Let me say that I admire the vigor of Professor Massey's reply. Let me also say that all the references to Grünbaum in my paper were references to Grünbaum's pre-1970 publications, in particular to his reply to me. Pre-1970 Grünbaum is no figment of my imagination. Pre-1970 Grünbaum indicated in many places that he was using the expression ‘convention’ in a perfectly standard philosophical sense; for example he equated the statement that the choice of a metric is ‘conventional’ with the statement that the choice is just a matter of descriptive simplicity. ‘Descriptive simplicity’ is a term introduced by Reichenbach for those choices in science which do not affect the truth value of what is said, i.e. for those choices which are conventional in a perfectly standard philosophical sense of conventional. Massey sometimes seems to suggest that one cannot infer from the fact that something is ‘convention laden’ in Grünbaum's sense that it is conventional in the sense of any other philosopher. Also, as Massey himself recognizes, pre-1970 Grünbaum did hold that the term ‘relation of spatial equality’ has an ‘intension’ which fails to determine the extension of ‘relation of equality’ in the case of continuous physical spaces and space–time.

Now the question is: to what extent is the position of post-1970 Grünbaum a substantial improvement on the pre-1970 position Professor Grünbaum's post-1970 position is certainly more complicated than his pre-1970 position. One notion used by Professor Grünbaum, both early and late, and which I did not discuss in my paper, is the notion of a metric being intrinsic.