Why bottom-up taxonomies are unlikely to satisfy the quest for a definitive taxonomy of situations.

The recent advent of methods for large-scale data collection has provided an unprecedented opportunity for researchers who seek to develop a taxonomy of situations. Parrigon, Woo, Tay, and Wang's (2017) CAPTIONs model is the latest such effort. In this comment, I argue that although bottom-up approaches of this sort have clear value, they are unlikely to provide the sort of definitive, comprehensive, and theoretically integrative taxonomy that the field wants and needs. In large part, this is because bottom-up taxonomies represent what is common about situations and not what is theoretically important and influential about them. (PsycINFO Database Record