Social and Enactive Perspectives on Pretending

• Authors: Zuzanna Rucińska

Abstracts

EN

This paper presents pretending as an enacted and fundamentally social activity. First, it demonstrates why we should think of pretense as inherently social. Then, it shows how that fact affects our theory in terms of what is needed in order to pretend. Standardly, pretense is seen as requiring a mechanism that allows one to bypass the ‘obvious’ response to the environment in order to opt for a symbolic response; that mechanism is imaginative and representational. This paper shows that the Enactive Account of Pretense reconsiders the idea that one needs to respond to an absent environment when pretending, proposing instead that socially constituted perceptual affordances for play allow for non-obvious ways of responding to the present environment. The enactive account of pretense suggests that one need not posit special cognitive pretense mechanisms and mental scripts in order to account for pretending, as available capacities for active perception and re-enactment of routines suffice. This paper concludes with suggestions for the kinds of cognitive skills that should be sought out to explain pretense

Keywords

EN

pretending; pretense; enactivism; social cognition; perception; imagination; scripts

• Publisher: Ośrodek Badań Filozoficznych - Centre for Philosophical Research
• Journal: Avant
• Year: 2019
• Volume: 10
• Issue: 3

Dates

published

2019

Contributors

author

Zuzanna Rucińska

• Centre for Philosophical Psychology University of Antwerp, Belgium

Identifiers

DOI

10.26913/avant.2019.03.15

Biblioteka Nauki

2206300