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By Root 556 0

that gold falling into your lap, you may as well leave all the grading and committee work behind you. You frantically look around the office for suitable containers and, having found some, rush outside to gather as much of the golden rain into your bags as you can. Before you leave the office, however, you do manage to make a couple of other phone calls. For example, you contact a car dealer and tell him that you are ready to buy that Mercedes that you have seen on his lot, the one you always wanted but knew that you would never be able to afford. Now you can finally get in touch with that inner conspicuous consumer (unless, that is, the devaluation of gold ensues quickly).

(3a) It is also possible, however, that the information about the golden rain strikes you as so obviously absurd that you just ignore it. You do not take in that representation at all; you do not assimilate it with any of your knowledge stores; you nod politely as Eve tells you about it and simply forget it the moment she is out of your office.

But let us see how these situations change once we have our metarepresentational capacity back and thus are able to consider the source of any new information. The first scenario actually stays the same. If you have no reason to suspect that Eve is misleading you about the rain, you adjust your plans (i.e., about the umbrella, the classroom announcements, and the bank) accordingly. The second and third scenarios, however, are markedly different this time around. When you hear from Eve that Adam is a bad colleague, you feel understandably concerned, but you do not cancel your lunch with him and you do not start looking for another job. Instead you keep Eve's information in mind but wait for further evidence that would either strengthen or weaken her claim. If several weeks or months later you find out that Eve has a long-standing grudge against Adam and that her stories about him might well be untrue, and if, meanwhile, Adam has been impressing you as a perfectly amiable person and a good coworker, it is likely that you will revise that initial bad impression about him that Eve has saddled you with. At the same time, you will not just "discard" Eve's communication as if it never happened; you will still retain the metarepresentation, "Eve told me that Adam is a bad colleague," because now it tells you something important about Eve herself.3 (On the other hand, if some time later Adam does turn out to be a bad apple, you will come back to the information provided by Eve and consider it once more.)

Finally, in the case of the reported golden rain, once you have ascertained that your colleague is not being ironic ("yea, right, it will rain gold in front of a building housing the English department!") or playing a practical joke on you, that is, once you are convinced that she is serious, you will take her representation, "it is raining golden coins," in by integrating it with what you already know about the world. Only, this time, your inferences will focus mainly on this particular colleague and your future behavior in relation to her. You may decide to double-check any information that issues from her in the future, and you may consider not entering into any collaborative projects with her—just in case. Again, you will not just discard the incident (the 3a scenario). Discarding it completely could be dangerous because, however wrong, that information still tells you something important about Eve, something that you are better off knowing now rather than in the future when you are put in a situation in which you depend on her. Of course, in time, you may come to revise and abandon your suspicious attitude toward Eve and consider the "golden rain" remark a single instance of bad judgment or a silly joke; or you may come to believe, based on your later experiences with her, that she is indeed not very mentally stable.

In other words, our metarepresentational ability allows us to store certain information/representations "under advisement." What it means is that we can still carry out inferences on information that