--- a/CR_preface.txt	Wed Nov 20 14:09:02 2024 +0000
+++ b/CR_preface.txt	Fri Nov 22 10:48:33 2024 +0000
@@ -85,7 +85,7 @@
 architectural properties of computer science
 There are no particulars in physics [ref. deiexis discussion, where is
 it]
-WHat drove me out of social inquiry and back to department 6 was
+What drove me out of social inquiry and back to department 6 was
 needing to be back in the practice.  That skill was not somthing that
 people on the outside understood.
 
@@ -264,7 +264,7 @@
 
 -------------------
 
-On first reading, before even finishing the introduction, as asked
+On first reading, before even finishing the introduction, I asked
 Brian what "effective" meant, since it seemed very important, and
 appeared to be being used in some technical sense, and it was not
 immediately obvious to me how that related to my understanding(s) of
@@ -281,41 +281,47 @@
 
 He started undergraduate study at Oberlin College in Ohio in 1967,
 where his interests included both physics and religion but left after
-only two years, travelling first to visit the Quaker community Argenta,
-British Columbia, and ending up in Ottawa where he started work as a
-programmer at the Division of Physics laboratory of the National
-Research Council of Canada, working on a project jointly involving
-Fermilab in Chicago and the Lawrence Research Laboratory in Berkeley.
-Working at all three sites, he programmed PDP 9 and PDP 15
-microcomputers, in machine language, for experimental control and data
-gathering.
-
-When the project ended Brian moved back to the family home in Cambridge,
-and began taking classes at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
-(MIT), with an interest in what was then known as Social Inquiry, in
-particular the politics of high technology.  But it quickly became
-clear to him that the understanding of computing that the social
+only two years, travelling first to visit the Quaker community
+Argenta, British Columbia, and ending up in Ottawa where he started
+work as a programmer at the Division of Physics laboratory of the
+National Research Council of Canada, working on a project jointly
+involving Fermilab in Chicago and the Lawrence Research Laboratory in
+Berkeley.  Working at all three sites on PDP 9 and PDP 15
+microcomputers, he "programmed like crazy" in machine language,
+building systems for experimental control and data gathering.
+  
+When the project ended Brian moved back to the family home in
+Cambridge, and started taking classes at the Massachusetts Institute
+of Technology (MIT), studying what was then known as Social Inquiry,
+in particular the politics of high technology.  But it quickly became
+apparent that the understanding of computing that the social
 scientists were critiquing was not the computing that he knew as a
 programmer, what he later came to refer to as "computing in the wild".
-He realised that he needed to get clear on what computing really is,
-so that he could legitimately critique it. He thought he had to go into
-the heart of the beast, as it were, so applied for the PhD program in
-Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT and began taking
-classes.
+
+"What drove me out of Social Inquiry and back to [Computer Science] was
+needing to be back in the practice.  That skill was not somthing that
+people on the outside understood."
+
+Brian had realised that in order to legitimately critique Computer
+Science, he needed to get clear on what computing really is: "I had to
+go into the heart of the beast, as it were". So he applied for the PhD
+program in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT and
+began taking classes there.
 
 When the MIT administration discovered Brian didn't have an
-undergraduate degree, Patrick Winston, the newly-appointed head of the
-Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, gave Brian an informal oral exam
-in topics from the MIT undergraduate computer science curriculum and
-awarded him the credits necessary for a degree, clearing the way for
-his admission to the graduate program.
+undergraduate degree, and so couldn't be registered for graduate
+study, Patrick Winston, the newly-appointed head of the Artificial
+Intelligence Laboratory, gave Brian an informal oral exam in topics
+from the MIT undergraduate computer science curriculum and awarded him
+the credits necessary for a degree, clearing the way for his admission
+to the graduate program.
 
 In 1977 Terry Winograd, who had left MIT to join the Computer Science
 Lab at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), invited Brian to
 spend the summer in the Understander Group there, where he joined in
 the development of KRL, a Knowledge Representation Language, which
 came to embody some of the ideas that were developed in his Masters
-and PhD dissertations.
+and PhD dissertations [refs].
 
 These biographical details bring us to the brink of Brian's
 professional life, and to the time and place where we first met. The
@@ -323,21 +329,20 @@
 summarized by a list of the positions he has occupied since the
 completion of his PhD a few years later:
 
+ * Member of the Scientific Staff, Xerox PARC
  * Director, Xerox PARC System Sciences Lab
  * Adjunct Professor of Philosophy, Stanford University
  * Founding member of Stanford University's Center for the Study of
    Language and Information
  * Founding member and first president, Computer Professionals for
    Social Responsibility
- * President of the Society for Philosophy
-   and Psychology
- * Professor of Cognitive Science, Computer Science,
-   and Philosophy, Indiana University
- * Kimberly J. Jenkins
-   University Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and New
-   Technologies, Duke University
- * Dean of the Faculty of
-   Information, University of Toronto;
+ * President of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology
+ * Professor of Cognitive Science, Computer Science, and Philosophy,
+   Indiana University
+ * Kimberly J. Jenkins University Distinguished Professor of
+   Philosophy and New Technologies, Duke University
+ * Dean of the Faculty of Information, University of Toronto
+ * Invited keynote speaker, _Défaire l'Occident_, Tarnac, France
  * Professor of Information, Philosophy, Cognitive Science, and the
    History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, University of
    Toronto
@@ -345,23 +350,63 @@
  * Reid Hoffman Professor of Artificial Intelligence and the Human,
    University of Toronto
 
-It was during Brian's years in Palo Alto, just for the summer until
-1980 [?], and then permanently, that the foundations of the work
-presented here were laid.
+It was during Brian's years in Palo Alto at PARC, at first just for
+the summer and then full-time, that the foundations were laid of the
+work that led to this book.
+
+  "As an exercise in using KRL representational structures, Brian
+   Smith tried to describe the KRL data structures themselves in
+   KRL-0. A brief sketch was completed, and in doing it we were made
+   much more aware of the ways in which the language was inconsistent
+   and irregular. This initial sketch was the basis for much of the
+   development in KRL-1."  [ref. Bobrow and Winograd 1978, "Experience
+   with KRL-O: One Cycle of a Knowledge Representation Language", in
+   _Proceedings of the Fifth International Joint Conference on
+   Artificial Intelligence_, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, Burlington,
+   MA.  Available online at
+   https://www.ijcai.org/Proceedings/77-1/Papers/032.pdf.
+
+<div class='Sketchy'>
+
+The aspect of the (never completed) KRL-1 meant that not only could
+some parts of a system's data be _about_ other parts, but that
+this would be more than just commentary. It would actually play a role
+in the system's operation. For KRL-1, this was initially motivated by
+a desire to address some aspects of ... such as negation and
+[disjunction] as, if you will, knowledge about knowledge, rather than
+as primitives built into the vocabulary of the representation language
+itself. [elaborate this with reference to old-style Semantic Nets and
+Bobrow and Norman ?]
 
- "As an exercise in using KRL representational structures, Brian
-  Smith tried to describe the KRL data structures themselves in
-  KRL-0. A brief sketch was completed, and in doing it we were made
-  much more aware of the ways in which the language was inconsistent
-  and irregular. This initial sketch was the basis for much of the
-  development in KRL-1."
+Brian's development of this idea, which he termed 'reflection', is
+documented in the papers gathered in _Legacy_.  But its title
+notwithstanding, this book is _not_ a recapitulation of that work.
+
+There was an assumption at the heart of Brian's reflective
+architectures, which was initially expected to occupy just one section
+of one chapter of his PhD, as signalled in its preliminary outline
+Table of Contents.  But its resolution proved to be much more
+problematic than expected, to the extent that its resolution has taken
+a lifetime of work to be brought clearly into focus.
 
---------
-That it might just be possible that this one person has accurately
-diagnosed a problem that a whole field of enquiry has missed, to the
-point where they've ended up altogether stuck, unable to see what
-they've missed.
----------
+Looking back it seems that this difficulty acted rather like the grit
+in the oyster, eventually stimulating Brian's wholesale
+reconsideration of the nature of computation, and Computer Science as
+currently practiced, which _is_ what this book is about.
+
+You'll have to read the book to find out what that assumption was, and
+the details of the critique of Computer Science that it led Brian to.
+
+It may seem rather presumptuous of me to suggest that this one person
+has accurately diagnosed a problem that a whole field of enquiry has
+missed, to the point where they've ended up altogether stuck, unable
+to see what they've missed.  The point of the list offered above of
+Brian's achievements and the manifest breadth of his background it
+testifies to will I hope give sufficient grounds for suggesting that
+it is at least possible that this indeed just might be worth checking
+out.
+
+</div>
 
 This is not an easy book to read, but it's a very important book, so
 it's worth the effort.  As Brian himself has said, it's written rather
@@ -391,3 +436,5 @@
 vision a reality.  As citizens, we need to cheer from the sidelines,
 and keep asking questions.  We owe him that much.
 [Haugeland?]
+
+Henry S. Thompson, Toronto and Edinburgh, November 2024.