What is evaluative conditioning? A reply to Corneille and Béna (2026)

In this paper, I respond to the paper by Corneille and Béna (2026; CB) which itself was a response to my earlier paper (De Houwer, 2026) in which I evaluated the proposal of Corneille et al. (2026) for a new definition of evaluative conditioning. I argue that CB hamper the debate by misrepresenting my opinions and by shifting the focus away from the core concerns that I raised in my previous paper. In addition to correcting the errors, I shift attention back to the main issues under discussion, thereby trying to advance the debate on the definition of evaluative conditioning.