Sorry, suffered from a little computus interruptus there.

Again, Tom's big five:

1) Reality is objective
2) Reason is absolute, always follow reason and never think or act contrary to reason
3) Moral principles are objective and thus shown through reason
4) every person should always be selfish
5) capitalism is the only just social system.

You should get along fine with this mind-set as it is "dogmatic." (pun intended)

It is difficult to dialogue when a questionable premise is cast in stone and all concepts are subjected to it.

Tom's view seems to be that the meaning of any concept is all of the concretes it subsumes, past, present and future and includes as a catch-all, all the possible concretes that might exist and we can never know about.

Here Tom will probably interject: "it depends on what the meaning of is, is?"

There is a basic failure to distinguish the sense of a word from its reference.

If you will accept that two or more ideas can refer to the same thing. The thing the ideas refer to is the reference of the ideas. The sense of the word is different.

Understanding isn't really as simply objective as Tom wants to reduce concepts to. There is a hermeneutical process that both confuses and enriches
our world view. Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote his thesis explaining how man's artificial language (words) requires the development of a natural language to understand what is being said.

Point is, all things can't be reduced to a simple formula. Tom is an excellent deconstructionist and often works at avoiding dialogue and reformulates his mantras to contain objectivist positions.

You do probably need to growl sometimes, just a mild "arf" doesn't always do the job here.