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Don,
I'm not sure you have to rely on the "just because" answer for
superposition. If you have two charges, 3q and 2q, the force is 3 times
as big as from 1q and 2q. But the 3q might just be 3 separate charges of
q each. So the force from 3 charges is the same as just adding them up.
I think that if you accept Coulomb's law, then you accept superposition.
I don't know that this is full of universal truth--I've taken the
simplest case where all the charges are together. But I think that
looking at the charges as a sum makes superposition seem reasonable to
students.