I'm afraid my brain chose to remember the jogging path, the view of the Potomac, the bridges, and some of the joggers, but nothing about what we said. If you converted me to your view, I have lapsed back into my old ways. I have to learn everything several times.

I don't see how I've misunderstood your claim. I realize you claim harmony doesn't cut reality at the joints. I think that's an aesthetic judgment. You say that Westergardian theory allows one to treat the music of Berg, Schoenberg, and Webern as belonging to the same school as earlier Western music, as if this were a point in favor of that theory. To me, it is a proof that the theory is both wrong and destructive, because my aesthetic sense says that music is crap. We agree that the test of a theory of music is whether it helps one compose good music. I've never tried to write music using either theory, but if using Westergardian theory allows one to write music like that of Berg, my aesthetic judgements, which are different than yours, say that proves it is a bad theory.

Perhaps if I had been raised in a culture that used Westergardian composition techniques, I would be acclimatized to it, and would appreciate that music, and have a low opinion of harmonic theory. Even supposing that were true, which I doubt, it would only mean that this is culturally relative. Not a failure of rationality.

It seems to me that to claim that harmonic theory is objectively wrong, you must also claim that the tastes of people like me, who like things written using harmonic theory and dislike things not using harmonic theory, are also objectively wrong.

If you showed that Westergardian theory gave a simpler explanation of the music that I like, that would help convince me that it was a superior theory. (I don't expect you can do this in a blog post.) But even then, calling it a bad concept would be like calling Newtonian physics a bad concept because it doesn't explain motion at relativistic speeds.