Ecological rationality and rational analysis are contested, not compatible, in the primary literature — three legs, not a settled division of labor

Gigerenzer's ecological rationality and Oaksford & Chater's rational analysis share one rhetorical move — "humans aren't irrational, the yardstick was wrong" (claim-oaksford-chater-redefine-rationality-as-reasoning-about-uncertainty) — but the primary literature treats them as contested, not as compatible priors over the same explanatory strategy. Recent LLM-meta-learning work (the ERMI paper, Jagadish et al. 2025, arXiv 2509.00116) folds both into one model as "distinct foundational frameworks"; three Tier-1 sources show that framing understates an active, textured disagreement. The texture has three legs:

1. A one-directional annexation that a referee flagged as unresolved. Oaksford & Chater cite Gigerenzer's heuristics approvingly in Bayesian Rationality, but Jonathan Evans, commenting in the same peer-reviewed forum, judged that "the link between the two programmes is unclear" because one appeals to ecological and the other to normative rationality (claim-evans-2009-bbs-calls-oaksford-chater-ecological-rationality-link-unclear).

2. An explicit self-differentiation from Gigerenzer's own camp. Nordli, Todd & Gigerenzer (2017) state on the record that "ecological rationality is not optimization," setting their good-enough, adaptive-fit account against "Bayesian models of cognition" — the family rational analysis belongs to (claim-gigerenzer-camp-defines-ecological-rationality-as-not-optimization).

3. A direct empirical clash. A Chater/Oaksford-coauthored 2003 test of take-the-best against complex "rational-norm" models was reanalyzed by Brighton (2006); under cross-validation the original result reversed and take-the-best won (claim-brighton-2006-reanalysis-reversed-take-the-best-result-against-chater-oaksford).

The disagreement is not flat rivalry where the camps never engage — they engage repeatedly — but the engagements are objections, boundary-drawing, and reversals, not reconciliation. The axis of dispute is stable across all three: optimal versus good-enough as the currency of rationality. This answers question-verify-ecological-rationality-vs-rational-analysis-compatibility in the contested direction, with the standing caveat that leg 3 is sourced from one side only (question-corroborate-brighton-2006-take-the-best-reanalysis-chater-oaksford-reply). The shared "yardstick was wrong" reflex still connects them to Simon's satisficing and to the continuity problem cluster — a family resemblance in stance, not an agreement in mechanism.