Why We Read Fiction_ Theory of Mind and the Novel - Lisa Zunshine [27]
I have returned again to the quote from The Blank Slate not to criticize Pinker's endeavor to view literary history from a cognitive perspective but rather to stress our own relative interdisciplinary timidity. Responding to the revolutionary advances made in the last two decades in cognitive psychology, anthropology, linguistics, and the philosophy of mind, Pinker and his colleagues in cognitive sciences grapple with difficult questions about literary narrative that we should be grappling with to a much larger extent than we currently do. Pinker may or may not be immediately aware of Tristram Shandy or Kater Murr when he positions far-reaching experimentation with established forms as a literary development unique to the twentieth century, but his awareness of them is almost beside the point. What is important is that he is venturing into the murky interdisciplinary waters and engaging a larger audience with important questions about literature and cognition, whereas we, though beginning to address such questions among ourselves, are hardly reaching out to readers outside of literature departments.
I wonder, then, what exactly are the epistemological and ethical grounds on which we stand when we mock Pinker's claim to being an "authority on literature" if we have not yet made any good-faith effort to meet Pinker halfway and offer our literary-historical expertise to develop a more sophisticated and yet accessible cognitive perspective on modernist representations of fictional consciousness? Paradoxically, it is only while we refuse to "take seriously" the research of cognitive scientists who dare to pronounce "on literature or . .. aesthetics more generally" that we could be made to feel that our contribution to this interdisciplinary exchange would represent little or nothing of value. Once we enter the conversation and engage with respect the arguments of Dunbar, Pinker, Dennett, and others, we realize that because of their ever-increasing—and well-warranted—interest in how the human mind processes literary narratives, our expertise could make a crucial difference for the future shape of the ever-expanding field of cognitive science.
TART 11
TRACKING MINDS 1
WHOSE THOUGHT IS IT, ANYWAY?
ntation."1 Introduced in cognitive science in the 1980s, it has since gained wide currency among theory-of-mind psychologists and philosophers of mind and has recently become a subject of a wide-ranging collection of essays, Metarepresentations: A Multidisciplinary Perspective, edited by Dan Sperber. Sometimes described as "a representation of a representation," a metarepresentation consists of two parts. The first part specifies a source of representation, for example, "I thought . . . ," or "Our teacher informed us. ... " The second part provides the content of representation, for example, ". . . that it was going to rain," or ". . . that plants photosynthesize.
Or, to come back to our Mrs. Dalloway passage, the sentence describing Hugh's pen—"It was still in perfect order; he had shown it to the makers; there was no reason, they 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 rings round them in the margin . . ."—is a metarepresentation with a specific source. That little tag, "so Richard Dalloway felt," alerts us to that source, that is, the mind behind the sentiment. Knowing whose sentiment it is constitutes a crucial