Getting real about pretense

Abstract

This paper argues that radical enactivism (RE) offers a framework with the required nuance needed for understanding of the full range of the various forms of pretense. In particular, its multi-storey account of cognition, which holds that psychological attitudes can be both contentless and contentful, enables it to appropriately account for both the most basic and most advanced varieties of pretense. By comparison with other existing accounts of pretense, RE is shown to avoid the pitfalls of representationalist theories while also allowing us to combine the best elements of the praxeological enactivist (Weichold & Rucińska, 2021) and Langland-Hassan’s (2020, 2021) proposals about pretense, while avoiding their key shortcomings.