I am concerned, in this chapter, with the phenomenon of play – specifically that form of play in which a child seems to be engaged in taking one thing for another, for example, apparently identifying a broomstick as a horse. In this situation, the child seems not simply to be transferring the term “horse” to the broomstick – providing a handy way of focusing attention on the stick by new use of an old label. Nor does the child seem to be merely committing an error, taking the stick to be the sort of thing he has hitherto called a “horse.” The child seems to be doing something different and more complex, attending to the stick via imaginative recourse to horses or, perhaps, focusing on horses through special use of the stick. In any case, the child's state of mind invites semantic elucidation, that is, some account of how reference may be understood to function in such play.

Nor is the child's state of mind in play unrelated to other, and perhaps weightier phenomena. Taking one thing for another is what is seemingly involved in ordinary forms of reference to works of art, in mimetic religious rites, in idolatry and word magic, and in discussions of drama. We label a picture of a man “man” rather than “picture of a man.” In certain ancient mimetic rites, ordinary mortals are apparently identified with the divine beings addressed.