“Pretending to growl like a
bear, or lie still like a corpse, is a sophisticated performance, where the
bear’s growling and the corpse’s immobility are naïve.” –Gilbert Ryle
When he was around the age of 2 my son loved
playing games of roaring with anyone willing to indulge him.
Sometimes, if my performances were too convincing, he would become genuinely
fearful - once or twice ending up in tears. It might be assumed that his
fascination with roaring was simply the result of a desire to conquer his fear
of facing up to a threatening adversary. I’m sure this is partially true but perhaps
it’s not the full story.
In 1958 two British
philosophers, Elizabeth Anscombe and J. L. Austin, were involved in a debate
over the nature of pretending. Simply put, the central problem went like this:
how can we tell the difference between pretend anger and anger proper? There is
a lot of detail to the arguments presented which I cannot hope to distil here
but one particularly interesting aspect that neither philosopher fully addresses
concerns the representational character of anger.
Aggressive behaviour is recognised by many creatures who naturally respond defensively or evasively. That doesn't mean that aggressive behaviour symbolises anger and that other creatures have to interpret the meaning before they can respond. It's far more fundamental than symbolism. But to pretend to be angry, by behaving in an aggressive way when one is not angry and has no intention of following up with violence is a skill that needs a very different set of skills and contextual cues to work its magic.
To make a convincing pretense
of anger, is to match many of the physical features of anger. When well executed, such displays are near identical to the things they seek to represent. Indeed, get a young
child to pretend to be really angry and you’re likely to get a real bite, scratch or thump for
your curiosity – though it might be argued – and I’m not too keen on testing the
theory – that the bite etc. is not as determinedly forceful as it might otherwise
be. I suspect this is why my son, and so many other boys (being the more
violent members of the species) of a similar age are so fascinated with
displays of mock anger because it is vital for them to be able to distinguish a mere
representation of anger from the far more serious representational prospect of
immanent violence, i.e. genuine anger.
As inordinate
representation users we humans are extremely sensitive to and adept at employing contextual cues in
ways that other animals simply aren’t and we have developed highly
sophisticated and sometimes extremely subtle ways of alerting one another to
the representational status of our behaviour. The next time you encounter a
dog, try making a matching representation of anger towards it and I’m sure
you’ll see what I mean.
