The Cognitive Revolution in Western Culture

LePan challenges the assumption that everybody thinks in the same way by examining a particular mental faculty - expectation. He concludes that certain forms of expectation did not exist in the minds of most medieval people, any more than they do in children or adults in many primitive societies.

Inhalt
Part 1 The issues of cognitive processes: anthropological perspectives; historical perspectives; literary perspectives. Part 2 Expectation in medieval society: expectation; the dawn of the artificial day - medieval temporal thought processes; thinking across the past; thinking into the future; causation and probability. Part 3 Literary expectation: expectation and literary plots; the ways of thought of medieval literature; Shakespeare and the revolution in literary plotting; illusion - expectation's dramatic by-product; Simon Forman's expectations. Postscript: Zimbabwe, 1985