I have been reading your use of the word to mean an empirically justified claim, rather than a claim which had no validity prior to experimentation.

And given that you weren't treating it as such, I had every indication that you believed otherwise.

That led me to believe that you were saying something about the worth of the assertion rather than acknowledging it as worthless until tested and merely making a comment about its formal properties.

So let me rewrite your post to conform to the as yet untested empirical assertion.

Instead of;

"My assertion there is not that I have the right to interpret what people mean. I am saying that if we got a hundred people who said that and explained to them the alternatives and asked them which they really meant, the large majority would interpret it the way I predict. It's an empirical assertion."

We end up with;

"My assertion there is not that I have the right to interpret what people mean. I am saying that if we got a hundred people who said that and explained to them the alternatives and asked them which they really meant, we would find out what their response was. Until then I have no reason to believe that an as yet unconducted experiment would conform to my hypothesis or disprove my hypothesis. It's an empirical assertion which is as yet not justified to believe in."

There now.

Spending all your time treating it as though it were a justified empirical claim led me to believe you were making one.

Sorry for reading your sentences just prior to the claim and all your posts afterwards.

Mea Culpa.

Dante