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Pretense, imagination, and belief: the Single Attitude theory

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Abstract

A popular view has it that the mental representations underlying human pretense are not beliefs, but are “belief-like” in important ways. This view typically posits a distinctive cognitive attitude (a “DCA”) called “imagination” that is taken toward the propositions entertained during pretense, along with correspondingly distinct elements of cognitive architecture. This paper argues that the characteristics of pretense motivating such views of imagination can be explained without positing a DCA, or other cognitive architectural features beyond those regulating normal belief and desire. On the present “Single Attitude” account of imagination, propositional imagining just is a form of believing. The Single Attitude account is also distinguished from “metarepresentational” accounts of pretense, which hold that both pretending and recognizing pretense in others require one to have concepts of mental states. It is argued, to the contrary, that pretending and recognizing pretense require neither a DCA nor possession of mental state concepts.

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Notes

  1. In a standard false belief task, the subject watches an experimenter (or a puppet) place an object in a container. The experimenter then leaves the room and an accomplice takes the object out of the container and places it in another container nearby. The subject is then asked where the experimenter will look for the object when she returns. Subjects who indicate that the experimenter will look in the container where the object was first placed are taken to understand (at least implicitly) that the experimenter has a false belief about the location of the object. That said, failure of standard false belief tasks should not be taken as proof positive of a lack of mental state understanding, as other factors may account for the failures (Bloom and German 2000). Moreover, some have recently cited results from looking-time and “active helping” paradigms to argue that children as young as 15 months have some understanding of mental states (Onishi and Baillargeon 2005; Buttlemann et al. 2009). Thus, the matter of precisely which concepts—mental and otherwise—young children possess remains controversial.

  2. For friendly amendments to Nichols and Stich’s account, see Carruthers (2006), Currie and Ravenscoft (2002), Doggett and Egan (2007), Gendler (2003), and Weinberg and Meskin (2006a).

  3. Of course, it is possible that human cognitive architecture is redundant in various ways, and that specific patterns of dissociation might weigh in favor of the very redundancy to which DCA views are (I will argue) committed. I will not have space to discuss evidence deriving from dissociations here. My more modest goal is to articulate an overlooked yet simpler cognitive explanation of the phenomena surrounding pretense. With the view in place, we can then turn to the empirical literature to see whether there is nevertheless support for a redundant architecture of the kind posited by DCA views.

  4. It is worth emphasizing, however, that Nichols and Stich cite pretense as providing the initial motivation for their view (2003).

  5. I will not offer any particular account of belief. The standard, if unilluminating, characterizations will have to do: to believe something is to take it to be the case, or to accept it as true; beliefs are functionally distinguished by their privileged role in guiding action and practical reasoning. I intend these not as philosophically adequate characterizations of belief, but as an indication that I am not working with any special or controversial conception of belief.

  6. Just as I will not have space here to canvass all the considerations raised in favor of DCA views, neither can I hope to fully explain or defend an account of propositional imagination. I hope only to establish here that pretense does not by itself provide reason to think that propositional imagining requires a DCA.

  7. In Lillard’s (1993) influential study, 4-year-olds were shown a toy troll named ‘Moe,’ who hopped up and down. The children were told that Moe was from the land of trolls where there are no kangaroos, and that he did not know what kangaroos are. Asked if Moe was pretending to be a kangaroo, most subjects replied that he was. Thus, despite successfully passing a standard false belief task, most of the children seemed to have a conception of pretense according to which pretending to be something amounts to acting like that thing, regardless of one’s intentions, beliefs, or other representational mental states.

  8. Nichols and Stich hold that representations are in the same code if they have the same logical form, and their representational properties “are determined in the same way” (2000, p. 125, emphasis in original).

  9. This is worth emphasizing: having a proposition in the Desire (or Belief) Box that contains c as a proper part is not at all the same thing as having the proposition c in one’s Desire (or Belief) Box; if it were, then desiring that not-c would involve desiring that c, and believing that not-c would involve believing that c.

  10. This is the step where the child effectively recognizes that a pretense is occurring. An obvious question is whether attributing to a child an understanding that a pretense “game” has begun secretly imputes to her an understanding of mental states. I think it does not, but the issues here are complex. I defer further discussion to Sect. 5.

  11. “Acting as if p” should from here forward be understood as equivalent to “acting in ways that would be appropriate if p,” and not as a mere synonym for “pretending that p.” More on this in Sect. 5.

  12. “Acting as if” should again be read as “acting in ways that would be appropriate if.”

  13. Some may object that this characterization of propositional imagining fails to distinguish it from hypothetical reasoning. In fact, I view propositional imagining as simply one form of (particularly rich) hypothetical reasoning. But, as noted above, I do not have space here to provide a comprehensive defense of a theory of propositional imagination. I aim only to show that the phenomena surrounding pretense do not require a more expansive account of what it is to propositionally imagine.

  14. Currie and Ravenscroft share the assumption as well, suggesting that propositional imagining should be seen as enabling a kind of psychological implementation of the Ramsey “test” (2002, pp. 12–13).

  15. The DCA theorist may still press his point by noting that are some general facts that can only be appreciated through first considering particular cases, as when a philosophical thought experiment describing a particular situation is used to influence belief in a new generalization. Does this not show that something akin to a PWB is needed for at least some hypothetical reasoning tasks? This objection misses the point of the challenge being raised. The SA account does not deny that we sometimes come to infer a new generalization g by thinking about a particular situation p. It simply insists that such an inference will only occur if one already has beliefs in generalizations relevant to determining what would happen if p, and that one does not need to represent that p in order to make use of them in inferring the new generalization.

  16. Perhaps the intention to determine who was the best leader causes the question “who was the best leader?” to be broadcast to a “global workspace” (Baars 1988, 1997, 2002), whereby connections are made available to a variety of other cognitive resources. Or, in lieu of a global workspace, we might suppose that the question is tokened in working memory (Baddeley 2007), which thereby allows the needed cross-talk among cognitive faculties.

  17. Depending on the cognitive age and emotional investment of the pretender, we will have varying expectations about how much of what is true “only in the pretense” must be appropriately taken into account in their responses going forward (we are not disappointed if a three year old pretender’s behavior contradicts or ignores some of what has already gone on in a pretense as it develops, while the lapse is less forgivable in, say, an improvisational comedy act).

  18. See Sect. 5 for more details on how parts of the “pretense game” are distinguished from non-pretense.

  19. Langland-Hassan (in press) develops the same idea further with respect to sensory or “perceptual” imagination.

  20. Lillard (1993) showed that children do sometimes make this kind of error. However, F&L might reply that pervasive confusions of this kind do not occur, despite the fact that one’s actions are almost always appropriate to some other kind of action than what one intends.

  21. For instance, in giving an exaggerated yawn and saying loudly, “Oh, I’m so sleepy!” the adult cues the child that it is sleep-appropriate behavior that constitutes the pretense, and not English-speaker appropriate behavior (it is the exaggerated nature of the gesture and intonation that is a typical manner cue).

  22. Compare: we easily recognize the actor playing Hamlet as behaving in ways that would be appropriate if he were Hamlet, while recognizing that he is also behaving in ways that would not be appropriate if he were Hamlet (e.g., ignoring the 500 people watching him from the theater). Recognizing the two together enables us to recognize that he is merely pretending to be Hamlet. There is no difficulty in the matter.

  23. Friedman et al. (2010) conducted an experiment where it was pretended that a teddy bear was talking (the experimenter spoke for the bear in a distinctive tone of voice, moving the bear in rhythm with the speech (p. 316)). They argue that behavioral accounts cannot explain how children understand such pretenses. Put into the above formula, “teddy bear” is x and “talking creature” is y. The child recognizes the pretense by recognizing that the experimenter is making the teddy bear act saliently talking-creature-like. Of course, the experimenter is doing the speaking, not the teddy bear. But, as noted above, salient resemblances are cheap: the teddy bear is still being made to behave like it is a talking creature to the extent that words are audible when talking creatures use their movements to demand one’s attention and are similarly audible as the child’s attention is focused on the bear. Attention is focused through the experimenter’s use of the unusual (low) tone of voice in rhythm with the bear’s movements, where these movements are exaggerated versions of the movements that normally accompany a talking creature’s speech; these manner cues indicate to the child that a pretense game is occurring (as described above) that is focused on the bear, enabling the child to interpret the low voice as an instance of making the bear saliently talking-creature-like (and not the experimenter!).

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Acknowledgments

Many thanks to an anonymous reviewer for this journal for several helpful criticisms and organizational suggestions. This work also benefitted from discussions with Jonathan Adler, Michael Levin, John Greenwood, José Luis Bermúdez, Josh Knobe, Jacob Beck, David Michael Kaplan, and Roy Sorenson. Thanks also to the audience at Washington University in St. Louis where a version of this paper was presented. Last but not least, thanks to Shaun Nichols and Stephen Stich for their groundbreaking work on this subject.

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Correspondence to Peter Langland-Hassan.

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Langland-Hassan, P. Pretense, imagination, and belief: the Single Attitude theory. Philos Stud 159, 155–179 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-011-9696-3

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