Roman Frigg and Adam Toon, both, defend a fictionalist view of scientific modeling. One fundamental thesis of their view is that scientists are participating in games of make-believe when they study models in order to learn about the models themselves and about target systems represented by the models. In this paper, the epistemology of these two fictionalist views is critically discussed. I will argue that both views can give an explanation of how scientists learn about models they are (...) studying. However, how the use of models can foster an understanding of target systems is not sufficiently accounted for by Frigg and Toon. (shrink)

Kendall Walton's Mimesis as Make-Believe is the most significant event in Anglo-American aesthetics in many a year, and joins a small pantheon of landmark books such as Nelson Goodman's Languages of Art, Richard Wollheim's Art and Its Objects and Arthur Danto's Transfiguration of the Commonplace. Walton's aim is to provide a comprehensive account of the representational arts—literature, drama, cinema, painting, drawing, sculpture—from both the generative and the receptive points of view. That is to say, he attempts to explain (...) how representations are fashioned, what their representational status consists in, how representations are apprehended and what the experience of them characteristically involves. Inthese aims he is to my mind enormously, if not completely, successful. (shrink)

_A penetrating study of the images, symbols, pageants, and creative performances ambitious Elizabethans used to secure political power_ Shakespeare’s plays abound with kings and leaders who crave a public stage and seize every opportunity to make their lives a performance: Antony, Cleopatra, Richard III, Othello, and many others. Such self-dramatizing characters appear in the work of other playwrights of the era as well, Marlowe’s Edward II and Tamburlaine among them. But Elizabethan playwrights were not alone in realizing that a (...) sense of theater was essential to the exercise of power. Real rulers knew it, too, and none better than Queen Elizabeth. In this fascinating study of political stagecraft in the Elizabethan era, Garry Wills explores a period of vast cultural and political change during which the power of make-believe to make power real was not just a theory but an essential truth. Wills examines English culture as Catholic Christianity’s rituals were being overturned and a Protestant queen took the throne. New iconographies of power were necessary for the new Renaissance liturgy to displace the medieval church-state. The author illuminates the extensive imaginative constructions that went into Elizabeth’s reign and the explosion of great Tudor and Stuart drama that provided the imaginative power to support her long and successful rule. (shrink)

This afterword extends and refines the arguments presented in Cohen and Jacobs . The main point made by the authors is that the antidepressant randomized controlled trial world is a make-believe world in which researchers act as if a bona fide medical experiment is being conducted. From the assumed existence of the “disorder” and the assumed homogeneity of the treatment groups, through the validity of rating scales and the meaning of their scores, to the presentations of researchers’ ratings (...) as the genuine outcome of interest — all aspects of such trials are make-believe. The continued acceptance of randomized controlled trials as appropriate mechanisms to ascertain the actual effects of psychoactive drugs on human beings in distress confirms that researchers are inextricably dependent on large-scale organizational and financial interests that require the sustained production of make-believe results about psychoactive drugs. (shrink)

While Bernard Suits's understanding of games has significantly influenced the philosophy of sport, the longest sustained investigation in The Grasshopper is of make-believe and roleplaying games. Suits’s discussion of make-believe and roleplaying is found in chapters 9 through 12, but what he says there is uncharacteristically unclear. To clarify Suits’s account, the present paper distinguishes between two arguments that Suits interweaves. In the first, Suits argues that game playing is not a species of play. In the (...) second, Suits argues that playing a make-believe or role-playing game is the same — at heart — as playing a game of any type. While the paper takes no position on the former, it defends the latter argument against several important objections by Thomas Hurka and C. Thi Nguyen. It contends, furthermore, that Suits is not simply trying to show that his theory of game playing can account for make-believe and roleplaying games. Rather, Suits is also using make-believe and roleplaying games to clarify exactly how his theory of game playing should be understood. (shrink)

Representation—in visual arts and fiction—play an important part in our lives and culture. Walton presents a theory of representation which illuminates its many varieties and goes a long way toward explaining its importance. Walton’s theory also provides solutions to thorny philosophical problems concerning the existence of fictitious beings.

In this paper I want to hold, first, that one may suitably reconstruct the relevant kind of mental representational states that fiction typically involves, make-beliefs, as contextually unreal beliefs that, outside fiction, are either matched or non-matched by contextually real beliefs. Yet moreover, I want to claim that the kind of make-believe that may yield the mark of fictionality is not Kendall Walton’s invitation or prescription to imagine. Indeed, in order to appeal in terms of make- (...) class='Hi'>believe to a specific form of imagination that fiction distinctively involves, one must move away from the realm of norms in order to attain a cognitive realm; namely, one must look at a specific form of metarepresentational state. This metarepresentational state of make-believe is a second-order representation that is about both real beliefs and make-beliefs, as the first-order representations it compares by acknowledging their contextual distinctness. (shrink)

This paper develops an analysis of the relation between fiction and make-believe based on the achievements of imagination. The argument aims at a “reciprocal supplementation” between two approaches to fiction. According to one approach, pretense or make-believe structures play a crucial role in our experience of fiction. Discussing Husserl’s view on bound imagining and Walton’s account of fiction as make-believe, I show why pretense and make-believe cannot thereby be reduced to the mere (...) reproduction of something we would experience as original. According to the other approach, which is presented in Ricoeur’s work on imagination, fiction exemplifies a productive or creative power of imagination that is not active in pretense or make-believe activities. The reciprocal supplementation between these two approaches concerns the following aspects: on the one hand, I wish show why Husserl and Walton allow us to rectify Ricoeur’s claim that make-believe is only reproductive. On the other hand, taking up some of Ricoeur’s insights, I wish to clarify why such an impact should be understood in terms of transformation. (shrink)

In this paper I propose an account of representation for scientific models based on Kendall Walton’s ‘make-believe’ theory of representation in art. I first set out the problem of scientific representation and respond to a recent argument due to Craig Callender and Jonathan Cohen, which aims to show that the problem may be easily dismissed. I then introduce my account of models as props in games of make-believe and show how it offers a solution to the (...) problem. Finally, I demonstrate an important advantage my account has over other theories of scientific representation. All existing theories analyse scientific representation in terms of relations, such as similarity or denotation. By contrast, my account does not take representation in modelling to be essentially relational. For this reason, it can accommodate a group of models often ignored in discussions of scientific representation, namely models which are representational but which represent no actual object. (shrink)

While Bernard Suits's understanding of games has significantly influenced the philosophy of sport, the longest sustained investigation in The Grasshopper is of make-believe and roleplaying games. Suits’s discussion of make-believe and roleplaying is found in chapters 9 through 12, but what he says there is uncharacteristically unclear. To clarify Suits’s account, the present paper distinguishes between two arguments that Suits interweaves. In the first, Suits argues that game playing is not a species of play. In the (...) second, Suits argues that playing a make-believe or role-playing game is the same — at heart — as playing a game of any type. While the paper takes no position on the former, it defends the latter argument against several important objections by Thomas Hurka and C. Thi Nguyen. It contends, furthermore, that Suits is not simply trying to show that his theory of game playing can account for make-believe and roleplaying games. Rather, Suits is also using make-believe and roleplaying games to clarify exactly how his theory of game playing should be understood. (shrink)

Abstract:How might reading fiction allow a victim of the deadly sin of pride to escape? Your fictive imagination uses the transworld exemplification of performance props playing the somaesthetic role of your avatar, a character whom you are not simply acting or identifying with but "being." You avoid the epistemic glitch of a point of view from nowhere. You play the fictive role of your avatar either in the make-believe world of sport and art without time past or in (...) the rhetorical activity of communication learning about history in that fictional world complete with moral judgment and the judgment of taste. (shrink)

Models as Make-Believe offers a new approach to scientific modelling by looking to an unlikely source of inspiration: the dolls and toy trucks of children's games of make-believe.

Around the middle of the twentieth century, psychologists rediscovered the value of make-believe. Beginning in the 1940s and 1950s, there was a sudden and considerable outpouring of books that explored the pedagogical and therapeutic significance of imaginative play. Numerous experimental studies published since then have emphasized the importance of games of make-believe in the cognitive development and successful socialization of the very young.1 And increased attention to the use of mental imagery and fantasy in various forms (...) of psychotherapy over the past half century has led many students of human nature to an increased awareness of what Dorothy and Jerome Singer refer to (in their monumental study The House .. (shrink)

How is it that we can rationally assert that sport outcomes do not really matter, while also seeming to care about them to an absurd degree? This is the so-called puzzle of sport. The broadly Waltonian solution to the puzzle has it that we make-believe the outcomes matter. Recently, Stear has critiqued this Waltonian solution, raising a series of five objections. He has also leveraged these objections to motive his own contextualist solution to the puzzle. The aim of (...) this paper is to defend the Waltonian solution. The general upshot is that, contra Stear, a make-believe based solution to the puzzle is viable after all. (shrink)

In Mind as Metaphor, Adam Toon interprets folk psychological discourse metaphorically. Based on Kendall Walton’s theory of metaphor, he argues that folk psychology ought to be understood in terms of prop-oriented make-believe that relies on representationally essential metaphors. Toon insists that this fictionalist view of everyday mental talk preserves what we commonly think folk psychology can achieve: it does not only rationalize but explains behavior causally. In this paper, first we raise concerns about Toon’s characterization of folk psychology (...) as metaphorical. Then we proceed to show that representationally essential metaphors are incompatible with genuine causal explanation. And finally, we argue that no construal of mental fictionalism can preserve the epistemic virtues we commonly ascribe to folk psychological discourse. (shrink)

I explore some of the reasons why, under specific circumstances, it may be rational to make-believe or imagine certain religious beliefs. Adopting a jargon familiar to certain contemporary philosophers, my main concern here is to assess what reasons can be given for adopting a fictionalist stance towards some religious beliefs. My understanding of fictionalism does not involve solely a propositional attitude but a broader stance, which may include certain acts of pretence. I also argue that a plausible reason (...) to be fictionalist about a specific set of religious beliefs and practices has to do with the value of some artistic creations; namely, those that require the adoption of a religious point of view for their understanding. (shrink)

In "Rethinking Sadomasochism," Patrick Hopkins challenges the "radical" feminist claim that sadomasochism is incompatible with feminism. He does so by appeal to the notion of "simulation." I argue that Hopkins's conclusions are generally right, but they cannot be inferred from his "simulation" argument. I replace Hopkins's "simulation" with Kendall Walton's more sophisticated theory of "make-believe." I use this theory to better argue that privately conducted sadomasochism is compatible with feminism.

Leddington (2016) remains the leading contemporary philosophical account of magic, one that has been relatively unchallenged. In this discussion piece, I have three aims; namely, to (i) criticise Leddington’s attempt to explain the experience of magic in terms of belief-discordant alief; (ii) explore the possibility that much, if not all, of the experience of magic can be explained by mundane belief-discordant perception; and (iii) argue that make-believe is crucial to successful performances of magic in ways Leddington at best (...) overlooks and at worst denies. (shrink)

In relation to the Kantian theory that moral judgments are imaginarily grounded, this contribution explores how moral agents experience and make use of this imaginary groundedness. Drawing from a strand of aesthetics that conceives of imagination as make-believe, the imaginary ground of moral judgment is theorized to stem from the interaction between active participants who pretend that their claims are grounded, and passive participants who are invited to go along. Based on this reconstruction, the experience of the (...) moral imaginary is argued to stem from a divided mind. It allows moral agents to be partly devoted to the mental and communicative attitude fitting the fictional world of groundedness, and partly to generating personal responses to moral claims. Using the experience of artistic fiction as an example, the actual experience of morality’s imaginary ground is finally located in the interplay between those two spheres. (shrink)

In this study we offer a new way of applying Kendall Walton’s theory of make-believe to musical experiences in terms of psychologically inhibited games of make-believe, which Walton attributes chiefly to ornamental representations. Reading Walton’s theory somewhat against the grain, and supplementing our discussion with a set of instructive examples, we argue that there is clear theoretical gain in explaining certain important aspects of composition and performance in terms of psychologically inhibited games of make-believe (...) consisting of two interlaced game-worlds. Such complex games can accommodate a continuous rich spectrum of congruent modes of listening, which broaches both the formalist-type and the narrativist-type. We conclude that this sort of oblique reading of Walton’s original theory actually complements and completes Walton’s recent theoretic angle concerning thoughtwriting in music by way of affording it with a suitable conception for a mechanism of appropriation for music. (shrink)

Kendall Walton explains pictures in terms of games of perceptual make-believe. Pictures or depictions are props that draw us to participate in games of make-believe where we imagine seeing what a picture depicts. Walton proposes that one imagines of one’s perceptual experience of the coloured canvas that it is a different perceptual experience. The issue is whether perception and imagination can combine the way Walton suggests. Can one imagine a perception to be different? To get a (...) clearer understanding of the unified perceptual-imaginative experience Walton posits, the paper turns to competing theories that explain perceptual experience in terms of contents, relations to objects, or both contents and relations. Walton appeals to theories of perceptual content and cognitive penetration. But it is also important to examine whether his view fits with recent theories that explain perception only in terms of relations or in terms of both contents and relations. The paper argues that Walton’s view is compatible with content theories of perception and can be defended from some objection once we look at the detail these theories offer. Walton’s view is not compatible with pure relational theories of perception but it can be explained by hybrid content-relational theories of perception that posit de re senses. (shrink)

‘We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth’, so Christians confess when they recite the Nicene Creed. Now if the argument of Mark S. McLeod-Harrison’s Make/Believing the World: Toward a Christian Ontological Pluralism is correct, God is not alone in that task. We human beings are makers of heaven and earth, too, in the sense that what exists is as it is because our minds have made it so, which is a kind (...) of noetic irrealism. Now noetic irrealism about heaven and earth quickly leads to ontological pluralism, that is, that there isn’t just one way heaven and earth, that is, the world, is; rather, there are many ways the world is, not all of which are compatible with each other. So, there are many heavens and earths, many worlds, created, in part, by human noetic feats. But worlds can’t be created just any way; there are limits to the ways a world might be, for instance, they must be internally consistent. But what provides these limits? These limits are given by a unity of the worlds which yield the boundaries within which our noetic feats may create a world. And what could provide this unity? …. (shrink)

The outcomes of sports and competitive games excite intense emotions in many people, even when those same people acknowledge that those outcomes are of trifling importance. I call this incongruity between the judged importance of the outcome and the intense reactions it provokes the Puzzle of Sport. The puzzle can be usefully compared to another puzzle in aesthetics: the Paradox of Fiction, which asks how it is we become emotionally caught up with events and characters we know to be unreal. (...) In this article, I examine the prospects of understanding our engagement with competitive games on the model of our engagement with works of fiction, thus enabling analogous explanations for both puzzles. I show that there are significant problems with such an approach and offer an alternative, mobilizing ideas from David Velleman and Thomas Nagel, that appeals to the volatility of our motivational attitudes. (shrink)

This article seeks to highlight the relevance of Marie-José Mondzain's trailblazing writings on Byzantine image theory and its modern legacy, with particular reference to Image, icône, économie (Im...

Prop oriented make-believe is make-believe utilized for the purpose of understanding what I call “props,” actual objects or states of affairs that make propositions “fictional,” true in the make-believe world. I, David Hills, and others have claimed that prop oriented make-believe lies at the heart of the functioning of many metaphors, and one variety of fictionalism in metaphysics invokes prop oriented make-believe to explain away apparent references to entities some (...) find questionable or problematic (fictional characters, propositions, moral properties, numbers). Elisabeth Camp has argued against my and David Hills’ views of metaphor. Her arguments, many of them echoed by Catharine Wearing, demolish a very implausible account of metaphor, but leave entirely untouched the views that Hills and I actually proposed. Clarifying what we say about metaphor serves also as a defense of fictionalist theories that invoke prop oriented make-believe. (shrink)

We often assume that religious beliefs are no different in kind from ordinary factual beliefs—that believing in the existence of God or of supernatural entities that hear our prayers is akin to believing that May comes before June. Neil Van Leeuwen shows that, in fact, these two forms of belief are strikingly different. Our brains do not process religious beliefs like they do beliefs concerning mundane reality; instead, empirical findings show that religious beliefs function like the imaginings that guide (...) class='Hi'>make-believe play. -/- Van Leeuwen argues that religious belief—which he terms religious “credence”—is best understood as a form of imagination that people use to define the identity of their group and express the values they hold sacred. When a person pretends, they navigate the world by consulting two maps: the first represents mundane reality, and the second superimposes the features of the imagined world atop the first. Drawing on psychological, linguistic, and anthropological evidence, Van Leeuwen posits that religious communities operate in much the same way, consulting a factual-belief map that represents ordinary objects and events and a religious-credence map that accords these objects and events imagined sacred and supernatural significance. -/- It is hardly controversial to suggest that religion has a social function, but Religion as Make-Believe breaks new ground by theorizing the underlying cognitive mechanisms. Once we recognize that our minds process factual and religious beliefs in fundamentally different ways, we can gain deeper understanding of the complex individual and group psychology of religious faith. [Abstract writing credit: book editor Andrew Kinney, HUP]. (shrink)

The Introduction provides an overview of Kendall Walton’s make-believe framework for a variety of representations and his arguments that such representations are dependent on their social or historical context. Walton argues that diverse representations involve our capacities for imagination and make-believe with props; they overlap with the fictional. Focusing on make-believe with props explains paradigmatic representational arts such as paintings and novels, theater and film. But this perspective reaches beyond the arts: it explains pictures (...) and photographs in general not only artistic ones; stories in general as well as literary and performing arts; music; metaphors, and even the claims we make about fictional entities and existence. The first section explains the main points of the make-believe framework in Mimesis as Make-Believe, and it reconstructs Walton’s argument in “Categories of Art” that some aesthetic properties depend on the perceptible and historical categories of art to which a work belongs. The second section outlines Walton’s specific proposals about literary fiction, fictional characters, poetry, pictures, photographs, music and negative existential claims. These explanations are integrated with summaries of the papers. The third section examines Walton’s implicit view of two much-discussed issues: the ontology of art and definitions of art. This discussion clears away some misunderstandings of Walton’s contextualism or historicism and relates Walton’s work to Arthur Danto’s and Frank Sibley’s. (shrink)

The core of Walton's theory is the claim that make-believe, understood as imagination or pretense, is the common element in all representations--literature, visual arts, theater, film, and opera. He sets out to show that, taking seriously childrens' games as a starting point, we can learn a lot about various kinds of representation. He suspects that make-believe may be crucially involved even in certain religious practices, in sports, in the institutions of morality, and in postulates of "theoretical (...) entities" in science. His theory will help us see, he suggests, that "engaging in make-believe provides practice in roles one might someday assume in real life, that it enables one to come to grips with one's own feelings, that it broadens one's perspectives". (shrink)

A caricature can reveal an aspect of its subject that a more faithful representation would fail to render: by depicting a slow and clumsy person as a monkey one can point out such qualities of the depicted subject, and by depicting a person with quite big ears as a person with enormous ears one can point out that the depicted person has rather big ears. How can a form of representation that is by definition inaccurate be so representationally powerful? Figurative (...) language raises a similar puzzle. Metaphors, taken at face value, are usually false: men are not wolves. The same goes for hyperbolic talk: Putnam did not change his position one billion times in his career. Still, figurative language is expressively powerful: by saying that human beings are wolves or that Putnam changed his position one billion times in his career one conveys, in a very vivid way, some true information about the world (something concerning the facts that human beings are cruel and that Putnam frequently changed opinion). Kendall Walton (1993) provides an elegant explanation of the expressive utility of figurative language by linking metaphor and prop oriented make-believe. We explore the hypothesis that the theory of prop oriented make-believe can also explain the representational efficacy of caricatures. (shrink)