Gigerenzer's camp defines ecological rationality as 'not optimization,' positioning it against the Bayesian-optimization family rational analysis belongs to

In a 2017 contribution to Mind, rationality, and cognition: An interdisciplinary debate (Psychonomic Bulletin & Review), co-authored by Gerd Gigerenzer himself with Samuel Nordli and Peter Todd, the ecological-rationality camp states its position under the explicit heading "Simon's bounded rationality is not Kahneman's bounded rationality; ecological rationality is not optimization." The authors draw the boundary at the level of currency: "In psychology, optimization models have been used to argue in favor of human rationality, as in Bayesian models of cognition, but also to argue for our lack of rationality, as in the heuristics-and-biases program." Their own framework, by contrast, studies "simple heuristics that exploit the available structure of environments, using relatively little information to reach good-enough (not optimal) solutions to the challenges facing the organism."

"Bayesian models of cognition" is precisely the family that Oaksford & Chater's rational analysis is a flagship instance of — an optimality-referenced account inheriting Anderson's "cognition as the optimal solution" strategy. So where claim-oaksford-chater-redefine-rationality-as-reasoning-about-uncertainty keeps optimality and changes its currency from logical validity to Bayesian information gain, Gigerenzer's camp rejects the optimizing move altogether and locates rationality in good-enough adaptive fit, directly building on Simon's bounded rationality. This is an on-the-record self-differentiation, not a claim of shared priors — the two programmes name optimization as the exact axis they disagree on. It is one of the three legs of the contested, not compatible reading in observation-ecological-rationality-and-rational-analysis-are-contested-not-compatible.