ABSTRACT
This essay tries to expose some learning processes, based on Skinner’s behaviourist theory, and how experienced reinforcement contingencies can give rise to the formation of biases. Schmill explicitly provides a concept of prejudice and states that prejudices can be explained in their logical functioning as enthymemes—that is, the notion that the meaning of the actual behaviour is not made explicit by stating all its premises, thus constituting the logical figure of the enthymeme. He then relates this logical peculiarity of prejudice to Paul Grice’s theory of implicatures and their rules and ends by exemplifying this with Shakespeare’s tragedy of Othello.
