Greg Currie is Professor of Philosophy at the University of York. He has published numerous articles and books dealing with fiction, film, imagination and the arts. His most recent book Imagining and Knowing: The Shape of Fiction was recently published by Oxford University Press.
A post by Greg Currie.
When their nests are threatened, plovers and lapwings behave in ways suggesting wing damage and consequent inability to fly, thereby distracting predators from the nest. People, experts even, describe this as “pretending that the bird has a broken wing that hinders flight”.[1] Anscombe objected: “you cannot ascribe real pretence to anything unless you can ascribe to it (a) a purpose and (b) the idea ‘can be got by seeming to--‘”.[2] Broken wing displays fail (b); the most one could say is that the bird has the idea that the predator can be distracted by having one wing drag on the ground.
Anscombe contrasts this purposive pretence with unpurposive pretending, when we pretend “just for fun” or “to tease”. Unpurposive pretending requires neither (a) nor (b), so is not ruled out as a description of distraction behaviour. Perhaps Anscombe assumes that non-humans don’t pretend for fun. She also distinguishes plain and non-plain pretending. The plain pretender “unreflectively knows that he is pretending” (292). A “great deal of unpurposive or only very vaguely and diffusely purposive pretending is non-plain“.
Let’s summarise:
You may know P but not know it unreflectively: you know it, but only reflection will reveal that you know it.
One of the things you may not know unreflectively is that you are pretending. That is non-plain pretence. Plain pretence occurs when you do know unreflectively that you are pretending.
Pretence can be purposive or not. It would be purposive if you were pretending to deceive or to play a theatrical part. It would be unpurposive if you were pretending for fun.
So we have:
| Plain (you know unreflectively that you are pretending) | Non-plain (you don't know it unreflectively) | |
| Purposive | ||
| Unpurposive |
Anscombe is saying that the boxes in the right column are non-empty. The box top-left is surely non-empty. I think Anscombe would say the box bottom-left is also non-empty.
It is unclear what “unreflectively knows” contrasts with. Here are two possibilities:
1. S does not unreflectively know P at t but does reflectively know this at t;
2. S does not unreflectively know P at t, and so does not know it at t, but would know this at t’>t if they reflected at t.
If it is 2, Anscombe’s view is that you can pretend without knowing that you do, though you would know it on reflection. More on this later.
A decade earlier Ryle said:
…we know that lively and frequent feelings are felt by sentimentalists whose positive actions show quite clearly that their patriotism, e.g. is a self-indulgent make-believe. Their hearts duly sink when they hear that their country’s plight is desperate, but their appetites are unaffected and the routines of their lives are unmodified. Their bosoms swell at a march-past, but they avoid marching themselves. They are rather like theatregoers and novel readers who also feel genuine pangs, glows, flutters and twinges of despair, indignation, exhilaration and disgust, with the difference that the theatregoers and novel readers realise that they are making-believe.[3]
Ryle talks of make-believe rather than of pretence but his view could be put in terms of pretending. Talking of “people who pretend to motives and moods and… abilities” he says that it is “always possible for a person to take others or himself in by acting a part” (172). Throughout the section on pretending (258-264) make-believe and pretence seem to be interchangeable.
One might not want to fall in with the idea that the non-marchers are pretend-patriots. Ryle illustrates the idea of unknowing pretence/make-believe with another example:
…the child playing bears, who knows, while in the well-lit drawing room, that he is only playing an amusing game, but feels faint anxieties when out on the solitary landing, and cannot be persuaded of his safety when in the darkness of a passage (258).
To me this sounds more like pretence which develops into something else. What would reflection show? It is hard to see the frightened child in the dark getting by reflection to the recognition “I am pretending there is danger here”. Nor does it help to point out that one may cease to be conscious of one’s pretence. To be unconscious of something is not automatically to fail to know it, or even to fail to know it unreflectively; one may become conscious of something without reflection. Ryle describes the hypochondriac as a pretender “completely taken in by his own acting”; why isn’t he instead someone who (1) thinks he is ill, and (2) ought not to think that because exerting reasonable levels of epistemic vigilance would persuade him otherwise? We say that people are imagining things when it is clear that we are attributing to them a belief. “Henrietta imagines that the prize is hers” may attribute a belief to Henrietta; one that compares unflatteringly with imagining in that it is not based on reason or evidence, that it corresponds to what she wishes to be the case. A tendency to ascribe pretence to the hypochondriac may be a similar comparison between what is actually (non-pretence) belief-motivated action and pretence.
But let’s grant that people who pretend to φ or to be ψs may not know this. We might insist, though, that to count as pretenders they must know that they are not really φing or that they are not really ψs. Ryle makes a lot of the way pretending to φ and really φing differ in complexity, though they might appear very similar. Sparring boxers pretend to attack; they are engaged in “sham-fighting” which involves a “series of calculated omissions to fight” (261). Do they know that they are pretending? I don’t know what survey evidence would turn up, or how far they would settle the question. What is clear is that the boxers know they are not really fighting; indeed, they know this unreflectively. Perhaps it is that knowledge which tips the balance in favour of saying they are pretending to fight. But the non-marchers in Ryle’s example surely do not know unreflectively that they are not really patriots.
Do the non-marchers have reflective knowledge of their lack of patriotism? I noted what (I think) is an ambiguity in the idea of reflective knowledge. Will reflection reveal to them knowledge they already have, or might it instead bring them to knowledge? Certainly, the latter is true—if we allow a great deal of time and effort for reflection. But that would be poor grounds for saying they know it now.
Something about the non-marchers does need explaining: the particular mix of actions/non-actions that characterise them. Their behaviour is reminiscent of ordinary pretence in this: they stick to low cost activities associated with patriotism, just as children who pretend to be pirates don’t do piratical things that would put them in danger.[4] And just as with the children, this is an exercise of agency; they “avoid” marching, rather than simply fail to march. They seem to be engaged in a well-organised project, and that might be hard to explain without assuming they were consciously guided by awareness of their pretence, as would be a con-artist who acts the part of a police officer until it comes to challenging an armed offender. An alternative explanation has it that the boundary of the non-marchers’ patriot-like actions are set by an internal mechanism that monitors cost. Even undisputed patriots are subject to such a mechanism, not (at least not usually) being willing to sacrifice absolutely everything for their country. It may be that the non-marchers don’t count as patriots simply because their mechanism is set to a very low threshold.
Two points. First, “know” is too strong. An amnesiac police officer might pretend to be a police officer for purposes of robbery. What is important is that she not believe she is a police officer. Secondly, Austin argued that pretending to Φ is consistent with really Φ-ing, as in his case of the burglar cleaning windows.[5] Austin’s burglar knows, and so believes, that he is cleaning windows. This excludes him, by my argument, from pretending to clean windows. But I say Austin is wrong: while the burglar is pretending to be a window cleaner, he is not pretending to clean windows.[6]
Despite all this, might the non-marchers be pretending? I like to think so. One way forward would be to say (1) they are self-deceived, and (2), following Gendler, self-deception is pretence.[7] There is no space to test this idea here.
* * *
Thanks to Anna Ichino for helpful discussion.
[1] Miguel Angel Gómez-Serrano, Broken wing display, Encyclopedia of Animal Cognition and Behavior, Springer, eds J. Vonk & T. Shackelford, pp.1-3.
[2] G. E. M. Anscombe, Pretending, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society. Sup. vol. XXXII, p.291. Anscombe considers the case of a dog said to be “pretending to be lame”.
[3] Concept of Mind, 92.
[4] The children in Swallows and Amazons do put themselves in some danger—less, probably, than real pirates would.
[5] J. L. Austin, Pretending, part of the symposium with Anscombe. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Sup. vol. XXXII 1958. Pp. 261-278.
[6] See Anscombe, Pretending, p. 290; also Cyril Barrett, Not exactly pretending, Philosophy, 1969, 44 (170):331 – 338. I am grateful to Guy Longworth for this last reference. See also The Tempest I.II: “To credit his own lie, he did believe/ he was indeed the duke; out o' the substitution/ and executing the outward face of royalty”.
[7] See Gendler, Self-deception as pretence, in her Intuition, Imagination & Philosophical Methodology, Oxford, 2010.