ABSTRACT
Imagination and make-believe, along with fantasy, pretence and play, make regular appearances in theories of art and the aesthetic. Imagination is the central idea; the others generally appear as forms of imaginative activity or as its manifestations. In work on child development, ‘play’ and ‘pretence’ are often used as near-synonyms for ‘imagination,’ while recent theories of inter-personal understanding appeal to a conception of imagination as ‘pretend-beliefs.’ I shall review some of these developments later. The special importance of make-believe as a companion to imagination in recent aesthetic thinking reflects the influence of Kendall Walton’s work, and I shall start with this.
