(Presented with all the other Commentaries on the Horne and Lowe article)
[No abstract; these are the first two paragraphs.]
A potentially creative tension, a critical commentator might call it a fault line, runs through the project of Horne and Lowe (1996): The matching-to-sample paradigm, a "highly artificial ... odd experimental paradigm," as the authors themselves call it (p. 000), confronts an immense problem area of naturalistic meaning and reference. Such a discrepancy in breadth is not necessarily a disadvantage in the first stages of an analytical investigation, yet the chasm separating this study from most discussions of semantics will have to be bridged, because the authors themselves endeavor to "foster productive interac tion with scientists from other traditions" (p. 186). For such bridging, the existence of scholars from other fields and the potential relevance of their work will have to be acknowledged. The "archeology" aspect indicated in the above title, referring to older contributions from a variety of fields, is intended to contribute to such interaction. Three aspects are emphasized: (a) a bridge to naturalistic semiotic performance in animals, (b) additional research on children's semiotic development, and (c) a bridge to philosophical and psycholinguistic approaches to meaning. Stimulus Equivalences and Semiotic Performance in Animals
I was astonished to read in Horne and Lowe (1996) that stimulus equivalences could not be established in animals. It would have seemed to me that no higher animal (whether predator or prey) could survive without being a quick learner of stimulus equivalences (e.g., that the smell, sound, sight, tracks, excreta of a predator mean danger). Admittedly, these are functional equivalences (p. 190) only and do not conform to the operational definition of stimulus equivalence, in that they do not entail all three features of the mathematical concept of equivalence. Yet, when a prey animal learns the equivalence between predators and the sounds they produce as well as the equivalence of predators and their scents, it will sniff when hearing this sound and search visually for the predator's location (cf. Rubenstein & Wrangham, 1986, passim for discussions of "predator vigilance"), similar to a child engaging in listener behavior after being asked "Where is the teddy bear?" Such gazelle behavior appears to be similar to the emergent equivalences BC and CB in Figure 2 of Horne and Lowe. Following the authors' reasoning (p. 187), I would therefore suggest that the gazelle has formed a stimulus class that seems to involve symmetry and transitivity, even if this has not been observed in the laboratory.
Address correspondence to the author at the Department of Psychology, California State University, Fresno, Fresno, California 93740 (E-mail: ernstm@csufresno.edu).