title: Content-blind norms, no norms, or good norms? A reply to Vranas.
abstract: In the psychology of thinking, little thought is given to what constitutes good thinking. Instead, normative solutions to problems have been accepted at face value, thereby determining what counts as a reasoning fallacy. I applaud Vranas (Cognition 76 (2000) 179) for thinking seriously about norms. I do, however, disagree with his attempt to provide post hoc justifications for supposed reasoning fallacies in terms of 'content-neutral' norms. Norms need to be constructed for a specific situation, not imposed upon it in a content-blind way. The reason is that content-blind norms disregard relevant structural properties of the given situation, including polysemy, reference classes, and sampling. I also show that content-blind norms can, unwittingly, lead to double standards: the norm in one problem is the fallacy in the next. The alternative to content-blind norms is not no norms, but rather carefully designed norms.
authors.affiliation: Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin, Germany. gigerenzer@mpib-berlin.mpg.de
authors.forename: G
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Gigerenzer
mesh_terms: D003071:Cognition; D006801:Humans; D008960:Models, Psychological; D011336:Probability; D012016:Reference Values