PUTTING CONTEXT INTO CONTEXT - A REJOINDER

Richardson (1996) criticises Roberts & Stevenson (1996) on two counts: that their classification of the commentaries used by Richardson (199 1) is in error, and that this is also confounded with item difficulty. Both claims are refuted here: the first by a demonstration of the val idity of the classification, the second by using published norms on it em difficulty. It is concluded that Richardson has not supplied eviden ce that disproves the existence of domain-free reasoning processes, an d it is suggested that he is attempting to resolve a false dichotomy: context-specific knowledge and domain-free reasoning processes are not mutually exclusive.