Is it the smile of someone inviting us to join in a game of make-believe?
The reason that a game of make-believe won't solve the Karzai problem is that the Afghans themselves can't pretend he's anything but what he is.
One big fact has largely been lost in the recent coverage of the Democratic presidential race: Hillary Rodham Clinton has virtually no chance of winning … The notion of the Democratic contest being a dramatic cliffhanger is a game of make-believe.
We have at all times revelled in the artificiality of theatre, in the fact that it is a game of make-believe which can persuade an audience to concentrate with the complete absorption of children at play.
On this type of view on metaphor, a metaphorical utterance is one that represents the world as it needs to be in order to make the utterance pretense-worthy in a game of make-believe that it suggests.
When we engage with a fiction, by watching a play or reading a book or viewing a work of visual art or playing a game of make-believe, we take certain things to be fictional, or true in that fiction.
The American aesthetician Kendall Walton has pioneered an approach to imaginative play in children and its analogues in adult human culture built around the notion of a game of make-believe.
