Limitations of Skinner's concept of an 'operant': A theoretical note

It is argued that even if an operant can be defined formally as the "interrelationships among S^D , R , and S ^rein", specific operants require delimitations of emitted behaviour and stimuli in terms of specific sets of contingencies of reinforcement. It is argued that the class membership of operant responses can be determined neither by reference to S^D , response topography, S^R , nor the supposed interrelationships among these, the contingencies of reinforcement. Functional analysis seems to require knowledge rejected by radical behaviourists. It is argued that operant behaviouristic analyses of human behaviour presuppose a common-sense understanding of actions, which–until explicated and shown to be reducible to a technichal behavioural language–must be taken as the point of departure in these analyses.     

The Genesis of the Logic of Immediacy

The article traces the genesis of soku, a particle elevated to the status of an operator of dialectical logic by Japanese philosophers of the Kyo?to school, to a translation problem that occurred when Buddhist thought spread from India to China. On the basis of the analysis of its most famous locus of occurrence, a passage in the Heart Sutra, it is shown how eva, a Sanskrit particle with the function of distinguishing between logical types of sentences, was transformed into a modifier of identity statements and an indicator of the inability of language to express deep-level Buddhist insights exhaustively.     

The serial position effect and different error types in anticipation learning

Abstract.— Minor modifications of the usual serial anticipation procedure did not affect the well-known Serial Position Effect (SPE), while the errors, i.e. Intra-list-Intrusions (ILI) and Failure-TeRespond (FTR), showed deviations from the usual distributions. It was therefore concluded that the SPE should not be analysed in terms of different error types, ILI and FTR. Transfer-to-position measured by means of a number-syllable paired association (PA) task, and a free-recall test of the original serial anticipation list measured after the termination of the PA-task showed a skewed and a symmetrical trend respectively. It was suggested that response-learning accounted for the symmetrical component of the SPE while association-to-position, contrary to prevailing views, was responsible for the skewed component.