| Popis: |
Helms focuses on inference in Shakespeare’s Othello, analyzing the ways Iago uses inference to understand others and to mask his own mental states, also known as levels of intentionality. Inference is a powerful tool for predicting human behavior based upon general principles, but as those principles are applied to more and more complex cases, inference can overload the mind and lead to misreading. Reading the minds of others can be a form of parasitism, a cognitive adaptation Lisa Zunshine describes as “promiscuous, voracious, and proactive.” Helms reads Iago as a social parasite, tracking the development of the parasite character type in Machiavelli’s La Mandragola, Jonson’s Volpone, and Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi. |
