The Limits of Cost-Benefit Calculation: Commentary on Bennis, Medin, & Bartels (2010)

Resisting knowledge, realizing values, and reasoning in complex contexts: Ecological reflections

In this article I explore the social, pragmatic, ecological contexts within which reasoning occurs, and without which it cannot function properly. A diverse set of perspectives are used to guide this exploration: (a) pragmatic critiques of studies showing failures to reason logically, (b) theoretical claims that reasoning is fundamentally social and argumentative, (c) a values-realizing account of resistance and truthfulness in social reasoning dilemmas, and (d) arguments related to the nature of rationality and resistance to scientific claims. Implications emerging from the integration of these sources point to improved prospects for a more ecological, values-realizing approach to theory, method, and application with respect to reasoning.

On Klatzky and Creswell (2014)

Klatzky and Creswell (2014) offer an interpretation of the unreliability of social priming effects by analogizing them to what is known about the complexity of cross-modal transfer effects in perception. The complexity of these transfer effects arises because they are both multiply determined and stochastic. In this commentary, I argue that Klatzky and Creswell’s thoughtful contribution raises the possibility that there might be deep and substantive limits to both the replicability and the generalizability of many of the phenomena that most interest psychologists, including social priming effects. Psychological phenomena largely governed by what Fodor (1983) called the “central system” may resist both replication and generalization by their very nature and not because of weak and underpowered experimental methods. With such phenomena, science might give us very good tools for explanation, but not for prediction (replication).