As I reconsidered this in greater depth, I feel it necessary to explain that though the kinetic and the dramatic potentialities certainly do draw upon "patterns" derived from sense experience, those two potentialities don't make substantial use of what I've called "epistemological patterns." I suppose I might term the first type of patterns "existential," since these two potentialities are more concerned with translating existence as the fictional characters *seem* to experience it.
The other two potentialities, however, are rooted in a fictional form of epistemology, because the forms they deal with depend on abstract constructions.-- AND THE HALF TRUTH WILL SET YOUR FREE, PT. 2.
This statement from my 2019 essay requires some modification thanks to my cross-comparison of three major thinkers here, though the modification depends on the accuracy of this online statement regarding Alfred North Whitehead's philosophy:
...the word “prehension,” which Whitehead defines as “uncognitive apprehension” (SMW 69) makes its first systematic appearance in Whitehead’s writings as he refines and develops the kinds and layers of relational connections between people and the surrounding world. As the “uncognitive” in the above is intended to show, these relations are not always or exclusively knowledge based, yet they are a form of “grasping” of aspects of the world. Our connection to the world begins with a “pre-epistemic” prehension of it, from which the process of abstraction is able to distill valid knowledge of the world. But that knowledge is abstract and only significant of the world; it does not stand in any simple one-to-one relation with the world. In particular, this pre-epistemic grasp of the world is the source of our quasi- a priori knowledge of space which enables us to know of those uniformities that make cosmological measurements, and the general conduct of science, possible.
I don't discard the general applicability of the statement I made; it's true that the two "vertical/abstract" potentialities make greater use of epistemological patterns than the two "lateral/existential" potentialities. But the Encylopedia makes the interesting analysis that Whitehead does not present his "prehension" operations as being "exclusively knowledge based." This suggests to me that prehension is not foreign to the activities of cognitive activity, but rather is called "pre-epistemic" because it's capable of including all forms of knowledge, cognitive and affective.
In fact, since I started applying my concept of Whiteheadian concrescence to fictional works, I've already functionally contradicted the HALF TRUTH statement without intending to do so.
Roughly two months before I wrote the two-part HALF-TRUTH essay, I posted CONCRESCENCE AND THE KINETIC PHENOMENALITY. In this, I examined two comics-works in terms of their "kinetic discourses," showing why the Jack Kirby work was superior to the Mike Zeck work in terms of illustrating how a diversely powered group of beings would battle one another. (To repeat an earlier qualification, it was widely rumored that artist Zeck may have been obliged to follow layouts set down by his editor Jim Shooter.) In this essay I concentrated on Kirby's superior ability to depict the interactions of "disparate elements," but much of this ability stemmed from a form of non-epistemological knowledge; the knowledge of how human beings of different capacities interact in a fight.
Similarly, I applied concrescence purely to the dramatic potentiality in 2022's SO THE DRAMA, SO THE MYTH. Despite the sound of the title, I was taking the position that my subject, the rom-com manga NAGATORO, was concrescent within the dramatic potentiality even though the feature had few if any moments of "myth" in its more epistemological manifestations. I found that, upon surveying a particular trope in NAGATORO, the narrative also depended not on any elements with mythopoeic content, but was based in the reader's knowledge of Japanese customs about the use of personal names. This too might be termed a form of "non-epistemological knowledge," and that knowledge is also expressed through the interaction of two disparate elements in this particular story, though in the form of an "accomodation narrative" rather than a "confrontation narrative."
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