Science and Human Behavior, Chapter 5: Operant Behavior, Quote 2

“It is customary to refer to any movement of the organism as a “response.” The word is borrowed from the field of reflex action and implies an act which, so to speak, answers a prior event—the stimulus. But we may make an event contingent upon behavior without identifying, or being able to identify, a prior stimulus . . . The term “response” is therefore not wholly appropriate but is so well established that we shall use it in the following discussion.” (p. 64)

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