It seems it is especially postmodern literature that undermines the belief in a clear and direct relationship between the physical world and the language depicting it. Quite recently, especially the possible worlds theories and their application in literary theory have tried to explain this relationship. Analyzing the narrative techniques used by Donald Barthelme in his short story The Dragon, ...

Please cite this article in press as: Templer, D. I. (2012), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2012.04 J. Philippe Rushton has been described as one of the greatest theorists in the field of personality and individual differences and social psychology. His life history theory (Differential K Theory) was said to bring unification to the scientific study of racial differences as Einstein’s theory ...

Abstract The Modern Synthesis (MS) gene-centered population model of evolution is currently being challenged by the Extended Evolutionary (ESS) organism-centered developmental evolution. predictions EES are here examined with respect to arguments Edward Drinker Cope (1840–1897) for an evolutionary process in which organisms both shape and shaped their environments such that activities themselve...

In an important essay, Mary Nash explored the ways in which 'biological essentialism' replaced religious criteria as the key component in the construction of gender differentiation in early twentieth-century Spain. There she notes that even though the biological model retained the traditional role of women as mothers and childbearers, the value neutrality of this role and the premise of social ...

Some authors defend literary cognitivism – the view that literary fiction is cognitively valu­ able – by drawing an analogy between cognitive values of thought experiments and literary fiction. In this paper my aim is to analyse the reasons for drawing this analogy and to see how far the analogy can be stretched. In the second part, I turn to the claim put forward by literary anti­cognitivists ...