| In make-believe play, children talk in such as way as to imaginatively transform ordinary objects and persons in the local environment. In this presentation I describe two practices by which such imaginary transformations are accomplished as well as two contexts in which they are deployed. The first practice, which I describe as a stipulation, involves an explicit assertion about the object - e.g. "Look it's a Rubik's Cube". The second practice occurs when the transformation is accomplished in an embedded way (for instance by referring to or addressing the object as an "X"). After describing the basic sequential organization of these practices I turn to describe the knowledge claims and moral positionings with which they are associated. Whereas explicit stipulations have a basic epistemic one-sidedness about them, embedded transformations are often produced in the context of extended play episodes and are more open to challenge from other participants. I consider the various forms these challenges take and attempt to describe the epistemic and moral order that they imply. |
