'untenable assumption' is a grammatically correct and usable phrase in written English.
It can be used to refer to a statement or belief that is unreliable or unsupportable. For example, "The politician made a broad, untenable assumption that everyone supported her policies."
But Mrs. Clinton's criticism makes sense only on the untenable assumption that peace requires racist zoning laws that perversely prohibit Jews — and only Jews — from living in certain neighborhoods of their capital, Jerusalem.
The differences between how they have been received, Ms. Nochimson wrote, "reveal an untenable assumption that the muscular filmmaking appropriate for the fragmented, death-saturated situations of war films is innately superior to the technique appropriate to the organic, life-affirming situations of romantic comedy".
This method relaxed the untenable assumption that all offspring control pairs were independent and required only that the family clusters were independent.
Second, conventional analyses implicitly treat the classification as perfect, and substituting expert judgment about actual classification errors for this often untenable assumption at least allows a quantitative assessment of the uncertainty arising from these errors.
The Met, he says, nonetheless tends to make untenable assumptions about the depth of visitors' knowledge.
The results are instructive for researchers in suggesting that various "combinatorial" strategies are unnecessarily reductionist and rely on untenable assumptions that can be avoided with more parsimonious approaches.
A scientist, his father is skeptical of "hidden and untenable assumptions" and dismissive of his poet son's suggestion of parallels with the fratricidal war in the Mahabharata — "The Mahabharata is just a story".
[537 U.S. 241] One must indulge in two untenable assumptions to find support in the equitable argument offered by respondent— that the public interest in free access to copyrighted works is entirely worthless and that authors, as a class, should receive a windfall solely based on completed creative activity.
The community often tends to use, unquestioningly, techniques based on the confusion matrix for which the correct application and interpretation requires the satisfaction of often untenable assumptions (e.g., perfect coregistration of data sets) and the provision of rarely conveyed information (e.g., sampling design for ground data acquisition).
Berkovitz (1998b, section 3.2, 2002, section 4) argues that Arntzenius's line of reasoning fails because it is based on untenable assumptions about the nature of probabilities in closed causal loops assumptions that are very natural in linear causal situations (where effects do not cause their causes), but untenable in causal loops.
And, similarly to Arntzenius's argument, Maudlin's argument also rests on untenable assumptions about the nature of probabilities in causal loops (for a further discussion of Maudlin's and Berkovitz's arguments and, more generally, the prospects of Cramer's theory, see Kastner 2004).
