Dear Sir,

I am sorry Dr Stolorow feels that I quoted him out of context, since I also think he and I are in fundamental agreement. He objects that whereas I was concerned ‘to explicate the preconditions for the sense that one's experiences are subjective, ours was to describe the intersubjective foundations of the sense that one's experiences are real’. Far more than ‘the sense of subjectivity’, I meant to be explicating (partially) the capacity for thought. One of my claims was that it requires not just ‘the sense of reality’, but a shared, public world that is objectively knowable (though not knowable for certain, etc.)

Perhaps I am unfair in pressing Stolorow's (and Atwood's) remark that, as he uses the