Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts

by Walton

Representations--in visual arts and in fiction--play an important part in our lives and culture. Kendall Walton presents here a theory of the nature of representation, which illuminates its many varieties and goes a long way toward explaining its importance. Drawing analogies to children's make believe activities, Walton constructs a theory that addresses a broad range of issues: the distinction between fiction and nonfiction, how depiction differs from description, the notion of points of view in the arts, and what it means for one work to be more "realistic" than another. He explores the relation between appreciation and criticism, the character of emotional reactions to literary and visual representations, and what it means to be caught up emotionally in imaginary events.



Walton's theory also provides solutions to the thorny philosophical problems of the existence--or ontological standing--of fictitious beings, and the meaning of statements referring to them. And it leads to striking insights concerning imagination, dreams, nonliteral uses of language, and the status of legends and myths.

Throughout Walton applies his theoretical perspective to particular cases; his analysis is illustrated by a rich array of examples drawn from literature, painting, sculpture, theater, and film. Mimesis as Make-Believe is important reading for everyone interested in the workings of representational art.

Genres: Philosophy, Art, Theory

468 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1990

Reviews

[Alina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Third time reading...

There is so much to be picked up on and thought through in this book. Its central, explicit claims are understated with respect to the implications they have for understanding the nature of consciousness more broadly. I've summarized these main claims in my review from my second time reading below, so let me here just make some more remarks about the implications I see following from them.

A consequence of Walton's view is that there are many apparent, phenomenal entities for which it is a category error to ask about their existence. Strictly speaking, they don't exist; but their purpose or function in our cognitive economy is to in a pretend-manner exist, so we miss a lot about their nature by focusing on the fact that they don't exist. When we pretend that something exists, that doesn't mean that it does exist or is an object out there that could or fail to exist. A temptation is to say that when we pretend that something exists, it does exist but in a realm of the imagination; Walton spends a lot of time arguing against this view. The heart of his argument here is that our notion of existing, even in the realm of the imagination, preserves the core of our notion of existence, as we understand it in typical cases (e.g., objects we find in the world around us). Pretended-existence lacks that core and has its own inner dynamics. So we shouldn't talk about pretended-existence as a species of existence. They are two separate genuses.

Another issue that Walton brings up and I want to think about more is the case of our pretending to be somebody else, as in children's games of make believe. When we do this, we become "self-reflexive props" -- we become the prop, which prompts us to imagine ourselves as representing ourselves (although under a different light, a different description). Contrast this to non-self-reflexive props, like our taking a banana to be a telephone. We can also contrast this case to that in which an actor plays herself. When I play myself in a theater performance, the imaginings I have about myself, that direct me towards what I should do -- these are 'third personal'. I imagine who I am typically 'from the outside' and on the basis of these observations determine what I should do. In contrast, in games of make believe, we can pretend to be ourselves in a different way. I imagine myself being myself 'from the inside'; I don't observe myself, but I have adopted the perspective of myself and see what follows from that.

I'm interested in this contrast insofar as I'd imagine that in this more intimate first-personal pretending case, it is more likely that beneath our conscious awareness the pretended experiences we have in this case may influence or shape the sorts of experiences we have in real life that have some analogue to these pretended experiences. This is connected to another pair of contrast cases: when we watch an actor on stage v. a movie. Only in the former case, there's a real person before us; perhaps there are some unconscious psychological processes whose triggering requires this physical presence of a person.

More broadly, I'd like to think more about in what ways make-believe situations impact us -- it's never that we directly take the contents of those to actually exist, but there seem to be various different ways we get impacted (e.g., we see the make-believe situation as a metaphor for something in real life, and this helps us see new properties of this real thing). I'd like to think about how these different ways of being impacted are modulated by or differ between different types of make-believe situations (e.g., having physical props v. not).

I'd also like to think more about the fact that this structure of make-believe situations seems to be extendable in accounting for the meanings and values (all the 'non-physical' components) of what we take to be reality. This is tied to Wittgenstein's notion of language games. Is this apparent similarity just due to the fact that the idea of a cluster of things springing from a rule is extremely general, so both phenomena (make believe and reality) can be modeled by this? Or, does this indicate there's some actual ontological continuity (e.g., in the psychological processes underpinning both) between them?

If they really are ontologically similar, what ultimately amounts to their difference? Is it that we're aware of the fact that the rules were arbitrarily created (arbitrarily in the sense that they are not determined by how the world stands, or were constructed in order to satisfy epistemic aims) in one case and not the other? That seems too simple and minimal. I'd like to think more about this.

As a side note, upon this time reading the book, I found the most interesting chapters to be: 1, 2, 3, 6, and 11.

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Second time reading...

I was so wrong about what this book is about and its contributions. Walton's purpose is to show how fictional propositions (e.g. “I plan to become a mermaid if academia doesn’t work out”) may be intelligible, but his theory in effect suggests a radical revision to our understanding of the nature of all possible experiences -- I do not mean this lightly. Let me first explain his theory of fictional propositions, then show how it leads to this revision.

According to this theory, we engage in games of make-believe, which consist of sets of rules that prescribe that certain real objects are to be treated as certain fictional entities. Often, these rules are systematically related to one another due to principles of generativity. We might begin with a simple set of rules and realize that we can make intuitive metaphorical extensions from this starting point. New rules may be erected to capture these extensions. For example, children might start off with a game of make-believe in which tree leaves are taken to be souls. This rule allows for the generation of another rule that fallen tree leaves are to be taken to be fallen souls. We may call a real object that we pretend to be some fictional entity in a game of make-believe a “prop”. The tree leaves in this example serve as props for the children’s game of glimpsing and enumerating lost and fallen souls.

Fictional propositions are uttered under the context of make-believe games. They may be semantically true or false (e.g., if in some possible world, tree leaves actually embody souls, these childrens’ fictional propositions could be true); but that is not the distinctive feature of them. Rather, fictional propositions are pragmatically taken as true or false, given the rules of a game (Walton 1990, 76). For example, between a possible world on which leaves actually embody souls and our actual world where they do not, the children could equally take their propositions to be true. Their pragmatic act of taking a proposition to be true functions independently of whether it is semantically true.

We may contrast this with approaches to explaining fictional propositions that appeals to the semantics of these propositions. For example, David Lewis argues that fictional propositions are indexed to possible worlds that represent the fictional work of which these propositions are part (1978). On this view, fictional propositions are subject to truth and falsity, just as ordinary propositions are, and they are true just in those indexed possible worlds.

In effect, Walton makes room for that we can approach any object of experience (whether it is a perceptual, imaginative, or thought-based "experience") as a constitutive part of reality, or as something that has some phenomenological presence but that is not part of reality, and rather is make-believe or fictional. For example, an object of experience may possess all the phenomenological characteristics typical of veridical perceptions and nonetheless be taken as make-believe. Say, my friend has a hallucination of his houseplants singing to him. The hallucination is so vivid that it is indistinguishable from a situation in which this would be a veridical perception. My friend is familiar with having hallucinations, however, and is able to refrain from taking this singing as real. He is able to take the singing as make-believe, even though it is not product of voluntary engagement in any game of make-believe. He might refuse to act upon impulses that would be rational if the events he hallucinates were real, or engage in further make-believe acts to play along with the hallucination, like singing along with the houseplants in jest.

Similarly, some of us may be able to take gender or race as make-believe, or social constructs lacking any realism, despite their showing up with full phenomenological vividness. Conversely, I could take an imagined event of giving birth, which possesses all phenomenological characteristics typical of fictions, as real. This could involve my planning my life now as to prepare for that event. Similarly, certain people take conspiracy theories to be real. Thinking that Hilary Clinton is literally a lizard might at first show up, phenomenologically, like a fiction to certain people, but they may nonetheless take this imagining to be part of reality. Over time this might even “rewire” the spontaneous phenomenological characteristics of the imagining, so that it shows up as part of reality before one takes any deliberate stance towards it.

So Walton's theory suggests that all possible objects of experience show up to us as either part of reality or of make-believe. This has a fascinating connection with Sartre and more broadly the existentialist tradition on freedom. Sartre thinks we are fundamentally and inevitably free because whenever anything shows up in our experience, it has some meaning or value for us, and we necessarily face the decision to determine whether this meaning will be taken up as legitimate (thereby, endorsing our prior projects), or as "nothingness" (thereby, rejecting a prior project and contributing to its deterioration). We affirm or negate meanings, and this may correspond with Walton's view that we can take something to be real or as make-believe. Sartre's idea of negation -- and its possibility to actually amount to freeing us from the meanings that squabble for our attention and that demand we feel and behave in certain ways -- is possible at all because our consciousness is capable of occupying this cognitive mode of make-believe, which is binarily distinct from reality.

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First time reading...

Walton's presents an account of the nature of representation. He defines representation, in the context of his book, as fictional representations, such as novels, films, or paintings. A representation represents fictional objects and relays fictional facts about them. According to Walton, representations work by virtue of our practices of make-believe. This is the same practice that child engage in when they play make-believe games. Such games are composed of "prompters" and "principles of generation." Prompters are the objects that children will play with in a game. There are rules that specify what should be imagined about a prompter when it is used within a game. For example, if a child is using a banana as a telephone, there is a rule that a participant should have an imagining of a telephone when she encounters the banana. This rule generates the fictional facts about a fictional object of a representation; in this case, the banana represents a telephone, or the situation of the child playing with the banana may be considered a representation of the situation of an adult operating a telephone.

In the case of novels, films, paintings, and other paradigmatic fictional representations, the art object itself is a prompter, and the audience of the art object are participants who intuitively know the rules about the use of the prompter. Grasp of these rules enables the presence of the prompter to elicit imaginings in the audience's minds. These imaginings constitute the fictional worlds that we associate with artworks. For example, when I read His Dark Materials, the physical book is a prompter, and when I engage with it, it plus the rules of generation associated with it enable me to undergo imaginings that constitute my phenomenological experiences of meeting all the characters and going alongside with them on their adventures. (But Walton is not clear whether we should think about the characters and objects that are phenomenally encountered in a fictional work as prompters as well; while they are not physical, they are associated with rules and elicit imaginings.)

While this premise of the book is very exciting, Walton spends all his time elaborating on finer-and-finer grained distinctions, whenever the opportunity opens; or, on beating a concept to death by applying it over and over again across a series of examples. It was not pleasurable to read as a whole. For example, Walton goes at length in categorizing all the different ways artworks afford our participation (e.g., the sorts of emotional responses that are appropriate for an artwork; the sorts of actions that are appropriate, given the physical medium of the artwork). He raises many possible counterexamples to his account and shows why they're misguided. I found this tedious and uninformative. The sorts of counterexamples he raises seem to be ad-hoc; it seems that Walton designs them simply so that he can take them down and provide apparent support for his account. The distinctions and categorizations he makes are sometimes interesting, but as a whole do not add to his main theory. They are just applications of his theory, which do not illuminate any new substantive features of his theory.

This is a long book (more than 400 pages). Let me summarize my favorite bits from it, the only parts that I found worthwhile reading carefully. This is chapter 1 "Representation and Make-Believe" and the last third of chapter 7 "Psychological Participation." At the end of chapter 7, Walton shows that his theory of representation can explain why we find art to be so absorbing and even addictive. When we engage with artworks, we are not mere observers of the details of those artworks. Rather, we are participants, in the same way that children are participants in their games of make-believe. We take the rules of the artwork as having normative force over us, and we perform the imaginative actions that conform to those rules. We have creative leeway in being participants; rules are extremely complex and indeterminate, and so provide room for us to respond to, identify with, or elaborate on the characters and elements of fictional worlds. I liked this point.

In chapter 1, Walton raises pretty interesting considerations regarding imagination. For instance, when we voluntarily summon up an imagined image, it usually is less "vivid" than imaginings that come to us spontaneously. Moreover, imaginings that are triggered by prompters on the basis of rules that are deeply held in our culture (perhaps to the extent that we never become aware of these rules but always take them for granted) tend to be ever more spontaneous and thus vivid. For example, you and I are on a walk and decide that we'll make-believe that any person we encounter is a wizard. This imagining follows from a voluntary decision, and this rule is not socially conventionalized. In contrast, the rule that when we see an American flag, this triggers the imagining of the concept of America is conventionalized. We'll undergo this imagining involuntarily whenever we encounter the flag, and so this imagined meaning is ever more vivid.

This suggests that Walton's theory of fictional representation can serve as a general theory of all meaning, whether factual or fictional, or whether found in our everyday lives or in special recreational activities. But strangely, Walton doesn't mention this idea, let alone pursue it. Walton skirts around it when he distinguishes between representing and referring/denoting, as kinds of relations that hold between a representational item and an object (chapter 2 "The Object of Representation"). There, Walton argues that referring/denoting requires that there be an actual object in the world, and the representational item picks it out. In contrast, representing, as a general relation, only requires that encountering that representational item triggers an imagining about (fictional) properties or propositions regarding some (fictional) object. Moreover, representing should not be confused with "matching," which is understood as a relation between two object that holds on the basis of the physical resemblances of those objects.

I found this to be a fertile moment for Walton to argue that the reference-based theory of meaning, which is so popular in philosophy of language, is misguided as a whole and can be replaced by a representational theory generalized from Walton's account of fictional representations. For example, a starting point for this would be that whenever we think that a word we use refers to a particular object in the world, in fact there is a social convention associated with that word that triggers in us an imagining of that object. The notion of reference was invented by philosophers when they tried to make sense of this imagining; and while the notion of reference can nicely model many cases of imaginings triggered by linguistic expressions, it is incomplete, and when taken too seriously, can generate apparent paradoxes (e.g., the empty referring expression).

Moreover, objects that we think we refer to can't, on their own, supply semantic value to our sentences. Rather, it is the significance or meaning of those objects as we encounter them in perceptual experience that might supply semantic value. And these perceptual meanings can be understood as especially vivid imaginings triggered by the object as a prompter, understood on Walton's model!

Perhaps Walton doesn't get into these issues because they are not within his scope of interest, which anchored on questions in aesthetics. But he mentions in the introduction that he is interested in connecting his ideas to concerns about language in general, so this was disappointing! I think this book will be of greater interest to readers who care more about traditional problems in aesthetics, such as: Do fictional entities exist? Is it possible to have relationships with fictional characters? What is the truth-value of claims made about fictional characters and objects? Walton's book consists of mostly his putting his theory to work in addressing such questions. I guess this book was a bad match for me, since I found his theory as having much potential for addressing more general questions about mind and language.

[Kaci Harrison · Rating 4 out of 5]

I dragged my feet finishing this one, but it was nevertheless a fun read. Walton proposes a comprehensive theory for understanding our engagement with the arts as a kind of make-believe, not unlike games we play as children. The characters in books and movies, the facts of the world within the work, and in some cases, the physical medium itself act as props with which we can play make-believe. Rather than using a banana as a prop for a telephone as children often do, we instead use characters, descriptions, and stories as props for discussing stories with others and engaging our feelings.

Walton’s interpretation is compelling. He resolves many puzzles in the aesthetics literature, such as the emotions we feel consuming art, how we can compare fictional worlds and characters, where the line between fiction and truth lies, and the ongoing metaphysical question about the existence of fictional things.

If you’re a philosopher with interests in aesthetics, this feels like a must-read. Might not be the most accessible to non-philosophers, but anyone who has wondered about these puzzles of fiction will already have some intuitions that’ll help follow and engage with Walton’s view.

📖: (4.5/5) ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️💫

[Nelliew · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the best book in philosophy I have read in a long time. I am going to need to read it a few more times, but 'read' for now.

[Icey · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book is divided into three parts. The first part provides an overview of the traditional view of representation in art, and offers a critique of this view. Walton argues that the traditional view fails to capture the ways in which we engage with art, and instead offers a new account of representation as a form of make-believe.

The second part of the book focuses on the nature of make-believe, exploring questions such as what it means to imagine something, and how we can distinguish between make-believe and reality. Walton argues that make-believe is a fundamental aspect of human cognition, and that it plays a crucial role in our engagement with the arts.

The third and final part of the book applies Walton's theory of make-believe to the arts, exploring how different forms of art represent the world through make-believe. Walton examines a wide range of examples from painting, sculpture, literature, and film, and offers a detailed analysis of how each of these art forms creates a world of make-believe for its audience.

[Rachael · Rating 4 out of 5]

Haven't read the whole thing but skimmed the majority of it (and read a lot in further depth) - would love to revisit it again sometime!

[Terese · Rating 2 out of 5]

A disappointment. Flat, repetitive, often spouting axiomatic "explanations" ad nauseum and surprisingly narrow-minded at times. I confess I gave up and just started skimming through the end section.