Lehar is so profoundly misoriented epistemologically that he imposes wording on me that I did not use. I precisely did not say that his account was "wrong": I wrote that he is self-deceived or dishonest in expressing in this way how things seem. The bad art continues in his reply: he paints the sides of the road as seeming "straight" each way and having curvature "in between", whereas the straight sides seem straight wherever I look at any moment - Lehar is back at pretending that his bubble diagram expresses his or my or anybody's experience.

Booth's riposte (above) to Lehar's specific response to his comment fully addresses also the general claim on which Lehar bases his Response to all commentators: Lehar's "paradigm" assumes an epistemology that was first refuted by Wittgenstein and Popper in the 1930s, by means of considerations that I and some of the other commentators summarised and have not been overturned since among professional philosophers of epistemology, science or mind. Lehar also refers to Booth's comment early in his Response but in terms that equally fail to appreciate his own basic misorientation epistemologically. Consequently Lehar makes further remarks ad hominem to my comment which are erroneous, as I point out after the relevant extracts from the start of Lehar's Response to commentators.

With respect to Lehar's general complaint (R1 in the officially published version of the paper) that

"Unfortunately, many of the commentators failed to grasp the paradigmatic nature of the proposal and restated their own paradigmatic assumptions as if they were plain fact, thus committing the error of petitio principii, assuming from the outset that which is to be proven."

Booth ripostes further: Others may have argued that Lehar's view is "incredible," but not I. My comment was that it is a terrible mistake to claim that the Bubble model is neuroscience. My argument was that this model is not any sort of science; it is art, and bad art at that. My comment specifically stated that the later Wittgenstein had refuted the epistemological assumptions of Lehar's "paradigm." I cited several examples of the fallacy permeating the target article, that introspection gives new knowledge. I explicitly stated that Lehar's treatment was so riddled with such errors that there were far too many to spell out within the word limit. Lehar plainly does not understand this fundamental critique of his "paradigmatic proposal" or that the only assumption made by Wittgenstein and subsequent philosophers, in exposing the fallacy in such foundationalist epistemologies, is that ordinary language succeeds. If Lehar and others profess not to share that "initial assumption," they deny themselves the right to expect anybody to attend to the marks that they make on the pages in BBS or anywhere else. So Lehar shows his incomprehension of the basic criticism of his modelling by his claim in Reply that "Booth says not a word about the epistemological difficulties … of the view he defends." The rest of this page that I've given myself to extend my riposte has space to disentangle some more knots in Lehar's position - namely, those in this first part of his reply to my comment. First, of course visual consciousness has "information content" and the brain "registers" that information. The question that Lehar refuses to pose to himself is what the information is about which is represented by physical processes in the brain that are causally integrated through the eyes to physical processes in the environment (Booth, 1978). If the subjective experience is of a red surface, then the spatial structure (and the colour: where's that in a merely spatial "model" of visual perception?) is of the red surface "known to science" (and to art, and indeed also to "religion"), unless the experience is illusory. Next, the foolishness in looking for consciousness among the brain cells is not just in looking inside the head. The foolishness is in looking anywhere for an "it", or for a "seeming", as though being conscious of straight (or red) were a thing with extension or location (or colour) anywhere other than in the public world of space (and colourings) that is normally seen correctly. So we have to ask if Lehar is attending to the plain meaning of his words when he writes in his Reply that "what we are seeing really is in our brain." This is a paradigm case of the distressed buzzing of "the fly in the bottle" that Wittgenstein worked so hard to set free. The petitio principii is Lehar's. The paradigm he proposes was shown to be utterly incoherent long ago by critical examination of its presuppositions without assuming any other particular paradigm. Lehar is free to show his mathematical literature and drawings to anyone who wants to look at them but he has no sound basis for claiming that they are science of the brain, of visual perception or of the awareness of sights.