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In this chapter I shall take up the question of children’s motivations to engage in pretence.1 I shall use the account provided by Nichols and Stich (2003) as a stalking horse: arguing that they are correct about much of the basic cognitive architecture necessary to explain pretence, but wrong on the question of motivation. Following a discussion of the views of Currie and Ravenscroft (2002) on this issue, I shall draw on Damasio’s (1994) description of the way in which emotions enter into practical reasoning involving mental rehearsal. This will enable me to defend a novel explanation of the motivations underlying pretence.

in Architecture of the Imagination, ed. Shaun Nichols (Oxford University Press, 2006): 257-272.

in Architecture of the Imagination, ed. Shaun Nichols (Oxford University Press, 2006): 257-272.

Iteration presents opposing puzzles for a theory of the imagination. The first puzzle, noted by David Lewis, is that when a person pretends to pretend, the iteration is often preserved. Let’s call this the puzzle of ‘pre- served iteration’. At the other pole, Gregory Currie has noted that very often when we pretend to pretend, the iteration does collapse. We might call this the puzzle of ‘collapsed iteration’. Somehow a theory of the imagination must be able to address these two puzzles. I argue that an empirically inspired cognitive theory of the imagination (Nichols & Stich 2000) can accommodate both puzzles.

The everyday capacity to understand the mind, or 'mindreading', plays an enormous role in our ordinary lives. Shaun Nichols and Stephen Stich provide a detailed and integrated account of the intricate web of mental components underlying this fascinating and multifarious skill. The imagination, they argue, is essential to understanding others, and there are special cognitive mechanisms for understanding oneself. The account that emerges has broad implications for longstanding philosophical debates over the status of folk psychology. Mindreading is another trailblazing volume in the prestigious interdisciplinary Oxford Cognitive Science series.

This volume brings together specially written essays by leading researchers on the propositional imagination. This is the mental capacity we exploit when we imagine that Holmes has a bad habit or that there are zombies. It plays an essential role in philosophical theorizing, engaging with fiction, and indeed in everyday life. The Architecture of the Imagination capitalizes on recent attempts to give a cognitive account of this capacity, extending the theoretical picture and exploring the philosophical implications.