Abstract

I critically examine Kendall Walton's Mimesis as Make-Believe, a systematic attempt to model the activities of appreciators of works of art on children's games of make-believe. I argue that crucial features of the games Walton takes as paradigms infect and distort his application of the model to aesthetic questions. Walton's account of pictorial depiction and his extension of the basic game model to dreams and daydreams are argued to be unsuccessful