With regard to &19-21 of the Paper, I think that the Author has been over-zealous in his attack on the characteristic strength definitions. Without losing oneself in semantics, the definitions may become more palatable to the Author if the word 'expected' is treated as a technical term which denotes that one is making a statistical statement (i.e. a statement about a population of results that is exactly true in theory only). 55.With regard to the CP 110 compliance criteria and the possibility of a 'logical impasse' ( §30), I think that the Author has hit on a very real practical disadvantage-when it occurs-but according to the statistical philosophy of concrete strength the probability of occurrence of the 'impasse' is small (but non-zero). In other words, the philosophy accommodates an 'impasse' but predicts that it should not happen very often; hence on these grounds it is not deemed important (rightly or wrongly!).56. To put the 'logical impasse' in greater statistical perspective (a) each individual result-x-is required to be such that x > 0.85 k (where k denotes the characteristic strength). Since, by definition, only 5% of results are expected to be less than k, the probability of x 0.85 k (i.e.area A, in Fig. 2) is less than 0.05. In fact it is given by 0.