Communication pragmatic perspectives
In the section of the book which discusses play as a communicator, we ask the question: “How do the different cases described by Buydendijk, Huizinga, Chateau, Caillois and Sutton-Smith relate and give messages to one another?”. The question is answered by describing the communication model for play and toys.
1. Communicative consciousness(feeling and intuition for communicative and dialogue-related action) is important to the matter of the control system of the “I”, of the person-at-play. (This is also described in connection with firstness, secondness and thirdness and the triad concept in Peirce’s system, Buber’s dialogics and Jayne’s concept of “I”.)
2. On the strength of spontaneous, random analysis and critique toys are attributed a number of meanings. This means that the basic meaning of toys does not always appear compositional.
The reason for this is that toys have meanings attributed to them, forced onto them - are, so to speak, “saddled with” meanings - which originate in ideological, fundamental ideas which in many cases have nothing whatever to do with the basic idea of the toy in question.
Research perspectives
The communicative relationship (i.e. with reference to the sign systems, case relations and interpretation) becomes twisted and the real significance of the toy is distorted. For this reason, there are the following important research perspectives in relation to the communicative value and evaluation of play with toys:
1. Play with toys is in no way released of an ethical or moral evaluation because play with toys is often a series of symbolic actions containing valuesand norms.
2. As play with toys does not always refer to action, it encompasses a possible situation in which values, normsand interpretations of existence are threatened.
3. Play with toys which questions the validity of the current understandingof existence, thus testing out norms and rules, ranks - in terms of ethical and existential criteria - higher than play which simply copies traditional norms and values.
4. Toys and play which ideally fulfil human needswithin the framework of social justice and harmonious society will - ceteris paribus - be of higher quality than toys and play which lack this perspective.
5. Play with any individual toy contains existential critical-utopian perspectives but this is in itself insufficient grounds for attributing the toy high quality.