We must have fundamentally different ideas of what it means for something to be a good explanation. It takes more than gesturing toward the hypothetical possibility of acting due to unacknowledged motives for it to count as a best, or even good, explanation.
I used to follow a lot of RSS feeds and the political blogosphere when that was a thing. And one of the best was Brendan Nyhan, and he had a routine segment criticizing op-ed sections for fabricating internal monologues of political actors, making assumptions about internal states of mind that could never be disproved and proceeding to analysis that depended upon such unfalsifiable speculation.
I think it was a good principle against which to judge media accountability, and I would generalize by saying that such speculation involves relaxing the norms that usually apply to critical thinking writ large. At the level of genre, this category of speculating I would say does not enjoy default legitimacy due to its departure from normal critical thinking principles relating to substantiation and a fundamental lack of interest in responding to arguments on their merits.
I'm arguing for the hypothetical possibility that an Objectivist could have hypocrisy on this. The argument that any individual Objectivist actually does requires a tremendous amount of additional information.
I do personally know some Objectivists who I believe are hypocritical on this matter. But that is based on years of interaction, and I wouldn't expect you to be convinced of that simply because I said it.
I used to follow a lot of RSS feeds and the political blogosphere when that was a thing. And one of the best was Brendan Nyhan, and he had a routine segment criticizing op-ed sections for fabricating internal monologues of political actors, making assumptions about internal states of mind that could never be disproved and proceeding to analysis that depended upon such unfalsifiable speculation.
I think it was a good principle against which to judge media accountability, and I would generalize by saying that such speculation involves relaxing the norms that usually apply to critical thinking writ large. At the level of genre, this category of speculating I would say does not enjoy default legitimacy due to its departure from normal critical thinking principles relating to substantiation and a fundamental lack of interest in responding to arguments on their merits.