A Cognitive Theory of Pretence
A Cognitive Theory of Pretence
One central theme of the book is that the capacity for mindreading implicates the capacity for pretense and imagination. In order to explain the processes underlying mindreading, it is vital to develop an account of the cognitive architecture subserving pretense and imagination. This chapter develops such an account and compares it to rival metarepresentational and simulation-theory accounts. On the account that is defended, pretense representations are contained in a separate mental workspace, a Possible World Box which is part of the basic architecture of the human mind. The representations in the Possible World Box can have the same content as beliefs, and are processed by the same inference mechanisms that operate over beliefs.
Keywords: metarepresentation, pretense, imaginary desires, imagination, possible world, simulation, Robert Gordon, Alan Leslie
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