Why We Read Fiction_ Theory of Mind and the Novel - Lisa Zunshine [28]
This section's discussion of metarepresentations draws on the work of Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, particularly their essay "Consider the Source: The Evolution of Adaptations for Decoupling and Metarepresentation," published in Sperber's collection. I will not try to summarize their carefully nuanced argument here; instead, I will adapt it and selectively quote from it for the purposes of explaining metarepresentation in fiction. To students of literature interested in learning more about our metarepresentational ability and its possible evolutionary history, I strongly recommend reading the original essay.
To grasp the importance of our capacity to form metarepresentations, let us imagine for a minute that we do not have this capacity, that is, that we can entertain representations, but we are not able to keep track of their sources. Let us consider how, thus circumscribed, we would conduct ourselves in the three following hypothetical situations, each of which involves our receiving a piece of information ranging from trivial, to fairly important, and to absurd.
(1)
Imagine yourself sitting in your office (which incidentally has no windows) and getting ready to teach a class. A colleague, named Eve, drops by and mentions casually that it is raining hard outside. You do not simply "save" this new information in your mind—the mind is not, after all, a computer; instead you assimilate it by integrating various inferences resulting from this representation with what you already know about the world, and hence modify your plans for future behavior. Or, to use Cosmides and Tooby's terminology, the information about the rain is treated by your cognitive architecture as "architectural truth"; that is, it is "allowed to migrate .. . in an unrestricted .. . fashion throughout an architecture, interacting with any other data in the system with which it is capable of interacting."2 Here are some examples of the thoughts arising in the process of such an integration/migration: "I'd better take an umbrella with me because it is a long walk from here to the building where I will be teaching"; "I should postpone making that announcement about the change in the syllabus until the second part of my lesson because many of my students will be struggling to find parking closer to campus and will be late for class"; "Peaches will be cheaper at the Farmer's Market this weekend because the drought seems to be over, so I should stop by the bank tomorrow and take more cash with me when I go to the Market on Saturday"; etc. As we can see, the range of databases affected by the information provided by Eve is so broad as to be, in principle, infinite.
(2)
Next imagine that during her short stay Eve tells you that a recent addition to the department, named Adam, is a terrible person and a bad
1: Whose Thought Is It, Anyway?
colleague. She has known him from a previous job, and she remembers him as selfish, rude, and incompetent. Again, in the process of assimilating this new representation, you will let it affect all kinds of mental databases. For example, you may decide that you should try to avoid working on the same project with Adam and will in fact cancel the lunch appointment that you had with him for next week. You may further begin to think that your department must be really going downhill—look what kind of people they hire these days!—and so maybe it is time to start looking for another job.
(3) Finally imagine that as Eve stops by, she informs you that it is raining golden coins outside. Once she leaves your office, you immediately call the department's secretary to cancel your class. You can't teach now: you have better things to do. In fact, the thought of an early retirement has just entered your mind; with all