Sentence:  These men - for the most part educated in our `` best '' New England colleges , well established financially and socially in the community - under kindly but insistent probing , reveal little or no objective or explicit criteria or data for their generalizations about the interests and attitudes of the people they <WSD>claim</WSD> to serve , or about the public responses that actually follow their occasional breach of a `` client-service relationship '' . 
Meaning of the word marked with <WSD> tags:  assert or affirm strongly; state to be true or existing