





















































The Epistemology of Imagination and Play in the Community of Inquiry


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The Epistemology of Imagination and Play in the Community of 
Inquiry 

 
Karen Mizell 
  

I. 

he “Community of Inquiry” (COI) as it is used in the context of doing philosophy with 
children, is a phrase that refers to a pedagogical method in which groups of children and 
adults come together to discuss a targeted philosophical issue.1 Generally, a philosophical 

topic is decided upon and initial questions or ideas may be proposed, which are used to generate a 
discussion among participants. One of the most important features of such a discussion, when well 
organized, is that all participants are provided with an opportunity to express their opinions and 
positions, with an express objective of doing away with an adult/child or teacher/student power 
differential. A model COI provides a place for many philosophical perspectives and opinions.  

     COI reflects the dawning recognition among many educators who worry that standard lecture-
based approaches to teaching and learning fail to generate genuine thinking in students. Recognizing 
the limitations of such pedagogies, educators have cast about for “active-learning” pedagogies that 
generate thoughtful, meaningful learning for students, a simplified description of the transformation 
of educational pedagogies, with roots in the works of such diverse thinkers as Jean Jacques Rousseau, 
Maria Montessori, Lev Vygotsky, Paulo Freire, and others.  

     As educators strive to help students develop empathy, expand their minds, view concerns from 
different perspectives, think critically, and become citizens of an evolving global community, it is 
clear that one thing students most need to learn is to transcend their own perspectives and to learn 
to view the world from others’ points of view. Martha Nussbaum observes that “[students] see only 
what their own minds have created, never the reality of the person who stands before them.”2 
Implicit in this passage, is her view that students must develop a cognitive apparatus that allows such 
altered viewpoints, a facility that rests upon imagination. 

     COI plays upon this use of imagination and allows students to avoid knowledge transmittal that 
is “pre-packaged” and finished. Instead, COI is a collaborative, inquiry-driven dialogue that invites 
young people to jointly interrogate a philosophical topic. Ideally, it represents a dialectic between 
several parties that involves careful thinking and listening, as well as speaking.3 As David Kennedy 
notes, COI is applied philosophy, “…the actual doing of philosophy rather than reading it or reading 
about it.”4 COI is designed to integrate children into a discursive, intersubjective intellectual 
community. Most importantly, it allows participating children to develop a respect for their own and 
others’ intellectual individuality. Michael Pritchard describes his own excitement at “seeing a 
community of inquiry in action [with its] give and take of…discussion.”5  

     The dynamic interaction in a well-structured COI encourages a philosophical dialogue that 
enhances children’s abilities to frame philosophical issues posed by themselves and others, and to 

 T 



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reflect on those issues while developing creative, individual approaches to thinking. In pedagogical 
terms, children become active thinkers and respected arbiters in the discussion, using imagination 
to cast and interrogate philosophical dilemmas in an, often, organic discussion. In practice, COI is 
an antidote for what Maxine Greene calls “the legacy of positivism” in which “children are perceived 
as human resources rather than persons.”6  In traditional educational models, children are often 
regarded as crude materials to be shaped according to external demands which are defined by others. 
In its best exemplification as an effective educational method, COI is based upon an enduring 
respect for the personhood of its student participants and constructs a “democratic community that 
is accessible to the young….[based upon] shared meanings, common interests and [participatory] 
endeavours.”7 Greene speaks to a common concern shared by some educators and philosophers 
associated with the Philosophy for Children movement; that is, children’s philosophical abilities are 
often overlooked and children are often marginalized and excluded from important human 
conversations. The most caring and well-intentioned adults often overlook the childish propensity 
for philosophical reflection.  

     COI, on the other hand, represents a recognition that children do engage in philosophical 
reflections, often unidentified and overlooked. COI is a venue that cultivates and encourages 
children’s natural philosophizing. Matthews speculates that:  

so much emphasis has been placed on the development of children’s abilities, especially their 
cognitive abilities that we automatically assume their thinking is primitive and in need of 
being developed toward an adult norm. What we take to be primitive, however, may actually 
be more openly reflective than the adult norm we set as the goal of education. By filtering 
the child’s remarks through our developmental assumptions we avoid having to take 
seriously the philosophy in those remarks; in that way we also avoid taking the child and the 
child’s point of view with either the seriousness or the playfulness they deserve.8  

It is the imaginative, philosophical playfulness that inheres in COI that I wish to examine in this 
paper. Conceptual play demonstrates an isomorphism between belief and imagining that informs 
the process by which children develop a grasp of philosophical puzzles. In particular, how does an 
epistemology of conceptual imagination and play figure into the Community of Inquiry when doing 
philosophy with children?  

II. 

     As an elemental aspect of childhood, play is acknowledged as a fundamental right supported in 
the Convention on the Rights of the Child.9  Theorists increasingly note the close correlation 
between learning and play in child development. Sara Smilansky, who studied child development in 
the 1980s, discovered that imaginative play is an essential tool for cognitive development.10 Another 
researcher in early childhood education, Vivian Paley, observes that important play behaviors are 
taught by children to one another. She discovered that “…the brightest kids make the most out of 
fantasy play. They set up a level of creativity that others follow.”11 She identified strong cognitive 
connections between imaginary play and progress in analytical thinking. Both Paley and Maxine 
Greene, recognize the erroneous assumption on the part of educators who fail to recognize 
imaginative play as an important component of intellectual growth in children.12  



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     Other thinkers note the tendency to sideline the importance of the imagination in education.13 
Greene appeals to John Passmore’s description of imagination as a process of learning that includes 
original and inventive cognitive strategies the student may not have been directly taught.14 Student 
innovation goes beyond direct instruction, a creative capacity based upon student imagination.15  

     Maxine Greene’s research affirms the importance of imaginative activity in rational development 
in children and makes sense of diverse experiences that may oppose or supplant their own 
interpretations of reality.16 It is through imagination that children understand the limitations of 
their own experiences and the possibilities that outrun experience. Children who attempt to make 
sense of their own experiences, who learn to be in the world in certain ways, depend upon 
imagination, and by extension, the construction of imagined worlds. Imagination opens up a 
plurality of experiences as children learn to access the “great community.”17 Lev Vygotsky’s important 
work in the area of children’s cognitive development is predicated upon the capacity of children to 
imaginatively innovate in ways that go beyond direct instruction in what he calls the “zone of 
proximal development.”18 Brian Sutton-Smith, an important play theorist, agrees that imagination, 
as it contributes to day-dreaming, pretense, and fantasy, is an activity of the playing mind and that 
children develop curiosity, as well as other cognitive faculties, through play.19  

     Sutton-Smith’s research reveals other important insights concerning the place of play in the 
intellectual, social, and moral growth in children. Directed imaginative play is a vehicle children use 
to solve problems and make contextual sense of their lives.20 Clearly, children’s play is often a 
reflection of their social situations, their relative disempowerment in the adult world and enables 
them to balance their appreciation of general life conditions. Much of children’s play is directed at 
addressing issues of hegemony and hierarchy21 and is an instrument that contributes to a child’s 
emerging autonomy. 

     Many philosophers have acknowledged the life-long interdependence between education and 
play. Indeed, Joseph Dunne notes that the Greek words for play (paidia) and education (paideia) have 
the same etymological root, which is the word for child (pais).22 While some educators dismiss 
children’s play and stories as just so much aimless imagining, they often belittle and correct 
imaginative children in order to direct the child to more productive, reality-based learning activities 
to counteract what is perceived as fruitless imagining. Piaget, for example, discourages childish 
imaginings as a trivialized “romancing.”23 Gareth Matthews observes that the stance employed by 
developmental psychology shapes presumptions about children’s abilities and influences subsequent 
interpretations of child behavior. If developmental psychologists assume certain limitations of child 
cognition when compared to adult capacities, the natural supposition is that it is a mark of 
ignorance, conceptual limitation, and incompleteness. As Matthews observes, an “unfortunate result 
of this is that it predisposes one to ignore, or misunderstand, the really imaginative and inventive 
thinking of young children. If one is predisposed to rack up “oddball” questions and unpalatable 
conclusions to cognitive incompetence, one will miss much that is interesting in what children have 
to say to us.”24  

     Progressive educators increasingly recognize the deep connection between learning and play, and 
even more importantly, that children like to play. Consequently, educators introduce educational 



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games into the curricula. The unfortunate result is that such teaching often becomes contrived and 
trivialized, and ultimately suppresses native creativity in children. An associated peril in this 
approach is that it preserves adult domination and control of childish learning which amounts to a 
patronizing and condescending view of play in the curriculum, and by extension, children’s directed 
activities. Among exceptions to such trends are Maria Montessori’s approach and Kieran Egan’s 
approach to incorporating imagination in education.25 As Dunne notes, educational models, such 
as Montessori’s [and Egan’s,] combine work and play in an effective and unified approach to 
children’s learning. He also adds that while philosophy with children is different from learning 
activities in Montessori [and Egan], they are alike in viewing learning and play as conjoined 
activities.26  

     Montessori and Egan regard children as essentially imaginative creatures who make epistemic 
sense of experience through the inventive constituents of cognition. On their views, imagination is 
a component of the rational understanding, foundational to children’s ability to make sense of the 
world. In addition, studies of the psychology of imagination in children recognize the social 
advantage of imagination that allows children to envision alternate states of affairs that might model 
better worlds and more inviting social environments. 

     Imagination is fundamental to understanding and acknowledging other cultures and the 
development of empathy, a moral emotion critical to grasping what it is like to be another person. 
The philosopher, Rosalind Ladd, observes that a child’s trajectory from dependence to moral 
autonomy depends upon her cognitive facility with moral reasoning. She calls this a kind of moral 
apprenticeship, but clearly, such cognitive acts depend upon imagination to establish modalities in 
moral understanding.27  

     Imaginary play returns significant cognitive and social results in classrooms where it is 
encouraged.28 Says a kindergarten teacher who took such play seriously and extended the time 
allotted for play in her classroom, “There is more time to be kind, to solve problems by imagining 
in different ways, to include more kids and let them have a say.”29 The result in this classroom was 
that children became nicer to each other, shared more, became more cooperative, and more 
empathetic to other children who might otherwise have been marginalized. Paley notes that although 
we might expect fantasy play to interfere with purposeful educational activities, her research indicates 
that it helps children to become more open-minded about alternate states of affairs.30  

     Epistemologically significant in understanding the machinations of philosophical inquiry, 
imagination figures into the comprehension of fiction, empathy, possibility and necessity, 
hypothetical reasoning, creativity and a range of other philosophical operations. In this respect, the 
cognitive capacity to conceptualize alternate states of affairs is crucial. The importance of imaginative 
activity in cognitive development allows children to make sense of diverse experiences that may 
oppose or even displace their common-place interpretations of reality.31 It is through imagination 
that children recognize the epistemic and metaphysical limitations of real-world experiences that are 
challenged by modal possibilities that outrun experience. Children who attempt to make sense of 
their experiences depend upon imagination and, by extension, the construction of counterfactual 
worlds.  



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     Imaginative, playful conversations may, at first glance, seem like so much spoken nonsense, yet 
targeted, philosophical conversations with children amount to a special kind of play: conceptual 
play. Children, who are engaged in philosophical discussions, offer playful treatments of semantic 
expectations, “reversal and inversion, exaggeration, paradox, playing with semantic boundaries, 
playing with space, and playing with time.”32 The creative use of language is often evidence of such 
imaginings. 

     Philosophical play exhibited by children in well-designed COI dialogues, represents a classic form 
of dialectic. The play theorist, Sutton-Smith notes that: 

…the center of play’s dynamism is a dialectical relationship between its enactments and their 
everyday references.  Pretense and imagination are predicated upon the creative use of 
language and the child may use words beyond their conventional usage. Words used in make-
believe and pretense may be used in a secondary, rather than a primary sense in such a way 
that the conceptual force of the latter derives from the former. Play may be a paradox in 
communication terms (it is and it is not what it says it is) but play also involves maintaining 
the referential paradoxes throughout.33  

     Other theorists note that children are capable of such imaginings and rarely confuse actual 
semantic relations. Michael Pritchard records a delightful conversation between grade school 
children who consider similarities and differences between humans and computers. They use various 
imaginative devices such as analogies and counterfactual conditionals (“If it could think….”). The 
upshot is they puzzle over thinking and meaning and consider various possibilities about human 
and computer thinking, as well as words and referents.34 

     Likewise, the children in Michael Pritchard’s COI groups illustrate such sophisticated use of 
language in imaginary cognitive play. Pritchard’s reflections support David Suits’ observation that: 
“Language itself gives us experiences, not so much by manipulating our sensory environment, but 
by focusing our attention….we are being presented with what, at the moment, are taken to be truths. 
That is to say, language has authority, so that what we read and hear has some tendency to direct 
our desires, beliefs and emotions.”35  

     What is it that children do when imaginatively engaging in philosophical play? Very often, they 
construct thought experiments, expressed as imaginable states of affairs.  Maxine Greene alludes to 
thought experiments as the architectural base of critical communities which should ground our 
teaching and learning.36 Such communities, according to Greene, open student imagination to 
alternate views, values, and perceptions. In the context of such communities, thought experiments 
are an important instrument for children as they learn.  

     Gareth Mathews, when considering “thought experiments” as a fundamental philosophical tool 
in philosophical conversation (COI) with children, writes: “[they] invite us to consider situations 
different from our everyday experience, even worlds unlike the familiar one about us….Thought 
experiments are often a good way to trace conceptual connections and ruminate on philosophical 
puzzles.”37 Intellectual adventure that stimulates children to imaginatively develop thought 
experiments allows them to consider philosophical issues from alternate perspectives. The classic 



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thought experiment is a kind of philosophical make-believe that turns on conceptual possibility.38 
Despite a dearth of research on the place of childish imagination in the curriculum, educational 
theorist, Kieran Egan, recognizes the educational efficacy of thought experiments when he asks 
children to imagine some state of affairs and draw out relevant inferences.39 Indeed, a profound and 
creative imagination, couched in powerful thought experiments, is important to learning. Within 
such imaginative and linguistic contexts, children are well able to detect coherent sets of propositions 
and, conversely, to identify incoherent sets of propositions, the stuff of philosophical thought 
experiments. 

     As we see, children are quintessentially inventive creatures, who often make sense of experience 
by resorting to imaginative capacities. David Hume observed that imagination is a cognitive state 
that brings into cognition the ability to transpose and change ideas that open alternate courses of 
experience and advance human understanding.40 Just so, children often construct imaginary states 
of affairs using sophisticated logics41 and frame them in classic thought experiments. Human 
learning, in general, is advanced as epistemic agency imaginatively offers alternate perspectives of 
experience by resorting to imaginative capacities and cognitive states that turn on the ability to 
transpose and change ideas.42  

     Thought experiments in COI reveal childish facility with complex belief structures. Philosophical 
thought experiments depend upon imagination, which are subject to rules of inference. Timothy 
Williamson notes, “although empirical knowledge constrains the attribution of essential 
[metaphysical] properties, results are more often reached through a subtle interplay of logic and the 
imagination. The crucial experiments [that figure into philosophical understanding] are thought 
experiments.”43 

III. 

     Useful thought experiments turn on contrary-to-fact conditionals, imaginative use of 
propositional content, conceptual possibility, and doxastic inferences.44 Children who are doing 
philosophy in the setting of COI are doing just that. They engage in a kind of conceptual play driven 
by thought experiments as epistemic vehicles. Such thought experiments illustrate their conceptual 
competence with moral, scientific, epistemological, and metaphysical concerns. Conceptual play of 
this kind amounts to a tool for acquiring knowledge that circumvents empirical entanglements. That 
children are able to effectively engage in philosophical thought experiments as they exercise complex 
epistemic abilities indicates their ability to appropriately use relevant concepts and counterfactual 
conditions they may never experience in the real world. In curiously mature ways, even very young 
children correctly work through thought experiments to illuminate comprehension about realistic 
and non-realistic situations.  

     Just as real world knowledge supports children’s pretend physical play, it supports conceptual 
play. The child’s ability to playfully imagine the world one way while recognizing that it is another 
functions as a skillful symbolic pretense. It is noteworthy that empirical data derived from studies 
with small children make it clear that children rarely resort to “representational abuse”45, which is a 
matter of confusing imaginary states of affairs with actual states of affairs. For instance, child subjects, 
some as young as fifteen months old, who imagined a particular state of affairs, such as pretending 



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an overturned cup represented a “spill,” did not think the table would be wet in the real world.46 
Children recognized that such propositions make perfect conceptual sense, but did not feel bound 
to imagine metaphysical falsehoods.47  

     Play among children often involves some measure of pretense about the existence of certain 
counterfactual states of affairs. Rational comprehension is enhanced as children develop 
competence with relevant fictions, especially as they recognize justifiable inferences and coherent 
imaginary states of affairs. Experimental and theoretical evidence supports the observation that 
imaginative inferences bear structural similarities to belief inferences and represent an important 
subcomponent in the epistemology of counterfactuals.48 The isomorphism between such inferences 
situates inferred rules that allow us to configure imaginative scenarios in ways that make sense. 

     To explain this capacity, Shaun Nichols and Stephen Stich postulate a kind of “belief” box in 
which the knower commits to the truth of belief X. Opposed to this is a “pretense” box which 
includes beliefs about imaginable states of affairs.49  A counterfactual conditional takes the form: If 
X had been the case, then Z would have been the case.50 They use their “belief box” to offer an 
explanation of the cognitive mechanism that explains the connection between representational 
belief and pretense mechanisms (imagining) that can be applied to epistemic processes employed by 
young children. Nichols and Stich hypothesize a “single-code” that explains parallels between the 
mechanisms that process information from both imagination and belief and assert that “pretense 
representations are in the same code as belief representations.”51 Says Nichols “…if a mechanism 
takes pretense representations as input, the single-code hypothesis maintains that if that mechanism 
is activated by the occurrent belief that p, it will also be activated by the occurrent pretense 
representation that p. More generally, for any mechanism that takes input from both the pretense 
box and the belief box, the pretense representation p will be processed much the same way as the 
belief representation.”52 The “pretense box” accounts for inference mechanisms that parallel real 
belief-forming mechanisms; “…to draw these inferences the child must be able to use real-world 
knowledge about the effect of gravity and so forth.[and] the inferences the child makes during 
pretense can somehow draw on the child’s beliefs.”53  

     This means that beliefs and imaginings used by children in thought experiments have similar 
content and follow a standard epistemic order. Ichikawa concurs:  “Imaginative propositional 
attitudes are interestingly and importantly belief-like, but nevertheless comprise a distinct cognitive 
attitude from belief.”54  He also observes that when deploying epistemic concepts in actual cases, 
cognitive subjects likewise correctly apply the concept in counterfactual instances. Both Williamson 
and Ichikawa support thought-experiments as convenient vehicles for imagination, and serves 
children’s emerging cognitive abilities.55  

     Empirical studies support the contention that imaginative content is, to some extent, anchored 
in the actual world. An observation Nichols offers about Alan Leslie’s research is that nearly all of 
the children, in his now famous experiment could point to the appropriate cup when asked to 
indicate the empty one (a metaphysically appropriate claim) in the midst of a pretend tea party in 
which, under the pretense of the play scenario, some cups are “full” and some are “empty.” This 
further supports the contention that even in the presence of “bizarre and creative elements” that are 



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present in pretend play, certain mechanisms are in place, which allow children to make epistemically 
predictable inferences comparable to those made in real-life situations.56 

     The epistemic toolkit children use in thought experiments is a feature of modal epistemology. 
Modal epistemology figures into nuanced understanding of knowledge about fictions, possibility, 
and necessity, and ultimately reflects coherent imaginations that suggest everyday belief formation. 
An important focus of modal epistemology is the manner in which an epistemic subject can know 
non-actual propositions to be possible.57 So, for example, it may be metaphysically impossible that 
X, but it is, nevertheless, coherently imaginable and conceptually possible.58  

     We often fail to notice that children routinely formulate time sequential and causal expectations 
when they “project the trajectories of nearby moving bodies into the immediate future.”59 In other 
words, they can play “catch” with balls and other toys. In the same vein, when Danielle imagines 
that Robert struck the match, she is justified in inferring that the match lit. A similar cognitive 
phenomenon occurs when children make hypothetical inferences on the basis of a counterfactual 
state of affairs to a counterfactual consequence. Making such an inference reveals a complex 
judgment about counterfactual states of affairs. Children are well capable of making such 
hypothetical inferences based on the assessment of counterfactual propositions.60 Such hypothetical 
inferences are not necessarily a consequence of instruction, but reveal the child’s natural capacity 
for counterfactual reasoning. Children exhibit a capacity for rational inference-making early in 
childhood.61 Indeed, patterns of reasoning in which children engage while in the context of pretense, 
mirrors their reasoning in non-imaginative contexts.”62  

     These observations are borne out by Gareth Matthews’ accounts of COI conversations he 
participated in with children at an art school in Scotland.63 The conversations reveal the 
concentrated epistemic skill grounded on the correspondence between possibility and imagination. 
The children who were part of his COI group exhibited sophisticated cognitive coherence between 
imagination and belief. A close examination of the conversations reveals a kind of epistemic 
frolicking based on imaginative inferences and counterfactual states of affairs.  

     Elsewhere, Matthews recorded an account of a three-year-old boy’s conversation with his father. 
The little boy, named Steve, addressed his dislike of bananas, saying: “If you were me, you wouldn’t 
like bananas either.” Steve correctly used the subjunctive form of the verb, to be. After a moment’s 
reflection about this imagined scenario, Steve then asked: “Who would be the daddy?”64 Gareth 
Matthews queried Steve’s father about this account because Steve correctly used a complex semantic 
construction that revealed his capacity to imaginatively take up the standpoint of another person. 
Although Steve might not be able to express the tacit propositions and argument structure of his 
expression, his simple wondering is an example of a counterfactual conditional –at three years of 
age. Only recently have logicians begun to puzzle through a sub-discipline of philosophy known as 
“possible-world semantics” which is captured in Steve’s three-year-old musings about an even more 
arcane enigma, that of a “counterfactual identity,” expressed in his “if you were me…”65 The point 
we may take from this example, and others from accounts of COI,  is that children, even very young 
ones such as Steve, are puzzling through modal possibilities, counterfactual states of affairs, and 



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hypothetical inferences, usually quite capably, and employing sophisticated semantic and epistemic 
structures to do so. 

     What we may ultimately learn from such conversations is an insight into hitherto overlooked 
rational capacities on the part of children that reflects an unsuspected semantic and philosophical 
sophistication. Philosophers and educators have important work to do as children are included in 
thoughtful and respectful philosophical discussions. Especially in the context of COI, we find a 
philosophically productive opportunity to really listen to children. Burgeoning accounts indicate 
philosophers are uniquely situated to recognize the epistemological capacities and metaphysical 
musings of children and to encourage their capacity for philosophical thinking. The benefits of such 
encounters are manifestly important in pedagogical and, even, moral theory. What may be even 
more important is the recognition that children, traditionally excluded from, and dismissed by the 
philosophical community, may have recognizable philosophical abilities and a legitimate place at the 
philosophical table.  

ENDNOTES 

1 The P4C movement assumes that children are able to engage in productive philosophical discussions and often do 
philosophy well and do it productively. I skate past a debate about the efficacy of such dialogues which has been 
admirably argued by Gareth Matthews, Matthew Lipman, Matthew Pritchard, Ann Margaret Sharp, Maughn Gregory, 
Jen Glaser, and Jana Mohr Lone. 
2 Martha Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education (Cambridge: Harvard 
University Press, 1997), 87. 
3 Timothy Williamson, The Philosophy of Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), 1. 
4 David Kennedy terms this activity a Community of Philosophical Inquiry (CPI), Kennedy, Philosophical Dialogues with 
Children: Essays on Theory and Practice (Lewiston: The Edwin Mellon Press, 2010), 97. 
5  Michael S. Pritchard, Philosophical Adventures with Children (Lanham: University Press of American, 1985), 96. 
6  Maxine Greene, Releasing the Imagination: Essays on Education, the Arts, and Social Change (San Francisco, Jossey-Bass 
Publishers, 1995) 32. 
7  Ibid., 33. 
8  Gareth Matthews, Philosophy and the Young Child (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980), 52-53. 
9  United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNICEF, 1989) Retrieved from http://www.unicef.org/crc 
on July, 2014. www,ohchr.org/documents/Professional Interest, Article 31.  
10 Sara Smilansky and Edgar Klugman, Chldren’s Play and Learning: Perspectives and Policy Implications (New York” 
Teacher’s College Press, 1990. 
11  Vivian Gussin Paley, A Child’s Work: The Importance of Fantasy Play (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).  
12  Ibid., 49; Greene, 54. 
13 Kieran Egan, “The Other Half of the Child,” in Thinking Children and Education, ed. Matthew Lipman, (Dubuque, 
Iowa: Kendall Hunt Publisher, 1993) 301; Gregory Heath, “Exploring the Imagination to Establish Frameworks for 
Learning,” Studies in Philosophy and Education 27 (2008): 115-123. 
14 Greene, 14. 
15 Lev Vygotsky remarks upon the trajectory of student ability in Thought and Language, translator,Alex Kozulin 
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999), 187. 
16 Greene, 54. 
17 John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (New York: Holt Publishing, 1927), 142. 
18  Vygotsky, 189. 
19  Brian Sutton-Smith, The Ambiguity of Play (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 37. 
20  Ibid., 36. 
21  Ibid., 114. 

 

http://www.unicef.org/crc


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22 Joseph Dunne, “To Begin in Wonder: Children and Philosophy,” Thinking: The Journal of Philosophy for Children 14 
(2), 17.  
23 Jean Piaget, The Child’s Conception of the World, 10; Matthews, Philosophy and the Young Child, 38-39.  
24 Gareth Matthews, Dialogues with Children (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), 32.  
25 Kieran Egan, Imagination and Education (New York: Teachers College Press, 1988). 
26 Dunne, 17. 
27 Rosalind Ladd’s observation about moral development can reasonably apply to intellectual development in general. 
“Paternalism and the Rationality of the Child, ” in Thinking Children and Education, ed. Matthew Lipman, (Dubuque, 
Iowa: Kendall/Hunt Publishing, 1993), 59-64 
28 Swedish “Play Schools” capitalize upon this observation. The curriculum is entirely driven by children’s play and 
found to be as, or more, successful for later learning as academically oriented pre-schools.  
29 Paley, 54.  
30 Ibid., 26. 
31 Greene, 54. 
32 Sutton-Smith, 148. 
33 Ibid., 196. 
34 Pritchard, Chapter 8.  
35 David B. Suits, “Really Believing in Fiction,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 87 (2006): 382. 
36 Greene, 198. 
37 Matthews, Philosophy and the Young Child, 74. 
38 Jonathan Ichikawa, Imagination and Epistemology (PhD diss., Rutgers University, 2011), 88. 
39 Kieran Egan, Getting it Wrong from the Beginning: Our Progressive Inheritance from Herbert Spencer, John Dewey, and Jean 
Piaget (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 93-94. 
40 David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, L.A. Selby Bigge editor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 148. 
41 Timothy Williamson, The Philosophy of Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford Publishing Ltd, 2007), Chapter 6. 
42 Hume, 52. 
43 Williamson, 19. 
44 Propositional imagination depends upon a representational theory of mind, which views beliefs as internal 
representations. On this view, “to believe that p is to have a prepresentation token with content p, stored in some 
functionally appropriate way in the mind.” (Shaun Nichols, editor, The Architecture of the Imagination: New Essays on 
Pretense, Possibility, and Fiction (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), 5) Such learning is composed on the back of 
conceptual possibility grounded on coherent states of affairs that employ contrary-to-fact conditionals.   
45 Tamar Szabo Gendler,”On the Relation Between Pretense and Belief” Imagination Philosophy, and the Arts, eds. 
Matthew Kieran and Dominic McIver Lopes (London: Routledge, 2003),130. 
46 Ibid. 
47 This is an insight we gain from Saul Kripke who is skeptical about the notion that what may be conceptually possible 
is an indicator of metaphysical possibility. Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980), 142. 
48 Kendall Walton discusses certain rule-governed conventions that involve make-believe, which he calls “principles of 
generation.” in Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts (Cambridge: Harvard University 
Press, 1990), 38. 
49 Shaun Nichols and Stephen Stich, “A Cognitive Theory of Pretense,” Cognition 74 (2000): 12. 
50 As Ichikawa notes, it is also possible to have a true antecedent and a counterfactual consequent. An indicative 
condition takes the following form: If X is the case, then Z is the case. The truth value of a counterfactual is not fixed 
the by the truth value of its consequents and antecedents. Ichikawa, 144-145. 
51 Shaun Nichols, “Imagining and Believing: The Promise of a Single Code,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 
(Spring 2004): 131. 
52 Ibid.   
53 Ibid., 130. 
54 Ichikawa, 155. 
55 Ibid., 72. 
56 Nichols, 130. 
57 Ichikawa, 79; Kripke, 144.  



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58 Ichikawa, 89.  
59 Ibid., 128.   
60 Ibid., 154.  
61 Ibid.,155; Alan M. Leslie, Pretending and Believing: Issues in the Theory of ToMM” in Cognition  50 (1994): 211-
238. 
62 Nichols, 180; Jonathan M. Weinberg and Aaron Mesking, “Puzzling Over the Imagination: Philosophical Problems, 
Architectural Solutions,” The Architecture of the Imagination: New Essays on Pretense, Possibility, and Fiction, ed. Shaun 
Nichols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006) 178. 
63 Matthews, Dialogues with Children. 
64 Ibid., 113. 
65 Ibid., 114-115. 

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Address Correspondences to:  
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 Professor of Philosophy 

 Utah Valley University 

 800 W., University Pkwy, MC 173 

 Orem, Utah 84058 

 Karen.Mizell@uvu.edu  

mailto:Karen.Mizell@uvu.edu



