Dear Patrick

Your offering - 'intellectual support-bargaining' - at this point appears to
me a pig in a poke.

You seem to defend your position by making 'intellectual support-bargaining'
a kind of envelope which contains those matters in the social sciences which
are too complex to definitively resolve empirically.  However, at least by
default, one might fear that the envelope might also contain deliberate
deceptions.  You write:

PS > Mason interprets my comments in accordance with the conventional and
simple understanding of information, which might be summarised as, "good
people tell the truth, while unprincipled people do not". 

Missing from this summary is not just that “good people might legitimately
disagree” but also that on some  adjudications, “good people lie”.  We owe
that latter insight to (say) Plato and Collingwood, who both clearly stated
that they saw it as a duty of an intellectual elite to deceive the rest. 
And to me, in his “Early Beliefs” Keynes (contra Russell) rather clearly
signals the same allegiance to deception (“guile”).

I am not sure where you stand on such matters.  If you wish to restrict
'intellectual support-bargaining' merely to a zone where ‘good people
legitimately disagree’, how would you propose to exclude such as Plato,
Collingwood or Keynes from abusing that privilege?  Alternatively, do you
see yourself as a link in the master/pupil chain: 
Keynes-Wittgenstein-Anscombe-Feyerabend, where ultimately  “Anything Goes”?

To put all this another way – is 'intellectual support-bargaining' another
name for Orwell’s Room 101?  Is it the place where, if push comes to shove,
4 = 5?

Forgive me if this sounds merely sarcastic – it is not mean to be.  My deep
seated loyalties lie with such as Russell and Popper, who abhor deception,
but I do not dispute the sad possibility that in the real human world,
deception is both intrinsic and vital.

Rob  Tye