It is well known that, from the second year of life, children engage in imaginative activities and pretend play. Pretending is changing the nature of perceptual inputs at will. In this paper I shall take up the question of young children’s knowledge about the pretend-real distinctions. According to Josef Perner, they have an immature concept, called prelief, because they do not differentiate between believing and pretending. But, we know that belief and pretense have different inputs. Imagination is at the whim (...) of our intentions, belief not. And, on the side of outputs, when children pretend, they carry out behavioral sequences “as if” they really had beliefs, but belief and pretense have different causal roles in action tendencies. So, when a boy pretends, he acts out his pretense within the scope of a supposition, but, why doesn’t he go all the way? That is, how are we to explain the limits children place on their activity? I shall answer these questions arguing that pretense is tied to conceptual knowledge. This will enable me to give a metaphysical account of this phenomenon, because it is based on the intentional manipulation of the identity of things and their properties. (shrink)

It is well known that, from the second year of life, children engage in imaginative activities and pretend play. Pretending is changing the nature of perceptual inputs at will. In this paper I shall take up the question of young children’s knowledge about the pretend-real distinctions. According to Josef Perner, they have an immature concept, called prelief, because they do not differentiate between believing and pretending. But, we know that belief and pretense have different inputs. Imagination is at the whim (...) of our intentions, belief not. And, on the side of outputs, when children pretend, they carry out behavioral sequences “as if” they really had beliefs, but belief and pretense have different causal roles in action tendencies. So, when a boy pretends, he acts out his pretense within the scope of a supposition, but, why doesn’t he go all the way? That is, how are we to explain the limits children place on their activity? I shall answer these questions arguing that pretense is tied to conceptual knowledge. This will enable me to give a metaphysical account of this phenomenon, because it is based on the intentional manipulation of the identity of things and their properties. (shrink)

Rakoczy and Tomasello follow Searle in claiming that rule games need status function assignment and constitutive rules. But, in the case of pretend play, it is not easy to put together these notions with the natural world knowledge necessary to engage in it. If we consider the pretended scenario as a possible world, metaphysically possible, then, how can we abandon the natural necessity implicit in it? The rules of pretend-inference can have a robustly objective status. On this view pretence stands (...) to pretending as truth stands to belief. (shrink)