Having Reflected (about interactions here)

Hi people. I could see I needed to reflect about my responses, and the
upshot of what came out was that it was down to me to make the responses
so far useful to me. There's no promise in simply rejecting what people
say, especially when as with Brett some major time has been put into
those responses. So first things first....major apology to Brett for my
failure to acknowledge and make a serious attempt to make use of his
criticisms.

Very hypocritical of me in fact, since after all the reason I gave was
that he should have done exactly those things for me. Brett, hope you'll
accept my apology, and think that you will (from experience of you), but
to be fair I think you should make your mind up based not on the
apology, but on the way I have made use of your criticisms. It isn't
necessarily what you'll want to see....and won't necessarily involve
responding to your actual criticisms.

I couldn't promise any of those things...all I can promise is that I
analysed your criticisms, and distilled one or more item out, that I
have then used as a criticism, which then goes on to modify my approach.
Whether you initially like it or not or find it useful for you I cannot
guarantee....only that it has been very useful to me, and that I can
explain precisely how.

So over to the 'criticism' I extracted and its use. Basically my goal is
the same - ultimately to explain the work I've been doing relevant to
the philosophy and the outcome of that work. I know it'll be hard to
accomplish and I know that no one has a clue what I'm going on about so
far. Therefore the criticisms that I need at the moment are not
regarding the ideas themselves...there's no point at this stage because
no one has a good enough nderstanding to be able to form criticisms.
Criticisms of 'vagueness' are reasonable, but not productive for me
because they don't lead anywhere. So I could rule out all the responses
involving statements that I had not provided any content (other than, to
let me know I still have a long way to go).

So the main material Ihad to play with became Brett's....and I was able
to do all the above reasoning before even looking at what those
criticisms were.  The conclusion of the above reasoning was that I
needed to go through Brett's criticism and identify the themes of
greatest substance in context of my goals. For me this turned out to be
a subset of the comments where Brett agreed to some extent with
something I said. The subset in question were all those that he then
summed up toward the end, as being, to the extent they were substantial,
essentially the same or in the vein of Deutsch Popper philosophy. For me
the, the reason this subset was 'substantial' was simply because Brett
not only said the parts he thought correct were, sort of, pale
reflections of Popper Deutsch (not meant harshly). But also because he
said the problems I was asserting, were also to the extent they were
substantial, actually addresssed fully by Popper Deutsch and so not
'new' problems as I was asserting.

All very useful....in a very robust sort of way that actually doesn't
depend heavily on the extent of Brett's actual knowlege of
PopperDeutsch. That's not to hint I don't think he has good knowledge,
but more that dependencies on things like that are bad in general and
need to be minimized. And the way it gets minimized here is because my
explanation for valuing this sub-set of his criticism highly is not
because I'm trusting Brett to be right, but because what he says is
actually consistent with what I already know to be the case about my
theory. There are strong parallels, and this is one of the key reasons
why the theory will be hard to explain.

So, having selected the knowledge-set from his criticism, I then needed
to formulate it into a criticism, which could then be converted into
some new direction or approach toward meeting my goal, which is to
explain this matter.

Cutting to the chase about that....the outcome is that I have upgraded
the problem of explaining how my theory can be similar but very
different now to 'top priority' to at least shed some light on. Thus my
next post will be addressing the similarities and differences between my
theory and Popper Deutsch. I will of course endeavour to do so with the
minimum of assertion and maximum of explanation and detail. See you
then.