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that require attribution of states of mind, such as, "A wants B to believe that C thinks that D wanted E to consider F's feelings about G." It is likely that cognitive adaptations that underwrite the attribution of states of mind differ in functionally important ways from the adaptations that underwrite reasoning that does not involve such an attribution, a difference possibly predicated on the respective evolutionary histories of both types of adaptations.3 A representation of a mind as represented by a mind as represented by yet another mind will thus be supported by cognitive processes distinct from (to a degree that remains a subject of debate) cognitive processes supporting a mental representation, for example, of events related to each other as a series of causes and effects or of a representation of a Russian doll nested within another doll nested within another doll. The cognitive process of representing depends crucially on what is being represented.4

Writers, comic artists, movie directors, and situation comedy producers (to list but a few) intuitively exploit this particularity of our mind-reading ability. Bruce Eric Kaplan's cartoon in The New Yorker features a not-so-happily married couple having a conversation about their relationship (figure 1). The gloomy husband feels compelled to assure the equally gloomy wife: "Of course I care about how you imagined I thought you perceived I wanted you to feel." The joke has many layers and is highly culture-specific, focusing on the married tedium of well-to-do Manhattanites and contemplating that tedium from a very particular point of view associated with this magazine. Moreover, even implicitly guided by that view, different readers may find different reasons for thinking that the cartoon is funny. Still, each of those possible ironic angles would be bound with the apparent impenetrability of the husband's sentiment. Overwrought to the sixth level of mental embedment—the level at which our species is not that cognitively fluent—this statement about mutual sensi

"Of course I care about how you imagined I thought you perceived I wanted you to feel."

FIGURE 1. "Of course I care about how you imagined I thought you perceived I wanted you to feel." © The New Yorker Collection 1998 Bruce Eric Kaplan from cartoonbank.com. All Rights Reserved.

tivity, caring, and understanding is literally incomprehensible and has to be deciphered with pen and paper, if one bothers to decipher it at all.

On a slightly less exalted level, there is "The One Where Everybody Finds Out" episode from the fifth season of Friends, in which Phoebe finds out that Monica and Chandler are "doing it" and decides to play a practical joke on them. Phoebe, who is not in the least attracted to Chandler, begins to act as if she were, knowing that because Chandler does not know that she knows that he is going out with Monica, he will think that Phoebe is actually interested in him and will be both confused and flattered, to the secret delight of everybody who is in on the joke. However, when Monica finds out that Phoebe has made a pass at Chandler (whom, she knows, Phoebe does not find attractive), she realizes that Phoebe is trying to make fun of him and talks Chandler into welcoming Phoebe's advances, so that Phoebe, not knowing that Chandler knows that she knows, will back down at a crucial moment and thus make a fool of herself. However, when Chandler acts according to this plan and responds enthusiastically to

7: Cognitive Science and Mis. Dalloway

Phoebe's flirting, Phoebe realizes that Chandler must know now that she knows that he knows . .. (and here I begin to lose it, so let us move quickly to the end of this sentence), and so decides that she will never back down first. As Phoebe puts it ever so eloquently, addressing her co-conspirator Rachel and their friend Joey, who has been witnessing Phoebe and Rachel's plotting from the beginning: "They thought they could mess with us! They're trying to mess with us? They don't know that we know they know we know! And Joey, you can't say anything!" To