Moffett 34: "The logic of lowest verbal abstraction is chronologic (narrative) because it conforms most closely to the temporal and spatial order in which phenomena occur (although already this represents considerable selecting and editing of events by our perceptual apparatus and memory, both of which have minds of their own)" [roughly "what is happening" or "recording"; "what happened" or "reporting"]
When we "assimilate a lot of narratives and [abstract them] into a generalization," we are moving to "the analogic" level [roughly what tends to happen or "what happens" or "generalizing"]
38: moving from "narrative to generalization" -- thinking of a thing as a "once-upon-a-time interlude" to "something that recurs"; making "an analogy between something in [the experience] and something I singled out of a number of other expereinces. I summarize a lot of little formless drams into pointed narratives and then I put these narratives into some classes"
the tautologic level -- transforming "general assertions int other general assertions which mean the same thing but, because they are now in another symbolic form, imply further assertions" (both mathematical equations and metaphoric constructions like man is "the glory, jest, and riddle of the world" transform "an entity into a new symbolization whereby I see it differently" [roughly "what may happen" or "theorizing"]
"I might speak or write about [an experience] without referring directly to it at all [as in a case where] I might be developing an anthropological theory" dependent on generalizations derived from experiences
Overall trajector: "an on-the-spot recording of what is happening before the guillotine, then an eyewitness account of what happened one day during the French Revolution, then a historical generalization about the Reign of Terror, then a political scientist's theory about revolutions"
"increasing distance between first and third persons, between the speaker and his subject"
Moffett sees this embodied in a hierarchy of "categories of discourse" -- "narrative, [then] exposition, [then] argumentation" (35)
a student should learn to "record, report, generalize, and theorize -- in that order" (36)