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I am afraid that neither could I. Watching this episode, many of us start feeling like Joey, who is generally portrayed as being a bit on the slow side. The situation is really not that complicated, and having live actors play it out helps to render it more comprehensible. Still, at some point, the agglomeration of multiply embedded minds proves too much of a cognitive load, and we begin to think of Phoebe's plotting in segments. We are keeping track, that is, of the two or three most immediate mind-readings (as in "now X doesn't known that Y knows what X does") and not of the whole series (as in "X doesn't know that Y knows that X knows that Y knows that X knows that Y knows what X does").

We certainly laugh as we watch Phoebe, Rachel, Monica, and Chandler navigate enthusiastically those mental labyrinths, but our laughter may have a complex emotional undertow. For we have been cognitively overpowered, finding ourselves lagging behind in this social game, with Joey bringing up the rear. On the other hand, our social ineptitude (or, as I prefer to see it, our appealing personal predilection for straight dealing) has been revealed in the safe setting of watching a television sitcom, so perhaps it is amusing after all. In fact, as I speculate in Parts II and III, when cultural representations push our mind-reading adaptations to what feels like their limits (within particular historical milieus, that is5), we might find ourselves in rather emotionally suggestive moods. Depending on the context and the genre of the representation (e.g., a cartoon in The New Yorker, an eighteenth-century psychological novel, a twentieth-century detective novel), a momentary cognitive vertigo induced by the multiple mind-embedment may render us increasingly ready either to laugh or to quake with apprehension.

Let us now turn to a novelistic representation of multiply embedded minds and consider a randomly selected6 passage from Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. Roughly halfway into the story, the husband of the title protagonist, Richard Dalloway, gets together with his old acquaintance Hugh Whitbread, and they come over to the house of one Lady Bruton, a woman keenly interested in politics. Milicent Bruton needs Richard's and Hugh's assistance to write a letter to the editor of the Times which would presumably influence the future of Great Britain. Here is how Woolf describes the process of composing the letter:

And Miss Brush [Lady Bruton's secretary] went out, came back; laid papers or. die table; and Hugh produced his fountain pen; his silver fountain pen, which had done twenty years' service, he said, unscrewing the cap. It was s rill in perfect order; he had shown it to the makers; there was no reason, rhev said, why it should ever wear out; which was somehow to Hugh's credit, and to the credit of the sentiments which his pen expressed (so Richard Dalloway felt) as Hugh began carefully writing capital letters with ::ngs round them in the margin, and thus marvelously reduced Lady Bruton's tangles to sense, to grammar such as the editor of the Times, Lady Bruton felt, watching the marvelous transformation, must respect. (110)

r.at is going on in this passage? We are seemingly invited to deduce the excellence of Millicent Bruton's civic ideas—put on paper by Hugh—first from the resilience of the pen that he uses, and then from the beauty of his

:ir:tal letters with rings around them on the margins." Of course, this reduction of lofty sentiments and superior analytic skills to mere artifacts, : uch as writing utensils and calligraphy, achieves just the opposite effect. By the end of the paragraph, we are ready to accept Richard Dalloway's

iew of the resulting epistle as "all stuffing and bunkum," but a harmless b unkum at that, its inoffensiveness and futility underscored by the : r.gue-in-cheek, phallic description of the silver pen that had done cv enty years in Hugh's service but is still "in perfect order"—or so Hugh thinks—once he's done "unscrewing the cap."

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