CORRESPONDENCE BETWEEN DEFINITIONS AND PROCEDURES: A REPLY TO STOKES, OSNES, AND GUEVREMONT

Abstract

Stokes, Osnes, and Guevremont's (1987) implicit definition of correspondence classes appears dose to ours (Matthews, Shimoff, & Catania, 1987). Their definition, however, is fundamentally procedural and thus may have to be modified as experimental methodologies are refined. The advantage of our contingency‐space analysis is that it is independent of specific procedures and focuses attention on problems inherent in some procedural definitions. Specifically, a contingency‐space analysis addresses the issue of distinguishing specific instances from classes and reminds us that correspondence can be identified as a class only on the basis of observing a population of opportunities for say/do sequences in which the subject sometimes does not say.