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The psychology of inherence is self-referential (and that is a good thing)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2014

Fred L. Bookstein
Fred L. Bookstein*
Affiliation:
Department of Statistics, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195; and Faculty of Life Sciences, University of Vienna, 1010 Vienna, Austria. flb@stat.washington.edufred.bookstein@univie.ac.at
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Abstract

Cimpian & Salomon (C&S) appear to characterize the inherence heuristic and essentialism as unwise or childish aspects of human reasoning. But actually, these cognitive modes lie at the core of statistical analysis across all of the quantitative sciences, including the developmental cognitive psychology in which the argument here is couched. Their whole argument is as much an example of its topic as an analysis of it.

Type
Open Peer Commentary
Information
Behavioral and Brain Sciences , Volume 37 , Issue 5 , October 2014 , pp. 484 - 485
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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