A post by Eva Backhaus

Take some stones and pretend that they are cars driving down a road on your table, now, one stone is not a car but a cow, watching the traffic, and then take two stones and imagine them to be a horse standing next to the cow. When I played this game with children they started to laugh and told me it’s ridiculous to use two stones for one horse. Since jokes are a good guide to philosophical problems I started to wonder why a stone can be a car or a cow or a horse in the same game, while two stones cannot be one horse. Once you start to think about which things can easily or naturally stand in for what it gets complicated: One stone can stand in for one ship and maybe for a whole armada, but less well for three ships. An object that is clearly bigger in reality should be assigned the bigger object in the game, and shape is important too: If you have a pen and an eraser the pen must be the street and the eraser the car not vice versa. This seems strange insofar as one of the most remarkable features of pretend play consist in the fact that props can, in general, stand in for any real-life-object we choose, regardless of their actual resemblance. Remember Kendall Walton’s tree-stump-bear: a real bear and the tree stump share (luckily) very few features. (Walton, 1990) But even though it can seem that pretend play and the realm of imagination are a sphere where we are “most free”, it is not exactly news that games of make-believe and pretense are restricted in various ways.[i] Walton and others (e.g., Langland-Hassan, 2016) have pointed out that once we start to pretend or imagine constraints apply to what we can and can’t do, e.g., once we decide where the head of the bear is, then we have to “feed” him from there. But, unlike my example, these restrictions only apply after we have made a first move in the game of pretense.

In what follows, I will deal with the question of how selection and use of objects in pretend play works and what it can teach us about imagination more general. This being said, I do not wish to make a statement about the systematic relation between imagination and pretense, but I believe nonetheless that there are helpful connections and analogies.

So, why are we amused if two stones stand in for one horse? A first idea that comes to mind is the fact that one stone can only stand in for one cow, or one car, or one horse because basic laws of logic tell us that one object (e.g., one horse) cannot be two (e.g., two stones). If this was the right solution, the restrictions on what can stand in for what seem to be confined to very few properties, most importantly: number. However, our amused reaction to the two-stone-horse does not mean that it is in a strict sense impossible to imagine the stones to be a horse and hence it is unlike real impossibilities that we usually fail to imagine in a rich or elaborate way. So, what we need is an explanation for the readiness or naturalness of some props, as opposed to others, to stand in for certain real-life objects. The explanation we seek should also explain why some basic properties like number, size, orientation, or shape seem to be relevant while other features like color, inner structure, surface, animateness, or weight are less important.

A second explanation for the phenomenon described is the idea that the two-stone-horse is not an initial assignment but already constrained by the fact that the cow, a somewhat similar animal, is represented by one stone. So, the constraint is the familiar one that comes from the moves already made. This solution points into the right direction but is not enough in itself since even if we begin the game by letting two stones stand in for one horse, we would probably have to explain ourselves to others. And, this brings us on the right track: Explaining, criticizing and arguing in and about games of pretense is often one of its main components: talk about what can stand in for what, what can be done with the props and what not, what is (im)possible and what is likely to happen makes up a big chunk of pretend-play. The talking often centers around the suitability of certain objects to stand in for others in a certain situation. And the reason why it is difficult to give the criteria of what can stand in for what is that this is largely a pragmatic question: it depends not on objective rules or relations of resemblance but on what we want to do (or play). So, if we want to divide an object – not the cow but a train for example –, then we better use two objects to stand in for one in order to be able to separate them later. Borrowing a term from the Tractatus, one could say that the prop and what it “goes proxy” for must share the same pragmatic “multiplicity”. (Wittgenstein, 1953) In case the props do not suffice, they need to be modified or exchanged for ones that do. Finding the right props may not be part of the game but nonetheless determines whether there will be a worthwhile game of pretense at all. So my proposal for the original amusement caused by the two-stone-horse is that horses do not (in general) have two parts that need to be separated in a game of pretense. Which props are suitable, good, ideal, or useless, is, however, a question that cannot be answered independently of the question what we, often collectively, want to do with the prop.

A question that remains is why it feels – situation-independent – wrong to use two stones for one horse if the constraints stem entirely from the specific purpose in a specific situation. The reason, I think, consists in the fact that number, size, shape and relation of objects are especially relevant for successful action across different situations. If we want to play with the props in an interesting or exploratory way, some of the above-mentioned features, e.g. size relation, are more important than others, e.g. color, because observance of size relations makes pretend play, beyond mere assignment, possible.  If we want to play with “cars”, the eraser can easily run along a pen-street but not the other way round. So, what explains our unwillingness to use two stones to stand in for one horse is that it usually does not benefit pretend action to use two object to stand in for what is in reality only one.

I want to conclude by saying something about the relation between props in pretend play and imagination proper. Even though imagination is a mental activity, we regularly use pictures, models, or objects to guide it. A well-known and very influential picture that seems to be able to do exactly this is the first known drawing of the “tree of life” from Darwin’s notebook. (See Figure 1) If we look at this rather sketchy drawing and the “I think” written next to it, it is undeniable that it takes a lot of creative imagination to come up with the drawing in the first place, but at the same time it guides imagination in a very effective way. So just like pretend play imagination proper often consists of both coming up with a good prop/picture and using it effectively for whatever project we are following. This, however, does not mean that we always have to put a visible picture or prop in front of our eyes in order to imagine something new. Amy Kind has drawn attention towards two inventors – Nikola Tesla and Temple Grandin – who were able to develop their inventions entirely without external crutches. (Kind, 2016) Tesla especially praises himself for the fact that all his inventions were flawlessly designed by mental work alone. But Tesla and Grandin may just be two exception that prove the rule that a lot of imaginative activity is guided, shaped and accelerated by pictures and models that we work on together.

[i] For an extensive discussion of the role constraints play for the epistemic use of imagination see: Kind & Kung, 2016.

References

Darwin, Charles, (1837-1838): Notebook B: Transmutation of Species, p. 36, (http://darwin-online.org.uk, last accessed 8/25/2021).

Kind, Amy, (2016), “Imagination under Constraints”, in: A. Kind & P. Kung (ed.), Knowledge through Imagination, Oxford: UP, 145-159.

Langland-Hassan, Peter, (2016), “On Choosing What to Imagine”, in: A. Kind & P. Kung (ed.), Knowledge through Imagination, Oxford: UP, 61-84.

Walton, Kendall, (1990): Mimesis as Make-Believe. On the Foundations of the Representational Arts, Cambridge (Mass.): HUP.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig, (1958): Tractatus-logico philosophicus. Werkausgabe Band 1, Frankfurt (Main): Suhrkamp.