Abstract
Even when they are defined with precision, one can often read and hear judgments about the vagueness of heuristics in debates about heuristic reasoning. This opinion is not just frequent but also quite reasonable. In fact, during the 1990s, there was a certain controversy concerning this topic that confronted two of the leading groups in the field of heuristic reasoning research, each of whom held very different perspectives. In the present text, we will focus on two of the papers published in Psychological Review, wherein the arguments of each of these groups were presented: on the one hand, Kahneman and Tversky (1996) [10], and, on the other, Gigerenzer (([3, 4, 5]) and Gigerenzer and Murray ([2]). Essentially, there are two reasons for carrying out an analysis of this controversy in this article: Firstly, because in the subsequent literature there is no analysis of the impact of those (allegedly opposed) positions on the development of both groups’ research programmes, especially in the case of the Adaptive Behaviour Cognition (ABC) research group at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development. The second reason is related to the perspective that will be proposed here to interpret those results. According to that perspective, if we take into account the scientific production of Trillas regarding the meaning of terms such as ‘vagueness’ and ‘fuzziness’, there would be reason to believe that Gigerenzer’s [5] controverted response to Kahneman and Tversky allows, even today, for new interpretations to be made. This is the objective of the present paper. The interpretation proposed here intends to be evaluated taking into account whether or not it is relevant to explore the social dimension of heuristic reasoning. Nowadays, what we know as social heuristics are the subject of much debate and research.
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Navarro, M.G. (2015). Vague Heuristics. In: Seising, R. (eds) Accuracy and Fuzziness. A Life in Science and Politics. Studies in Fuzziness and Soft Computing, vol 323. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-18606-1_27
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