Why We Read Fiction_ Theory of Mind and the Novel - Lisa Zunshine [31]
The exploitation of this exploding universe of potentially representable information creates a vastly expanded risk of possible misapplications, in which information that may be usefully descriptive in a narrow area of conditions is false, misleading, or harmful outside of the scope of those conditions. Exactly because information that is only applicable temporarily or locally begins to be used, the success of this computational strategy depends on constantly monitoring and re-establishing the boundaries within which each representation remains useful. . . . Information only gives an advantage when it is relied on inside the envelope of conditions to which it is applicable.11
As a constant monitoring and reestablishment of boundaries (e.g., "Adam is a bad colleague, but only in Eve's representation of him"), our metarepresentational capacity is thus "essential to planning, interpreting communication, employing the information communication brings, evaluating others' claims, mind-reading, pretense, detecting or perpetrating
1: Whose Thought Is It, Anyway?
deception, using inference to triangulate information about the past or hidden causal relations, and much else that makes the human mind so distinctive." The lack of such an ability could be characterized as "naive realism"—a state that Cosmides and Tooby suspect was "an ancestral cognition for all animal minds."12 They further point out that although cognitive "systems of representational quarantine and error correction" that evolved to differentiate among representations, "storing" some of them with source tags that limit their scope of inferences, "are, no doubt, far from perfect [;]... without them, our form of mentality would not be possible."13
What is the relationship between Theory of Mind and metarepresentationality? Baron-Cohen and Sperber have argued, separately, that "the ability to form metarepresentations initially evolved to handle the problems of modeling other minds or the inferential tasks attendant to communication."14 After all, consider how crucial it is for a social species such as ours to be able to attribute thoughts to people around us while keeping track of ourselves as sources of those attributions in case we need to revise them later (e.g., "I thought you wanted to go to the store with me because you got up from the table, but now I know that I was wrong: it seems that you just wanted to stretch a bit").
On the one hand, Cosmides and Tooby agree with these views by stressing that the "restricted applications of inferences," achieved by processing information metarepresentationally, is "not an oddity or byproduct of. . . [ToM], but .. . a core set of. . . adaptations essential to modeling minds of others accurately."15 On the other hand, they point out that "the problems handled by metarepresentations .. . are so widespread, and participate in so many cognitive processes, that it is worth considering whether they were also shaped by selection to serve a broader array of functions—functions deeply and profoundly connected to what is novel about hominid evolution."16
Oliver Sacks's research into the cognitive neuroscience of vision seems to support the latter view. Although Sacks does not use the term metarepresentation, here is a resonating quote from his essay describing the experience of an Australian psychologist, Zoltan Torey, who went blind at the age of twenty-one and since