IVor:

I am all in favor of bringing out hidden assumptions, and disinfecting them in the sunlight.

While your post proposes to say a lot about my (or our) assumptions and how binding it is to have uninspected assumptions, you have made no effort to state what assumptions you think I am making here.

I don't know what criterion you use to measure the degree of correspondence between ideas and reality. My measure of it is in the results one produces by applying them, and the degree to which they predict events which when looked for can then be found to exist. That's why thermodynamic theory is better than phlogiston theory.

Anyway, I'd appreciate your breezy diagnosis a bit mroe if you provided me with concrete or at least specific examples of assumptions you think I am making which you believe are flawed, and a statement of why they are flawed.

Maybe I could learn something.

A.