The birth of expectation
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
The birth of expectation
(The cognitive revolution in Western culture, v. 1)
Macmillan, 1989
Available at 9 libraries
  Aomori
  Iwate
  Miyagi
  Akita
  Yamagata
  Fukushima
  Ibaraki
  Tochigi
  Gunma
  Saitama
  Chiba
  Tokyo
  Kanagawa
  Niigata
  Toyama
  Ishikawa
  Fukui
  Yamanashi
  Nagano
  Gifu
  Shizuoka
  Aichi
  Mie
  Shiga
  Kyoto
  Osaka
  Hyogo
  Nara
  Wakayama
  Tottori
  Shimane
  Okayama
  Hiroshima
  Yamaguchi
  Tokushima
  Kagawa
  Ehime
  Kochi
  Fukuoka
  Saga
  Nagasaki
  Kumamoto
  Oita
  Miyazaki
  Kagoshima
  Okinawa
  Korea
  China
  Thailand
  United Kingdom
  Germany
  Switzerland
  France
  Belgium
  Netherlands
  Sweden
  Norway
  United States of America
Note
Includes index
Notes and references: p. 308-362
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Does everyone think in the same way? Until recently most 20th-century authorities would have answered 'Yes: though what we think varies enormously, the processes of thought are the same.' Here Don LePan challenges this assumption through an examination of a particular mental faculty - expectation. The book is broad-ranging, focusing on historical and anthropoligcal as well as literary developments. What the evidence in all these areas suggests, LePan concludes, is that certain forms of expectation simply did not exist in in the minds of most medieval people - any more than they do in the minds of children or those of adults in many primitive societies even today. LePan shows that the more complex forms of expectation depend on a person's having developed ways of thinking in probabilities rather than certainties, and ways of projecting multiple chains of cause and effect - often unravelling simultaneously in different places - into a hypothetical future.
Today this sort of projection seems like second nature to us, but such abilities are not innate; though the potential to develop them may be, that potential is realised only as fomal education becomes widespread and as societies invent or become familiar with such things as clocks, calendars, and complex economic systems. An acceptance of the notion that human cognitive processes may vary among different peoples and different eras has profound implications, not only for the study of our own history and literature, but also for our approach to other contemporary societies. The deeper understanding of our own ancestors may also help us to understand better the differences that separate the developed and the less-developed world today. Don LePan is the author of "The Broadview Book of Common Errors in English".
Table of Contents
- 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
by "Nielsen BookData"