This is made in philosophy bites with me David Edmonds and me Nigel Warberton.

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Philosophy bites.com. Philosophy bites is made in association with the Institute of Philosophy.

Kids like to live in a fantasy world.

That much is obvious to any parent.

But what's that got to do with philosophy?

Allison Gopnik is a renowned psychologist at Berkeley.

She's intrigued by the world imagination plays in our lives,

and it's linked to a concept much puzzled over by philosophers, causation.

Asin Gopnik, welcome to Philosophy Bites.

Well, glad to be here.

The topic we're going to focus on today is the imagination. Now why do we have an imagination at all?

Well that's a good question. You know, Plato thought that the poets should be exiled from the

Republic because they were not only liars but they were really bad liars who weren't very convincing for everyone.

You could think of a sort of evolutionary version of Plato's objections which is it's easy to see why

understanding about the real world would give us all sorts of evolutionary

benefits, but why would it ever be that understanding about things that aren't true and that you

know aren't true would you have evolutionary benefits.

And it's a particular puzzle for developmental psychologists

because two and three-year-old children

ubiquitously spend 24-7 off in these wild crazy pretend worlds.

Yeah, for Plato, obviously depictions of reality were at several removes of what he saw as the real world.

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