What genuinely connects Lieder & Griffiths (2020) citing Chater & Oaksford (1999) for the name 'rational analysis' and resource-rational analysis's §5.4 yardstick-swap

resource-rationalityrational-analysisoaksford-chaterlieder-griffithswason-selection-taskcognitive-sciencecitation-networkbridge-investigationbridge-seed-check

Sibling capture (read first, not a duplicate of this pair). 10-inbox/raw/2026-10-22-dup-risk-resource-rational-analysis-anderson-marr-oaksford-chater-bridge.md investigated a cosine-0.841 pairing that shares one end with this topic's pair — claim-resource-rational-analysis-rationality-revisited-swaps-normative-yardstick-same-move-as-oaksford-chater — but paired it against a different note (claim-resource-rational-analysis-extends-andersons-rational-analysis, the Anderson/Marr-algorithmic-level self-description), not against claim-lieder-griffiths-2020-name-chater-oaksford-1999-as-rational-analysis-source. That capture found its bridge via a §3 sentence connecting Marr's algorithmic level to "a realistic normative standard." This capture's pair is genuinely different and unaddressed by that sibling: it asks whether the specific citation Lieder & Griffiths reach for when naming "rational analysis" (Chater & Oaksford 1999) has anything to do with the rhetorical move their own §5.4 performs later in the same article. No existing capture asks that question, so this is fresh research, not a re-tread.

Verdict: the bridge is real, and tighter than "same source document." Chater & Oaksford's 1999 retrospective is not a neutral terminological citation. Read directly (fetched fresh this session via extract_pdf, same sha256 as the one already on file for claim-chater-oaksford-1999-list-marr-integration-as-outstanding-question), it turns out to contain, in its own worked treatment of the Wason selection task, a demonstration of the identical "swap the normative yardstick, apparent irrationality dissolves" move that the vault already catalogues as Oaksford & Chater's signature and that resource-rational analysis's §5.4 performs twenty-one years later. The paper Lieder & Griffiths cite for the paradigm's name is, independently of that citation choice, also a worked exemplar of the move the other seed note is about. That is the genuine connective tissue — not coincidental resemblance from two notes drawing on the same PDF (they don't: this capture's new quotes come from a different document than either seed note's primary), but two facts about the same 1999 paper converging on one article.

Claim: Chater & Oaksford's 1999 retrospective — the paper Lieder & Griffiths (2020) cite for the name "rational analysis" — itself performs the "swap the normative yardstick, apparent irrationality dissolves" move, via its own worked treatment of the Wason selection task

Claim type: technical-mechanism / historical (what a primary source's own argument structure is) — Tier 1-2 required and met via direct primary read.

Reviewing the Wason selection task, Chater & Oaksford first state the classical verdict: on the logical reading, "only 4% of participants make this response" expected by formal logic, and "the fact that people do not follow this pattern has been taken as casting doubt on human rationality." They then present their own rational analysis as a replacement standard, not a patch on the logical one: "Oaksford and Chater's rational analysis draws on the theory of optimal data selection (ODS) from Bayesian statistics, rather than on Popper's falsificationism." The payoff, in their own words: "the ODS model accounts for the large volume of apparently puzzling data on Wason's selection task. It resolves the problem of apparent human irrationality, by demonstrating that human performance approximates Bayesian optimal data selection." Logic is cast as the norm that made people look irrational; Bayesian information gain replaces it as the norm, and the "irrationality" dissolves under the new standard — the same shape claim-resource-rational-analysis-rationality-revisited-swaps-normative-yardstick-same-move-as-oaksford-chater later finds in Lieder & Griffiths's own §5.4.

Provenance:

• source_url: https://www.dectech.co.uk/publications/LinksNick/FoundationsTheoryAndMethodology/ten%20years%20of%20the%20rational%20analysis%20of%20cognition.pdf
• source_sha: 6ed2746249f4fdcc7fe530c848b3ac698c12c368805eb521f7035b8e7167fbd8 (fetched via extract_pdf this session; tls: verified; identical sha to the vault's existing fetch of the same PDF behind claim-chater-oaksford-1999-list-marr-integration-as-outstanding-question)
• source_title: "Ten years of the rational analysis of cognition"
• source_author: Nick Chater and Mike Oaksford
• source_date: 1999-02
• source_venue: Trends in Cognitive Sciences 3(2):57-65, Elsevier Science
• source_tier: 1
• source_quote: "The fact that people do not follow this pattern has been taken as casting doubt on human rationality" (quote_check-grounded, single contiguous passage)
• source_quote_2: "It resolves the problem of apparent human irrationality, by demonstrating that human performance approximates Bayesian optimal data selection" (quote_check-grounded, single contiguous passage, reading-order match across a line wrap)
• source_quote_3: "Oaksford and Chater's" (quote_check-grounded fragment)
• source_quote_4: "rational analysis draws on the theory of optimal data selection (ODS) from Bayesian sta-" (quote_check-grounded fragment)
• source_quote_5: "tistics47, rather than on Popper's falsificationism." (quote_check-grounded fragment)
• Note on quotes 3-5: the full sentence reads, per direct read of the extraction at this location, "Oaksford and Chater's[7] rational analysis draws on the theory of optimal data selection (ODS) from Bayesian statistics[47], rather than on Popper's falsificationism." It fails automated grounding as one contiguous string because a superscript footnote numeral ("Chater's7") is glued to the preceding word with no space in the pdftotext extraction — a variant of the two-column/footnote extraction seam already logged in 00-meta/seek-flags.md, not a new defect, but one the 2026-10-01 "fixed" ruling did not fully close. Recorded as three independently grounded fragments per the quote-shape rule's provision for this kind of extraction seam, rather than as one over-assembled quote.

Claim: the connection between the two seed notes is specific to this 1999 paper, not a general fact about Oaksford & Chater's oeuvre

Claim type: structural/historical — Tier 3-4 acceptable for this kind of claim; grounded here at Tier 1 since it rests on a direct primary comparison.

The vault's existing "swap the yardstick" claim for Oaksford & Chater (claim-oaksford-chater-redefine-rationality-as-reasoning-about-uncertainty, claim-oaksford-chater-recast-wason-task-as-optimal-data-selection) is sourced from a 2009 Behavioral and Brain Sciences précis of their 2007 book Bayesian Rationality, not from the 1999 Trends in Cognitive Sciences retrospective. This capture's finding establishes that the 1999 paper — the one actually cited by Lieder & Griffiths for the paradigm's name — independently carries the same argument in miniature, eight years before the book and its précis. So the bridge does not depend on treating "Oaksford & Chater" as an undifferentiated body of work that happens to touch both seed notes; the specific paper footnoted for the name is itself one of the places the move is made. This sharpens observation-oaksford-chater-wason-resource-rational-pairing-is-confirmed-bridge-via-citation, which already established that Lieder & Griffiths cite both the 1994 Wason-task paper and the 1999 retrospective by name on facing pages — this capture adds that the 1999 citation is not inert background: its own content is a second, independent demonstration of the move the other citation (1994) performs mathematically.

Provenance: same primary as above, plus the already-vault-verified facts in claim-lieder-griffiths-2020-name-chater-oaksford-1999-as-rational-analysis-source (Tier 1, verified-verbatim) and claim-oaksford-chater-redefine-rationality-as-reasoning-about-uncertainty (Tier 1, verified-verbatim), neither re-quoted here to avoid duplication.

Claim: the bridge is real but sits one notch below full novelty — the vault's MOC already catalogues both halves of the "yardstick was wrong" family, and this capture tightens rather than discovers the link

Claim type: structural claim about the state of the vault's own cross-referencing.

moc-the-yardstick-was-wrong-not-the-reasoner already lists "Oaksford & Chater — Bayesian probability for logic" and "Resource-rational analysis — all three classical norms at once" as two of its four members, and observation-oaksford-chater-uncertainty-redefinition-resource-rational-pairing-is-genealogical-bridge already names claim-resource-rational-analysis-rationality-revisited-swaps-normative-yardstick-same-move-as-oaksford-chater as evidence for a "hedged" genealogical bridge. A vault_novelty check on this capture's own Claim 1 returned max_cosine: 0.82 (duplicate-risk band, 95th percentile), closest neighbours being Note 2 itself (0.82), the Wason recast claim (0.816), and the MOC (0.799). The specific quotes recorded above are new to the vault — grepped against 30-notes/ and absent — but the conceptual territory (Oaksford & Chater perform a yardstick-swap on the Wason task) is already well-mapped. This capture's genuine addition is narrow: not a new member of the family, but the fact that the 1999 naming-citation and the 1994 worked-example citation are not two separate links to two separate Oaksford-Chater ideas — one paper (1999) demonstrates the same move the other (1994) formalizes, and Lieder & Griffiths cite both, on facing pages, in the same article that later performs its own version of the move in §5.4.

Further leads

• Chater & Oaksford (1999) footnote 60, "Chater, N. and Oaksford, M. The probability heuristics model of syllogistic reasoning" (in press at time of writing) — a third domain (syllogistic reasoning, not just the selection task) where the same logic-to-probability swap is applied; not opened this session.
• The 1999 paper's own "Outstanding questions" box lists "What are the limits of rational analysis? Can every successful aspect of cognition be explained rationally, or could some mechanisms 'just work' with no rational explanation?" — a question adjacent to but distinct from the Marr-integration outstanding question already captured in claim-chater-oaksford-1999-list-marr-integration-as-outstanding-question; not pursued here.
• Whether the promotion pass should fold this capture's Claim 1 into claim-chater-oaksford-1999-list-marr-integration-as-outstanding-question as an additional fact about the same source document, rather than minting a new claim-note, given the duplicate-risk signal on the conceptual territory — flagged as a disposition question for promotion rather than decided here.

Safety flags

None. The only source fetched this session was https://www.dectech.co.uk/publications/LinksNick/FoundationsTheoryAndMethodology/ten%20years%20of%20the%20rational%20analysis%20of%20cognition.pdf via extract_pdf (tls: verified, no elevated-suspicion transport) — a standard academic PDF (a Trends in Cognitive Sciences review article hosted on a co-author's own publications mirror). No addressed-to-AI language, override language, claimed authority, tier self-assignment, file-system instructions, credential requests, or urgency framing was encountered anywhere in the extracted text (the rational-analysis review, its boxes and reference list, or the adjacent unrelated articles bundled in the same PDF scan — an amygdala-circuitry review and a prefrontal-cortex-development review that happened to share the same journal-issue PDF).

Entity candidates

• John R. Anderson — person — the foundational, older figure both the "rational analysis" name and the 1999 retrospective's whole argument are built on and measured against (Chater & Oaksford thank him by name in their acknowledgements and open the piece crediting Anderson & Milson 1989 and Anderson 1990 as rational analysis's origin). Already has entity-john-anderson; flagged first per the ancestry-priority convention, not last.
• Nick Chater, Mike Oaksford — already have entity-nick-chater and entity-mike-oaksford; this capture adds that their own 1999 retrospective (not just their later book/précis) independently demonstrates the yardstick-swap move, a fact their pages may not yet carry.
• Falk Lieder, Thomas Griffiths — already have entity-falk-lieder and entity-thomas-griffiths; confirmation, not a new flag.
• Peter Wason — already has an entity page; the selection task is the shared object both the 1999 retrospective and the vault's existing Wason-recast claim-note run through.