Elsevier

Cognition

Volume 143, October 2015, Pages 1-12
Cognition

The pretense debate

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2015.06.007Get rights and content

Highlights

  • The debate over the psychological mechanisms underlying pretense is set out.

  • We explain Friedman and Leslie compelling case against current behavioral theories.

  • We develop a new behavioral theory, the “pretense game” theory.

  • The pretense game theory avoids all the problems raised by Friedman and Leslie.

  • We argue that Leslie’s theory of pretense fails to explain many important facts.

Abstract

In a number of publications, Alan Leslie and colleagues have developed a theory of the psychological mechanisms underlying pretense. This theory maintains that pretense is an early manifestation of “theory of mind” or “mindreading” – the capacity to attribute mental states to oneself and others. Nichols and Stich proposed an alternative theory of pretense on which pretense in young children does not require mindreading. Rather, they argued, young children have a behavioral understanding of pretense. In a lengthy critique, Friedman and Leslie made a persuasive case that the Nichols and Stich theory cannot account for the early emergence of children’s capacity to engage in joint pretense and recognize pretense in others. In this paper, we set out a new “pretense game” theory of pretense that avoids the problems raised by Friedman and Leslie, and does not require that children who engage in joint pretense must have a theory of mind. We go on to argue that our pretense game theory can explain many of the facts about pretense that go unexplained in Leslie’s theory. The central shortcoming of Leslie’s theory is that it attempts to explain the production and recognition of pretense behavior by positing the existence of an innate concept, without explaining how this concept enables those who have it to recognize or produce pretense behavior.

Introduction

Over the last 25 years, Alan Leslie and his collaborators have developed and defended a sophisticated and influential account of the psychological mechanisms underlying pretense, focusing primarily on pretense in children (German and Leslie, 2001, Leslie, 1987, Leslie, 1988, Leslie, 1994, Leslie, 2002, Leslie and Roth, 1993, Leslie and Thaiss, 1992, Onishi et al., 2007). In Mindreading, Nichols and Stich (2003) proposed an alternative account that borrowed a number of important ideas from Leslie, while arguing that one central feature of Leslie’s account is problematic and should be abandoned. Friedman and Leslie (2007) responded to Nichols and Stich (hereafter N&S), arguing that the N&S account of pretense is fatally flawed because it cannot account for the capacity to recognize pretense – a capacity which emerges quite early in childhood. In this paper, we have a pair of goals, one positive and one negative. The positive goal is to respond to the Friedman and Leslie (hereafter F&L) critique by showing how, with some elaboration and reconstruction, an account similar to the one proposed by N&S can address the pretense recognition problems posed by F&L. If our revised version of the N&S theory succeeds in meeting F&L’s objections, it might be thought that the debate has reached an impasse, at least for the moment, since there are two competing theories that can explain the available facts about pretense. However, our negative goal is to argue that this is not the right conclusion to draw, because the theory of pretense that Leslie and colleagues have developed and defended thus far is not a serious competitor to the theory we propose. More specifically, we will argue that the explanation of pretense that Leslie has proposed is importantly incomplete; it does not provide a satisfying explanation for some of the most obvious and important facts about the production and recognition of pretense.

Section snippets

Background: some shared assumptions about cognitive architecture

The N&S account of pretense is set out as a series of additions to a widely shared picture of the basic architecture of the cognitive mind. Though Leslie has explicitly embraced this picture only once, in a paper co-authored with N&S (Nichols, Stich, Leslie, & Klein, 1996), we think it is clear that Leslie, like many other theorists, assumes that this account of cognitive architecture is by and large correct, though far from complete.

Some points of agreement between Leslie’s theory of pretense and the N&S theory

Two examples of pretense recounted by Leslie, 1987, Leslie, 1994 have been widely discussed in the literature. In one of these, a child and her mother pretend that a banana is a telephone. The mother holds the banana up to her face and talks to Daddy. She then hands it to the child, who says hello to Daddy. In the other, a child and the experimenter have a pretend tea party during which imaginary tea is poured into a pair of cups, and then one cup is turned upside down and shaken. The child is

Some points of disagreement between Leslie’s theory of pretense and the N&S theory

By adding decoupled representations to his account, Leslie explains how pretenders avoid what he sometimes calls “reputational abuse” – the sorts of problems that would arise if pretenders treated representations subserving pretense in the same way that they treat the “primary representations” in their Belief Box. In addition to the quotation marks that serve to mark decoupled representations in his model, Leslie proposes to add “a second extension to the primary code” for the mental

Friedman & Leslie’s critique of behavioral theories of pretense

To explain their objections to N&S’s account of pretense, F&L consider a number of examples aimed at showing that the N&S behavioral account of pretense recognition leads to obviously mistaken predictions. In some cases the problem is that the N&S predictions would be far too broad. “The [N&S] theory,” they argue, “predicts that children will mistakenly deem non-pretend behaviors to be instances of pretense” (F&L, 2007, 111). In other cases, the problem is in the opposite direction – the N&S

The pretense game

According to Leslie and his collaborators, pretense is a mental state. We disagree. We think that pretense is best viewed as a sort of game – a game that requires no understanding of mental state concepts.

A critique of Friedman and Leslie’s explanation of pretense

If the explanation of pretense that we have offered in the previous section is plausible, then it might be thought that for the moment the debate has reached a standoff, since competing and significantly different explanations have been proposed – our “pretense game” account and the metarepresentational account offered by Leslie and colleagues – both of which claim to be able to account for the facts about pretense. However, we think that this is the wrong conclusion to draw. The debate is far

Objections, replies and clarifications

In the previous section we argued that, in its current state, Leslie’s metarepresentational theory of pretense is not a strong competitor for our pretense game theory because Leslie’s theory is gravely underspecified. Leslie and his colleagues have not told us how the theory explains some of the most obvious facts about pretense. They have not told us how possession of the PRETEND concept enables a child to understand what Mommy is doing in the banana-telephone pretense, or how it enables a

Conclusion

The main difference between Leslie’s metarepresentational theory of pretense and the theory offered by N&S is that on Leslie’s theory both the recognition and the production of pretense behavior require a child to form mental representations that include the mental state concept PRETEND. Thus “pretend play … [is] a primitive manifestation of the ability to conceptualize mental states” and “pretense is an early manifestation of … theory of mind” (1987, p. 424 & p. 416). On the N&S theory, by

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    We are indebted to Ori Friedman, Shaun Nichols and to two anonymous referees for their insightful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

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