CROSSING T'S, DOTTING I'S

 Yet the weakness of weak propositions is also their strength, for readers inevitably seek to justify their appreciation of favored artists via abstract propositions.-- STRONG AND WEAK PROPOSITIONS PT. 2.

 

In STALKING TWO PERFECT TERMS, I announced that I would retire the barely used term "postulate" in term of "proposition." But my saying this means that I must transfer everything I said about the two forms of postulates, especially in FORMAL AND INFORMAL EXCELLENCE PT. 2, to a "formal proposition" that represents the didactic form of vertical meaning, and to "informal proposition," that represents the mythopoeic form of vertical meaning.

The one potential problem with these determinations is that way back in 2018's three-essay series STRONG AND WEAK PROPOSITIONS, I stated that I considered both the lateral and vertical meanings of a given work were propositional in nature.

But the solution is easily solved by a quick visit to Schopenhauer. In his principal work THE WORLD AS WILL AND REPRESENTATION, the gloomy philosopher created a lot of dualisms, but one of the simplest is to contrast "the concrete" of our physical experience and "the abstract" of our mental experience. 

So, since I've already assigned (as in the quote above) abstractions to the world of vertical meaning, then by default (as well as the PROPOSITIONS series) the world of lateral meaning is aligned with the concrete, because the lateral is also the "literal" record of what happens to characters in the narrative and how they feel about it. 

So, to apply full symmetry to the formulations of FORMAL AND INFORMAL EXCELLENCE, all four potentialities line up like so:

THE KINETIC-- informal propositions based on fictional phenomena meant to generate concrete excitations 

THE DRAMATIC-- formal propositions based on fictional phenomena meant to generate concrete emotions

THE MYTHOPOEIC-- informal propositions based on fictional phenomena meant to generate abstract correlations

THE DIDACTIC-- formal propositions based on fictional phenomena meant to generate abstract cogitations