ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that Aristotle is articulating a cognitive feature of Athenian society, one that is key to understanding the importance of its theatre – the concept of eikos, or probabalistic thinking. Aristotle famously describes muthos (plot/narrative) as "the soul of tragedy" and narrative in action (praxis) as the aim of the art form. The chapter also suggests that Aristotle's views on how a dramatist might create effective emotional theatre comport with contemporary theories of predictive processing. Predictive processing is connected to Friston's free energy principle, which states that any self-organizing system that is at equilibrium with its environment must minimize its free energy to resist a natural tendency to disorder or entropy. The chapter focuses on tragedy's ability to evoke a sense of wonder by engaging probabilistic thinking, which can elicit powerful empathetic emotions, which in turn can result in mind-changing experience.
