The latter claim amounts to saying that ALL openly acknowledged exploratory studies are good (thus deserving approval), which is just bizarre and clearly not what Wagenmakers et al. meant.

What Wagenmakers et al. actually said was “we do not disapprove of exploratory research as long as its exploratory character is openly acknowledged” (p.634). Note that saying that “I will not DISAPPROVE of X as long as it is Y” is NOT the same as “I will APPROVE of X as long as it is Y”.

The paper also claimed that “in Wagenmakers et al.’s dichotomous framework, performing invalid statistical inference is suggested to be an acceptable, if not recommended, scientific practice as long as it is correctly labeled as exploratory” (p.4).

Firstly, the paper described Wagenmakers et al. as a “dichotomous framework” (p.4). But they never claimed that their framework is dichotomous. In fact, they explicitly said that “psychological studies can be placed on a continuum from purely exploratory…to purely confirmatory” (p.633).

Hi! I agree with the paper’s general point that the exploratory-confirmatory distinction is impoverished, and I also found its attempt to explicate a richer account of the distinction helpful. But the use of Wagenmakers et al. (2012) as a foil led to severe mischaracterizations of their arguments.