Among other things, Baumard et al.'s considers the enforcement and establishment of moral norms, the interpersonal comparison of welfare, and the structure of fairness norms. This commentary draws attention to the relevance of the game theory literature to the first and second topic, and the social psychology literature to the third topic.

The article argues for the epistemic rationale of triangulation, namely, the use of multiple and independent sources of evidence. It claims that triangulation is to be understood as causal reasoning from data to phenomenon, and it rationalizes its epistemic value in terms of controlling for likely errors and biases of particular data-generating procedures. This perspective is employed to address objections against triangulation concerning the fallibility and scope of the inference, as well as problems of independence, incomparability, and discordance of evidence. (...) The debate on the existence of social preferences is used as an illustrative case. (shrink)