 Facile charges of solipsism miss the point. My experience of you leads me to hypothesize that you are a being very much like myself, with your own private experience. This is as firm a belief as any I have. I could not function without it. If asked to assign this hypothesis a probability I would choose 1.0. Although I have no direct personal access to your own experience, an important component of my private experience is the impact on me of your efforts to communicate, in speech or writing, your verbal representations of your own experience. Science is a collaborative human effort to find, through our individual actions on the world and our verbal communications with each other, a model for what is common to all of our privately constructed external worlds. Conversations, conferences, research papers, and books are an essential part of the scientific process. (84–85)