorists of imagination, including several participants on this blog, have tended to think that pretending requires imagining. When I pretend, say, that I am Napoleon, what distinguishes this from being deluded that I am Napoleon, is that I imagine rather than believe that I am Napoleon. And this enables us to distinguish pretense from delusion or confusion, even if many of the outward behavioral expressions are the same in either case.
Yet here is a counterexample to the general thesis that pretending requires imagining. Or at least I think it's a counterexample.
One movie that I've enjoyed several times over the course of my life is Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes. This is a film production of Shakespeare's classic play, set in a modern-day fantasy world. The characters have things like guns and cars and modern clothing, etc.
Now here's how the counterexample works. It will be clear to anyone who watches the film that Claire Danes has an impressive grasp of Shakespeare's language. All the lines that she speaks in her role as Juliet are spoken with understanding and an emotional grasp of the import of what she is saying. However, if you watch carefully, you may have some doubts about Leonardo DiCaprio's grasp of the Shakespearean language. Often, I get the sense when watching the film, that when he spoke his lines as Romeo, he did not really know what exactly he was saying. I generally admire DiCaprio as an actor, but let's assume that it is so for the sake of argument.
So for, example, let us assume that when Leonardo DiCaprio spoke the line “She doth teach the torches to burn brightly,” he did not grasp its meaning. He was just uttering the line out of rote memorization. And so on for many others of his lines. But since he was acting, he was still pretending to be a character who had the thoughts that those lines express. Thus in the moment when he said (in front of the camera) “She doth teach the torches to burn brightly,” he was pretending to be a character who thinks a certain proposition, even though DiCaprio himself did not have that proposition in mind (he just had a sequence of uncomprehended words in mind). Let's say that proposition is the following: Juliet's appearance, mannerisms, and personality create a kind of joy that no other entity could bring. Grant for the sake of argument that that is the proposition that that metaphor expresses; and grant for the sake of argument that in fact Leonardo DiCaprio does not understand this. For short, call that proposition J.
Now let’s call the following proposition P: I think that J.
It is arguable that imagining that P requires comprehending J (though perhaps some readers will get off the bus at this point). It seems to follow, then, that DiCaprio, on camera, pretended that P without actually imagining that P, which gives us a counterexample to the general thesis floated at the beginning of this blog.
And so the puzzle that I leave you with is this: in light of the sort of counterexample to our general thesis that DiCaprio gives us (and such counterexamples can be multiplied) what should we say about the general relationship between imagining and pretending?
Of course, some readers of this blog will welcome the conclusion that pretending does not require a distinctive cognitive attitude of imagining. Peter Langland-Hassan, whose recent book had a symposium here on The Junkyard, has advocated a theory of pretending that does without a distinct cognitive attitude of imagining (2014, 2020).
Yet I suspect others will resist that conclusion. Here I'd like to point to a paper by Stephen Stitch and Joshua Tarzia that came out in Cognition in 2015. Their theory holds that pretense is a matter of imitating what you imagine, where the imitation is a bodily imitation of something that you are imagining in your head. So on the Stitch and Tarzia view, if you pretend that you are a cat, that implies that you are imagining that you are a cat. I have made similar suggestions myself in earlier work (2011), though for me that was never a constitutive theory of pretense but rather a proposal about the psychology of how it often works. So I left myself a way out at the time, and looking back, I’m very happy that I did!
Nevertheless, the theoretical pull of incorporating imagining into the constitutive characterization of pretense is strong enough (for multiple reasons) that we should look at the DiCaprio-style counterexamples as a relatively serious challenge.
So what should we say about the general, constitutive relation between pretending and imagining, if there even is one?
References
Langland-Hassan, P. (2014). What It Is to Pretend. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 95, 397–420.
Langland-Hassan, P. (2020). Explaining Imagination. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Stitch, S. & Tarzia, J. (2015). The pretense debate. Cognition, 143, 1-12.
Van Leeuwen, N. (2011). Imagination Is Where the Action Is. Journal of Philosophy, 108(2), 55–77.