Bias as Default Setting: An Architectural Argument Against the Bias Catalog

The Kahneman-Tversky, Gigerenzer, and Stanovich traditions have been read as cataloging biases. The framework's reading is that they have been cataloging probes. Each canonical paradigm was constructed by an experimenter to elicit a specific judgment, and each paradigm was therefore probing a specific dimension of the four-dimensional judgment process. The four dimensions (recognition, contextualization, resolution, action) are ordered by dependency, each dimension is a necessary condition for the next, and the six pairwise reversals of the ordering produce six structural classes (4-3, 3-2, 2-1, 4-2, 3-1, 4-1) the probes' class signatures fall into. The "bias" the paradigm produces is the gap between the participant's default at the probed dimension and the experimenter's normative target. The structural account classifies probes, names what each probe targets, and reads the participant's response as evidence of the default content at the targeted dimension. The canonical paradigms distribute across five dependency-violation classes. The 3-1 signature catches probes where the resolution operates on a dimension 1 admission that does not include the targeted referent (Linda, availability, representativeness). The 2-1 signature catches probes where the contextualization holds a frame whose content was not delivered through dimension 1 admission (cab problem, Asian disease, fundamental attribution error, IKEA, endowment, base-rate neglect, confirmation bias, planning fallacy, status quo bias, in-group bias). The 3-2 signature catches probes where the resolution operates on a dimension 2 frame whose content is not the frame the situation called for (anchoring, hindsight, false memory). The 4-3 signature catches probes where the action operates without dimension 3 having delivered a resolution against the currently relevant content (belief perseverance, sunk-cost). The 4-1 signature catches probes where the action operates without dimension 1 having delivered the targeted referent (confabulation). Devine's three-study sequence is a separability demonstration of the dimension 2 / dimension 3 distinction rather than a single class. The bystander and bandwagon effects are not clean probes, and dissolve under the strip-test diagnostic into heterogeneous defaults running normally under one label. The catalog hands two openings forward, a falsifiability prediction (probes targeting the same dependency should produce correlated responses across participants, probes targeting different dependencies should not, regardless of the named-bias label), and a construction problem (the 4-2 dependency is empirically unrepresented and the next paper inherits the task of probing action-stage and resolution-stage dependencies independently of upstream content). The companion paper (Stewart, 2026w) develops the architectural account this paper applies. **Keywords:** experimental probes, dimensional judgment, four-operation ordering, cognitive bias paradigms, default setting, structural typology, probe-to-dimension assignment, heuristics-and-biases tradition