Strange Concepts and the Stories They Make Possible: Cognition, Culture, Narrative (Paperback)

Acknowledgments
Part 1: "But what am I, then?": Chasing Personal Essences across National Literatures
1. Ural Mountains?Rome?London
2. Essentialism, Functionalism, and Cognitive Psychology
3. Possible Evolutionary Origins of Essentialist Thinking
4. "A bullet's a bullet's a bullet!"
5. Talk to the Door Politely or Tickle It in Exactly the Right Place
6. Resisting Essentialism
7. The Ever-Receding "Essence" of Sosia
8. Identical Twins and Theater
9. How Is Mr. Darcy Different from Colin Firth?
10. Looking for the Real Mademoiselle
11. "Mahatma Gandhi: war!" "But he was a pacifist." "Right! War!"
Part 2: Why Robots Go Astray, or The Cognitive Foundations of the Frankenstein Complex
1. What Is the Frankenstein Complex?
2. On Zygoons, Thricklers, and Kerpas
3. Theory of Mind
4. Theory of Mind and Categorization: Preliminary Implications
5. Concepts That Resist Categorization
6. . . . and the Stories They Make Possible
7. The Stories That Can Be Told about a Talking Needle
8. Asimov's "The Bicentennial Man"
9. Cognitive Construction of "Undoubted Facts": "The Bicentennial Man" and the Logic of Essentialism
10. Made to Rebel
11. Why Phyllis Is Still a Robot
12. . . . and Why Rei Toei Is Not
13. More Human Than Thou (Piercy's He, She and It)
14. Made to Pray
15. Made to Serve. Made to Obey. Made to Break Hearts
Part 3: Some Species of Nonsense
1. How Nonsense Makes Sense in The Hunting of the Snark
2. "Strings of Impossibilia" and What They Tell Us about the Value of Nonsense
3. "Painters of the Unimaginable," or More aboutReally Strange Concepts
Conclusion: Almost beyond Fiction
Notes
Bibliography
Index