Why We Read Fiction_ Theory of Mind and the Novel - Lisa Zunshine [35]
I was reminded some time ago about everyday failures of our sourcemonitoring—failures that we do not even register consciously unless pressed by circumstances—while reading the account of Martha Stewart's trial in The New Yorker (Stewart had been accused of insider trading and subsequent lying to federal agents). The author, Jeffrey Toobin, refers to a "curious" testimony by one of Stewart's close friends, Mariana Pasternak, who, at one point, could not identify the source of one of her memories:
3: Everyday Failures of Source-Monitoring
Pasternak's appearance ended on a curious note. In her direct testimony, she said that, in another conversation in Mexico, Stewart had commented about [the tip of her broker who had advised her to sell her stocks in the biotech company ImClone]: 'Isn't it nice to have brokers who tell you those things?' But under [the defense lawyer's] cross-examination, she said, 'I do not know if that statement was made by Martha or just was a thought in my mind'—a concession so dramatic that it brought a gasp from the spectators. But then, when the prosecution questioned her again, Pasternak said her 'best belief' was that Stewart said it. (70)
I suspect that the main reason Pasternak's concession "brought a gasp from the spectators" is the charged atmosphere of the courtroom and the specifics of this particular case, in which so much hinged on reconstructing who said exactly what and exactly when. Had any of the "gasping" spectators been asked to trace the exact sources of this or that representation of his, it is likely that he would feel just as uncertain about certain aspects of it as Pasternak did.1
One may ask, then, why we should posit our metarepresentational ability as a special cognitive endowment when it seems that we are routinely unsure about the sources of our representations. The answer to this question applies equally well to the question of why we should posit our Theory of Mind as a very special cognitive adaptation when in fact we routinely misread, misinterpret, and misrepresent other people's states of mind. To adapt one of Ellen Spolsky's insights, both the metarepresentational ability and the Theory of Mind are not "perfect" in some abstract, context-independent sense. Instead, they are "good enough"2 for our everyday functioning: however imperfect and fallible, they still get us through yet another day of social interactions.
Thus, in the example above, the trial witness may have difficulties pinpointing the exact source of her personal memory, but even her apparent failure is thoroughly structured by her metarepresentational ability. That is, she knows that the representation, "Isn't it nice to have brokers who tell you those things?" does not simply describe the state of affairs but also expresses somebody's opinion. Even if she strongly agrees with the truth of this sentiment, on'some level it has still been processed in her mind with a tag limiting its source to two people, either herself or Martha Stewart. The potential for a misattribution or uncertainty (e.g., "Was it really me or Martha?") falls within the same functional range as (to return to the example from Part I) our mistaken interpretation of tears of joy on our friend's face as tears of grief. In the latter case, our range of readings is drastically and productively limited to the domain of emotions; in the former case, Pasternak's range of attribution is drastically and productively limited to two people (as opposed to, say, 150 other people of her acquaintance).
Though not "perfect" (in some rather abstract way), this is surely a "good enough" cognitive scenario, of the kind that we live with daily. Evolution, as Tooby and Cosmides frequently point out, did not have a crystal ball:3 the adaptations that contributed, with statistical reliability, to the survival of the human species for hundreds of thousands of years and thus became part of our permanent cognitive makeup profoundly structure our interaction with the world, but even when they function properly, at no point