Schusterman, R. J., Kastak, D., & Reichmuth, C. J. (1997). What's in a name? Equivalence by any other name would smell as sweet. Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 68, 252-258.

[No abstract; these are the first two paragraphs.]

Horne and Lowe (1996) argue that our results demonstrating California sea lion Rio's success on tests of equivalence relations (Schusterman & Kastak, 1993) were likely due to four procedural artifacts (p. 223). However, four lengthy commentaries directly addressed Horne and Lowe's attempt to devalue and explain away our positive findings, and all of them found the alternative explanations and arguments neither persuasive, compelling, parsimonious, nor even accurate (Fields, 1996, p. 280; McIlvane & Dube, 1996, p. 269; K. Saunders & Spradlin, 1996, p. 306; R. Saunders & Green, 1996; pp. 313—314). It is therefore unnecessary for us to further elaborate on either our procedure or the interpretation of our results. Instead, in this paper, we will concentrate our effort on two points made by Horne and Lowe. First, we will focus on their assumption that thought is dependent on words rather than the other way around. Second, we will address their point that one must be cautious about overinterpreting results from a single study (Horne & Lowe, 1996, p. 330) by reviewing the results of recent work at our laboratory as well as other important studies concerning the cognitive capabilities of nonhuman animals.

We believe that Horne and Lowe's basic premise that naming or verbal reasoning is necessary for the emergence or the formation of equivalence classes in an individual is wrong. In our view, the way some nonhuman animals and preverbal children classify the relations between and within objects and events determines whether and how codes, symbols, or words are acquired and used and not vice versa. Nonlinguistic animals have repeatedly shown that they are capable of reasoning and conceptualizing about relations dealing with time, space, and objects (for reviews, see Cheney & Seyfarth, 1990; Mackintosh, 1994; Schusterman, Thomas, & Wood, 1986; Vauclair, 1996; Wasserman, 1993). Animals, along with nonlinguistic human babies and adults, have been shown to display many abstract types of thinking (for babies, see Wynn, 1992; for adults, see Schaller, 1991; Shepard & Cooper, 1982).

Address correspondence to Ronald J. Schusterman, Joseph M. Long Marine Laboratory, 100 Shaffer Road, Santa Cruz, California 95060 (E-mail: rjschust@cats.ucsc.edu).