Meaningful Stimuli and Equivalence Classes: The Intersection of Hedonics, Connotative, Denotative, and Discriminative Functions

An equivalence class can contain nominally meaningless stimuli that become related to each other by training and testing. It can also contain at least one meaningful stimulus. The likelihood of equivalence class formation is enhanced by the inclusion of a meaningful stimulus as a class member. It is traditional for stimulus meaningfulness to be characterized by its hedonic, denotative, and connotative properties. Thus, class enhancement can be attributed to these properties. In addition, the hedonic and connotative properties of the meaningful class member generalize to the other class members and is determined by the nodal structure of the class. Apart from hedonic, denotative, and connotative content of a meaningful stimulus, that stimulus also generates responses that are respondent and vary in topography, or are operants that are under discriminative or conditionally discriminative control. When one of these functions is acquired by a meaningless stimulus and it is then included as a member of a to-be-formed equivalence class, its inclusion also enhances likelihood of class formation, sometimes to the same degree as the inclusion of a meaningful stimulus. Thus, class enhancement typically attributed to the hedonic and connotative properties of a meaningful stimulus can be accounted for by the stimulus control functions served by that stimulus instead of their hedonic and connotative properties. Finally, denotation is considered last in the relative absence of empirical findings. In total, then, this article explores meaning from traditional and behavior analytic perspectives.