Nick Chater

Cognitive scientist and, with Mike Oaksford, co-architect of the rational analysis / Bayesian-rationality programme — the view that human reasoning should be measured against optimal inference under uncertainty rather than formal logic. He matters to the vault as the standing representative of the Bayesian-optimization pole in its "the yardstick was wrong, not the reasoner" cluster, defined in explicit empirical and methodological tension with Gigerenzer's ecological rationality — most sharply in the still-unresolved dispute over whether Brighton's 2006 cross-validation reanalysis reversed Chater, Oaksford, Nakisa & Redington's 2003 take-the-best result, a reversal this camp has never been found to have replied to.

References

• claim-oaksford-chater-redefine-rationality-as-reasoning-about-uncertainty · claim-oaksford-chater-recast-wason-task-as-optimal-data-selection · claim-brighton-2006-reanalysis-reversed-take-the-best-result-against-chater-oaksford · claim-no-chater-oaksford-reply-to-brighton-2006-reanalysis-located
• Captures: 2026-08-02-did-the-chateroaksford-camp-reply-to-brightons-2006