Keith, I agree with what you have written above (as I tried to acknowledge in my earlier post) and was simply frustrated by the actual phrases both you and Dave used, which were in both cases totalizing and demonstrably not always true. All I was looking for was a simple acknowledgment that, yes, it is possible to learn “on one’s own” on occasion (and that the use of the term “social” by Dave to characterize reading a book is a bit torturous, in my mind). And that, unlike what you wrote, it is entirely possible for the environment *not* to learn from the individual, nor the individual from the environment. In countering reductionism, we often go too far in the other direction, in ways that I find both sloppy and unhelpful. Perhaps this seems like I’m being harsh, especially since the position you and Dave (and indeed, myself, most of the time) espouse is not the dominant (reductionst) paradigm. I maintain that if we want to engage with the bast majority of folks who still approach things from this binary/reductionist position, we need to do so in a way that doesn’t undermine this new perspective by being unduly loose, nor in a way that does not respect people’s everyday perception of the world. Quantum Theory and Newtonian Physics have not, as far as I know, been reconciled, and people still build bridges quite fine using the later.