ABSTRACT
A major problem facing contemporary psychology is how to account for “emergent” behaviour, i.e. behaviour that is novel, has not been directly trained or reinforced, and cannot be explained by simple conditioning principles such as stimulus generalisation. Many important phenomena such as reasoning, the acquisition of language (Chomsky, 1959; 1972), the learning of arbitrary relational concepts (Williams, 1984), and indeed most of what we call symbolic activity, appear to have emergent properties. Perhaps because it provides a rigorous means of assessing emergent behaviour, the paradigm of stimulus equivalence has generated great interest among behaviour analysts in recent years. At last it seems that we have the basis for an experimental analysis of symbolic behaviour.
