2026/05/02 by Olivia Guest, Andrea E. Martin, Iris van Rooij · 1 voice
Psychology · Mathematics · Neuroscience · #Child and Animal Learning Development #Cognitive and developmental aspects of mathematical skills #Embodied and Extended Cognition
paper · doi:10.5281/zenodo.19983695
We commend Sanbonmatsu et al. (2025) for centring metatheory and metamethod as remedies to “difficult research problems”. However, we wish to depart from their conceptualisation of what models are and what role they play in psychological theorising. Under computationalism, models are not a container for observations through being fit to neurobehavioural data and should not be held to the standard of providing us with numerical predictions. Computational cognitive models can only play their role of mediating from theory to data and back, if and only if we buttress their special status against confusions with other model types, such as with inferential statistical models of the data. This is a realistic goal for our fields. Ultimately, theory crisis or no, blurring the boundary between model, theory, and data in our metatheoretical calculus, results in many of the problems all authors have pointed out.