De Ruiter, J.P. & De Ruiter, L.E. (2017). Don’t shoot the giant on whose shoulders we are standing. Commentary on Branigan & Pickering. Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

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Structural priming is a sufficient, but not a necessary condition for proving the existence of representations. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Cognitive science relies on the legitimacy of positing representations and processes without “proving” every component. Also, psycholinguistics relies on other methods, including acceptability judgments, to find the materials for priming experiments in the first place.