1. The Story so far.

You would gather from my comments on John Skoyles's 'What is Popper's Problem', (both in NEWSLETTER 3, nos 1/2, pp. 2-6) in which I explained why I did not think he had got the matter right, that I found his piece puzzling. I cast about a bit to try to make sense of it. Well, I never thought of taking a particular idea of his literally, the idea that ideas propagate themselves and are in competition. Far from taking it literally, I took it metaphorically and complained about the metaphor. I even likened his 'metaphor', disparagingly - and he properly took me to task for that - to a similar one used by sociobiologists. I thought the idea was bad enough (or, rather, worse than bad enough) as a metaphor. But it is clear from Skoyles's Reply (NEWSLETTER 3 nos 3/4, pp. 47-49) that that was a mistake. He really does mean me to think that ideas do actually, quite literally, propagate themselves and are actually, quite literally, in competition. He says this is a fact. I think he is dead wrong. Incidentally, he cannot claim to be expounding Popper here, since it is always clear from what Popper writes that he means the competition of ideas, and so on, metaphorically. And, incidentally again, not even genes literally propagate themselves, though concrete genes - I mean segments of DNA - can be said to behave, chemically, in such a way as to cause the assembly of other segments of DNA embodying the same patterns they do.

This matter, whether ideas literally propagate themselves and are literally in competition, is much more important than whether Skoyles misrepresents my ideas, suggestions, intentions, criticisms, and so on, as I think he does. So I shall say nothing in self-defence except to express the hope that people will do me the kindness of reading what I wrote, rather than what Skoyles says I wrote, if they have any desire to get my point. Nor shall I spend time in defence of Popper's views against Skoyles's misrepresentation, important though I think it is to get Popper's philosophy right. There is a bigger fish to fry.