Empiricism, cognitive science, and the novel.
Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, September, 2007 by Kramnick, Jonathan
"I see into minds, you see," the robot continued, "and you have no idea how complicated they are. I can't begin to understand everything because my own mind has so little in common with them--but I try, and your novels help."
--Isaac Asimov, Liar!
No one literary form has a proprietary stake in the mind, but as genres go the novel has since its inception taken remarkable interest in mental states. Among other things, eighteenth-century fiction is so much writing about the mind: about how thoughts represent things, cause other thoughts to happen, or lead to actions. The same might be said for empiricism. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophy paid unusual attention to the content of minds and the nature of ideas, to "human understanding" as...
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