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we know is incorrect (e.g., "it is raining golden coins") or have certain doubts about (e.g., "Adam is a bad colleague") but that the scope of these inferences will be relatively limited.4 The "meta" part of the representation, that little "tag" that specifies the source of the information (e.g., "it was Eve who told me that . . .") is what prevents the representation from circulating freely within our cognitive system and from being used as an input to "many inferential processes, whose outputs are inputs to others."5 Instead of being available to all of our stores of knowledge and prompting us to

1: Whose Thotight Is It, Anyway?

adjust our behavior in numerous ways, some of which could be harmful to us, that information is stored in what Cosmides and Tooby call a "suppositional" format and is thus available to a very selective set of cognitive databases, many of them having to do with the source of information. At the same time, "once [information] is established to a sufficient degree of certainty, source . . . tags are lost . . . e.g., most people cannot remember who told them that apples are edible or that plants photosynthesize."

The concept of metarepresentationality begins to figure in psychologists' discussions of the difference between our episodic memories (i.e., memories tied to specific learning episodes or experiences) as compared with semantic memories (i.e., general knowledge not tied to specific learning experience6). It has been suggested that "episodic memories are stored and retrieved via metarepresentations." That is, such memories retain the time-, place-, or agent-specifying source tags and as such are stored as events that have been "experienced by the self at a particular and unique space in time . . , with conscious awareness that 'this happened to me.'"71 may thus remember, for example, that it was last Thursday (the time-specifying tag), when I had dinner at my friend's house (the place-specifying tag), that she told me (the agent-specifying tag) that I should try to use shorter sentences in my scholarly writing (the representation or memory itself).

By contrast, semantic memories are representations that are stored without the source tag:

Semantic memory . . . enables a person to have culturally shared knowledge, including word meanings and facts about the world, without having to recollect specific experiences on which that knowledge was based (e.g., knowing that Sacramento is the capital of California [or, to use the example above, that plants photosynthesize]).8

Note, however, that a semantic memory—or a representation stored without any source tag—could acquire a source tag and become a metarepresentation. For example, people used to think that Earth was the center of the universe with other heavenly bodies orbiting around it. Gradually, however, this semantic memory, this culturewide, incontrovertible knowledge, became a metarepresentation with a source tag, "[P]eople used to think that. . . ." Moreover, we can append any semantic memory with a source tag and thus turn it into a metarepresentation, if only for the purposes of discussion, for example, "Lisa does not believe that Sacramento is the capital of California." By the same token, throughout our lives, we treat an untold number of semantic memories as absolute truths—for example, if you drop a shoe, it will fall—even though we can imagine conceptual frameworks within which these memories are not true anymore, say, in space, outside of Earths gravitational field. For practical reasons, however, it does not make sense for us to keep in mind all those alternative frameworks and thus store the representation, "if you drop a shoe, it will fall," with a place tag such as, "on Earth" (unless we are astronauts). What these examples show is that although the distinction between the semantic and episodic memories (or between representations and metarepresentations) is useful both for our cognitive information management and for our discussions of cognition, this distinction is always context-dependent and potentially fluid.

Metarepresentational