Pretend play and the development of collective intentionality

Young children's pretend play is considered in the context of the development of collective intentionality. It is argued that (i) early pretending is an essentially social and culturally acquired form of action, and (ii) early social pretend play can be considered as the first form of true collective intentionality in ontogeny - involving shared cooperative activities and even some rudimentary form of joint creation of status functions. Recent experimental studies are reported that provide evidence for the claims. Finally, philosophical implications of these claims and findings are discussed. The most important implication that emerges is that existing conceptual analyses of collective intentionality stand in need of being supplemented by more fain-grained taxonomies for the description of such early forms of collective intentionality. (c) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.