The what and how of equivalencies
نویسندگان
چکیده
I believe that we have to be grateful to Francois Tonneau for undertaking the overdue job of clearing out the conceptual and semantic overgrowth that had engulfed behavioural equivalence research and was increasingly turning this area into a matter of a quasi-theological dispute. I hope that henceforth editors and referees will be less facile about laying down the laws on what facts demonstrate or do not demonstrate an equivalence relation and on what terminology is the right one and which is the wrong one. Although here and there I would have wished Tonneau to have been even more explicit and extreme in his critique, I shall certainly not attempt to better the substance of his arguments about whom, where, when and what went logically astray about equivalence relations. I also do not want to become involved with the question of what would be the right behaviouristic concep.tual framework for investigating language acquisition as I feel that many song-birds, an African grey parrot and certain bonobos can tell us more about that than Skinner, Sidman or even Tonneau can (Delius, 1990; see also Xia, Siemann, & Delius, 2000; Xia, Emmerton, Siemann, & Delius, 2001). Instead, I want to underline the fact that organisms were not created for the purpose that behaviour analysts might at some future time work out all the (divine?) rules according to which they were designed to behave. Rather, organisms are the outcome of a chancy game-like process where the laws of behaviour are more determined by the government of competitive Darwinian fitness than by any fundamental principles of logic, or indeed mathematical set theory. Within the evolutionary game, sensory organs, the nervous system and response equipment are all costly devices that only pay-off if they promote
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