Stimulus equivalence, stimulus relations, and emergence of operants
Luis Antonio Pérez‐González · European Journal of Behavior Analysis · 2001
Tonneau’s paper focuses on two main points: One of them deals with the adequacy of the ac-count of stimulus equivalence in terms of math-ematical set theory. The second point deals with the usefulness of stimulus equivalence derived from matching to sample procedures to under-stand symbolic behavior. Tonneau states that many concepts of stimulus equivalence are inad-equate and the theory is too bound to matching to sample procedures. Tonneau suggests focus-ing on functional equivalence, rather than on stimulus equivalence, and to use other procedures besides matching to sample, that implies stimu-lus correlations. I will discuss first the place of stimulus equiva-lence in the context of the study of complex behavior; second, I will discuss about the direc-tion the research must take for better understand-ing complex verbal behavior. Functional stimulus equivalence One can say that functional stimulus equiva-lence occurs when two or more stimuli end up having the same function after the application of Address correspondence concerning this article to E-mail: