The Cognitive Revolution in Western Culture: Volume 1: The Birth of Expectation [Paperback]

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.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