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insist so strenuously on his not wishing to marry Anne?... It may be that [he] does not know his own mind. The value, therefore, of being allowed inside the mind of such a character is partly an illusion, a device of the author's to make us believe simultaneously that we are being told everything there is to tell and that something crucial is being left out. [Something other than Captain Wentworth's faulty introspection thus has] to provide the missing explanations, to formulate meanings that at this moment are beyond the ability of the characters to understand and, ostensibly, against the will of the author to communicate.

When the reader recognizes this strategy, he becomes not merely an inquirer into the motives and intentions of the characters, but an inquirer into the motives and intentions of the author herself. Like detectives, we find ourselves asking forbidden questions: How does her mind work? Why is she telling us this and not that? What is being withheld?4

I have added emphasis to the parts of Belton's argument that vividly demonstrate how the insight provided by cognitive evolutionary psychologists can productively converge with that of literary critics, who comment on the tacit shift in our interaction with the text, that is, on our heightened attention to the source of representation, once the representation itself has proven less than reliable. Let me recast Belton's analysis in explicit cognitive-evolutionary terms. When we consciously decide that Wentworth's professed indifference toward Anne is really not a "fact" anymore, a certain cognitive adjustment takes place within our system of information management. Wentworth's indifference ceases to be a representation that can migrate with very few restrictions throughout our cognitive architecture, impacting "any other data with which it is capable of interacting."5 It has become a metarepresentation, framed by a source tag along the lines of, "Wentworth believes that. . . ." As a result, we are now moved to take a closer look at the author—the primary source of our information about Wentworth's mistaken beliefs—and ask ourselves what she is trying to achieve here. Is she trying to emphasize certain aspects of Wentworth's character (say, his relative lack of self-awareness) that could partially excuse his present behavior (e.g., his attention to Louisa Musgrove) and thus qualify him as a not infallible but still a suitable partner for Anne?

In other words, the conceptual adjustment that we go through here is similar to the conceptual adjustment that takes place once we learn that the information provided by Eve is wrong (e.g., "Adam is a bad colleague," "It is raining gold outside"). There, we refocus our attention on Eve. Here, we develop a new interest in reevaluating the sources of information about Wentworth's feelings, such as the story's narrator or its author (more about the relationship between the narrator and the author later). Paradoxically, this process of refocusing our attention both constrains and opens up our venues of interpretation. By beginning to treat the representation, "Captain Wentworth is indifferent toward Anne," as a metarepresentation, we "constrain" the scope of inferences we can draw from this representation and thus limit it largely to the possible motivation of our source of information. By doing so, however, we learn to ask new questions about the intentions of the author (such as, how do we account for Austen's emphasis on Wentworth's lack of self-awareness?) and consequently develop new ways of thinking about Persuasion. Our capacity for "monitoring and reestablishing the boundaries within which each representation remains use-ful"6 thus underlies crucially our practices of literary interpretation.

The cognitive-evolutionary research into our ability to "consider the source" does more, however, than just substantiate Belton's insightful reading. Thinking in terms of our metarepresentational capacity allows us to see a pattern behind a series of seemingly unrelated conceptual processes informing our interaction with works