Non-Waltonian Make-Believe

The Other Kinds of Make-Believe

The Waltonian theory of make-believe is an account in which a particular phenomenon, called make-believe, is supposed to exist, which accounts for (among other things) what we colloquially call ‘make-believe’. (It is important to recognize that Waltonians apply ‘make-believe’ to many things that we would not usually call make-believe, like looking at a painting of a cabin or reading a sentence, but the name of the theory comes from what is generally seen as the central case.) Waltonian make-believe always has certain features. It consists of a deontic structure, usually called a game of make-believe, in which general prescriptions to imagine combine with particular props to mandate specific imaginings. For instance, if children are playing a game of Restaurant, in the game there will be ‘prescriptions to imagine’ people as waiters, patrons etc.; the people are props to which the prescriptions are applied, so that ‘Julie is a waiter’ is treated as if it were true, and as props they make other things to be treated as if they were true, e.g., ‘The waiter is now taking the order for the table.’

We can easily accept that Waltonian make-believe is a real phenomenon. But are there forms of make-believe that are not Waltonian? Given the structure of Waltonian make-believe, there are a few possibilities.

(1) Waltonian make-believe is prescriptionist. This means we can ask whether there is anything that is recognizably make-believe but has no prescriptions. We have to be careful here because, despite the implicature of ‘game’, it seems that the account allows for one-off make-believing – i.e., you don’t need a standing system of prescriptions or props, because just one prescription made up one time, if applied to one prop one time, seems to give us a ‘game of make-believe’ in the Waltonian sense, despite not being much of an actual game.

Make-believing with props seems to involve practical classification. We classify stumps in the field as bears and act accordingly; the children classify people as waiters in a restaurant and act accordingly. Thus when we ask whether all such make-believe needs to be prescriptionist, we seem really to be asking a more general question, namely, whether all classification for purposes of acting is a matter of prescriptions. Obviously one can turn any classification for practical purposes into a set of prescriptions; it just requires turning ‘What has feature x is an A; into ‘When something has feature x, classify it as A’. But Waltonianism requires not merely that make-believe can give us prescriptions but that the prescriptions give us the make-believe. There are attractions to being a prescriptivist in this context because we usually take sets of prescriptions not to imply anything about what is actually true. The prescription, ‘Treat whales as fish for purposes of fishing law,’ does not commit us to saying that whales are fish outside of fishing law. The problem is that this is often true of figurative descriptions. ‘The clouds are lambs in heaven’s fields’ is not obviously a prescription, but used figuratively it also does not commit us to the verbally similar literal expression, ‘The clouds are lambs in heaven’s fields.’

The natural move for a Waltonian would be to argue that ‘The clouds are lambs in heaven’s fields’ really is a prescription. Being consistent about this seems to require us to hold that all metaphors are instances of make-believe. Walton himself attempted to give a make-believe account of metaphor, but with results that have not generally been regarded as satisfactory. We ourselves do not regard such accounts as promising, but it is worth noting that there are a few people who still do.

Thus a possible alternative is not to be prescriptionist about the practical classification but figurationist. This requires an independent and non-prescriptionist account of metaphors and other similar figures of speech, but if we can have this, make-believe could be structured not by prescriptions but by something like metaphorical descriptions. Again, we must be careful. The figurationist doesn’t have to hold that we cannot identify prescriptions for make-believe, but only that the prescriptions are derivative rather than fundamental. (It is also worth reminding ourselves that it is entirely possible that some make-believing could be best accounted for prescriptionism and others by figurationism.)

Can there be unstructured make-believe? Both prescriptionism and figurationism describe make-believing as structured, only differing about how the structure works. Can there be make-believe the presupposes no prescriptive or figurative structure at all, but simply something like free play of imagination? Again, the question is not whether there is make-believe that cannot be characterized in terms of prescriptions or figurations but only whether there is make-believe that does not depend on such things. To put the question in a different way, are there kinds of make-believe for which any prescriptions and figurations are only derivative things that emerge from the make-believe, rather than being what makes it possible? We are inclined to think so. Whimsy seems an obvious possible source of such unstructured make-believing. If you walk down a hallway and on a whimsy imagine yourself walking through the corridors of a spaceship, it doesn’t seem that you have to be formulation a prescription that prescribes that you do this; nor does it seem that this has to be based on any metaphor. This, however, seems to be an area requiring further research.

(2) Waltonian make-believe uses props; we will call it prop-specified.¹ Thus we can ask if there are cases of pure make-believe, i.e., classifiable as make-believe but using no props.

A complication on this point is that the Waltonian account is associated with empty make-believings – i.e., cases where we have prescriptions to imagine in a game of make-believe, but no props? This would just be like, in law, having a right but no title; for instance, you may have the right to own property no title to any actual property, and therefore not own any property. Walton’s account does seem to require that there be such empty make-believings.² It is clear that in a game of make-believe there can be prescriptions that never come into any effect – e.g., we may pretend that different bushes are animals, with one of our rules being that a rose bush is to be treated as a tiger, but it could very well be that we find no rose bushes. There could have been a tiger in our make-believe, had there been a rose bush, but there was no rose bush, and therefore there was no tiger. It also seems that this could apply to an entire game of make-believe; we could just have misconceived the situation, so that we find no props at all to specify our prescriptions to imagine. Therefore, the Waltonian account does not require actual props, only possible props. (This point was relevant to one of our discussions of how Waltonian theory is applied to video games.)

A possible candidate for pure make-believe is when the make-believe is purely postulational. We might make-believe not that horses are unicorns, which is obviously prop-specified, but that there are unicorns. This seems particularly relevant to how Waltonian theory applies to fiction, because it seems in many cases that authors begin working on their fictions by simply positing or postulating them. In Lewis Carroll’s poem, “Jabberwocky,” something called ‘the Jabberwock’ is put forward as existing and said to be slain by a ‘vorpal sword’. There is nothing that the Jabberwock or the vorpal sword are — the whole point of the poem is that ‘Jabberwock’ and ‘vorpal’ are nonsense words that don’t have a specifiable meaning on their own. We could, inspired by the poem, make-believe that the cat is the Jabberwock and that the cat-toy is the vorpal sword, which would then be prop-specified, but this is a further step. If we can just make-believe that there is a Jabberwock slain by a vorpal sword, on its own, then we have a kind of make-believing that is pure and not prop-specified. It doesn’t matter that we could then in addition make-believe that some prop is this Jabberwock; the make-believing that there is such a Jabberwock does not itself require that any props for the Jabberwock be specified by the structure of our make-believe.

The most natural way to object to this, it seems, is to say that this is not really make-believe but something else that is related, like pretending or imagining. We’d need a non-question-begging account of how this is not purely a matter of verbal preferences, but one could argue that all the candidates for pure make-believings are really not make-believings but something simpler than make-believe. The difficulty for the Waltonian is that Waltonians are notoriously shy about giving any account of what the ‘imagine’ in ‘prescription to imagine’ means, and you would definitely need an account of imagining to rule out pure make-believing.

This brings us to the third possible place at which we might find non-Waltonian make-believing.

(3) Waltonian theory is based on the notion of prescriptions to imagine. Can there be non-imaginative make-believe? This is the hardest to work out because, again, Waltonians usually avoid specifying what counts as ‘imagining’. We certainly use other verbs than ‘imagine’ in make-believe contexts: pretend, simulate, act, playact, act out, act as if, fantasize, mock-up, fabulate, concoct, fictionalize, picture, fancy, envision, feign, masquerade, affect, pose, pass off, dissemble, disguise, imitate, play, treat as, not to mention make-believe, make up, and make as if to believe. The Waltonian has to say, we think, that all of these, insofar as they are strictly relevant, are just words for the same general thing, or at most, more specific variations of the same general thing. Perhaps. We are not convinced, however. Certainly it seems to us that when children make-believe, they are doing much more than just imagining, and sometimes may not even be focusing on imagining at all. But again, it depends on what we take ‘imagine’ to be mean when we are applying the Waltonian theory, and that is not easy to determine.

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Thus we seem to have several possibilities for kinds of make-believe that do not fit the Waltonian framework, which is prescriptionist, imaginationist, and prop-specified:

figurationist make-believe,
unstructured make-believe,
pure make-believe,
non-imaginative make-believe.

There are at least candidate phenomena for some of them (we ourselves think all of these kinds exist), but since Waltonians have largely taken over the term ‘make-believe’ in aesthetics and other fields, they tend to be neglected. If Waltonian make-believe is used to explicate fictional narratives, or paintings, or scientific models, we need at least to consider whether these things might be better understood in a non-Waltonian way, even if we still think of them as involving make-believe in some way. The Waltonian framework illuminates a great many things, but it is not the only game in town, and the kind of thing it calls ‘make-believe’ is not the only thing that can be called so (and, indeed, not always even obviously the sort of thing that we would call make-believe. ‘Make-believe’ is said in many ways.

1. What is an appropriate adjectival form of ‘prop’? ‘Prop’ is adopted by Walton, presumably, from the theatrical sense. That is a shortened version of the word ‘property’, so etymologically the relevant adjectival forms would seem to be either ‘proper’ or ‘proprietary’, both of which seem potentially misleading in this context. In theatrical contexts, most people just use ‘prop’ as the adjectival form of ‘prop’, but in this context that could be very confusing.

2. The analogy between prescription and prop, on the one hand, and legal right and title, on the other, is quite close; one could easily have a Waltonian account of legal rights as make-believe. One could also, of course, go the other way, and hold that Waltonian make-believe is actually just one specific case of a more general phenomenon of which legal title is a different specific case. Both have a deontic structure with prescriptions specified by physical anchors.