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Can role-playing be wrong? An analysis of normativity of play from the perspective of the Enactive Cognitive Science

Book Contribution - Chapter

In the United States, there is a heated debate over whether it is acceptable to dress up for Halloween as Moana a Polynesian Disney character. In the Netherlands, dressing up as Santa's little helper Black Peter by painting one's face black has increasingly been considered offensive. People cannot agree: is it wrong to pretend play to be Moana or Black Peter? This chapter poses meta-questions inspired by this problem: How do people decide if some pretend acts are normatively wrong? Is role-playing in itself a normative act? And if role-play is a normative act, where does it get its normativity from? The chapter provides examples of role-play that are seen as controversial and discusses the philosophical view that all play is 'good in itself' (or 'neither right nor wrong'), which is in tension with a view that role-play can be wrong. It analyses this tension from the enactive and ecological perspective by referring to the concept of affordances. It examines what follows for a normativity of play from two perspectives on affordances for play (normative and non-normative), and suggest practical ramifications that follow from taking either perspective on normativity of play.
Book: Play and democracy: philosophical perspectives / Koubová, Alice [edit.]; et al.
Pages: 51 - 69
ISBN:978-0-367-64127-6
Publication year:2022
Keywords:H1 Book chapter
Accessibility:Closed