Killeen and Jacobs (2016) Are Not Wrong

Having said this, the catchy title does not withstand any deep analysis, and any decent behavior analyst would want to rephrase this as “Snow is called white, coal is called black, and food is called a reinforcer”, etc., these being defined by our current verbal community—which is, as Killeen and Jacobs (2016) say, what you can do with them (emit verbal behavior). A more accurate statement is, “Coal is black, snow is white, food is a reinforcer, and all are true when other conditions are right” -- but this does not make for an attention-getting title. [...]at first blush, an organismic state of, say, hunger might be reasonably predictable from a recent history of abstinence, but this history is summarized at least in part by the current state of the gut – and the gut is, of course, an external input to the organism (it’s just a tube of skin through the organism). Killeen and Jacobs do shine further appropriate light on these with their vector-algebra approach in the Appendix to their paper, and show how each of these is co-dependent with all the other terms—thus does their paper lead the reader through from a simple, easily understood 3-term contingency to a totally interactive 4-term contingency (their Equation 5).