I’d walk this back a even further. Whether the prior is “agreed upon” is far less important than that it constitutes objective knowledge which is therefore criticizable. That is, an explicit prior enriches and enlarges the critical, scientific discussion we can have together. I suspect that one reason this convo is not moving toward resolution is that it has been framed through a question about alternative ways to make statements that have precisely the opposite character—i.e, statements about statistical ‘results’ that are meant to close off critical discourse!
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