It is thus basically a synonymn for the interrelations of content and context . See also economy , horizon of expectations . In Syntactic Structures and elsewhere, Noam Chomsky asked how anyone could understand a sentence they had never heard before and how they could generate new sentences which would be intelligible to others. The presumption that because a certain condition obtains today, it must always have been such, and vice versa. E.g., that people evolved from some kind of apes indicates that people are now higher apes.
Similar structures lie behind many popular assertions about the nature of art .
In an era of historical relativism , such statements smack of essentialism . Influential literary school of thought which asserted that a text is the existential expression of an individual consciousness. Accordingly, Geneva school criticism is relatively uninterested in the text as a physical object and more interested in its affective properties. See also affective fallacy , phenomenology . In postmodernism , nothing is seen as outside history, and all conceptions of genius are discarded or at least made secondary to such things as the social formation .