A post by Jennifer Van Reet.

My own thinking about how pretense is represented has certainly evolved over the years. Most recently, my conception most closely resembles Picciuto and Carruthers (2016)’s characterization of pretense as a state of “embodied imagination” in which individuals “act as if P (without believing it) while imagining that P”.  What I appreciate about this characterization is how it makes clear that imagining is a necessary component of pretending, but that pretending is something more, and thus, different from imagining. Picciuto and Carruthers clearly specify how “acting as if” can mean not acting at all (e.g., when you pretend to sleep by lying completely still) or not acting any differently from how one would act in the real world (e.g., when you pretend to have painted fingernails just by acting like you).