Stimulus-Response-Reality

An old bit today from Paul Watzlawick's 1976 volume, "How Real Is Real?":

"There is a joke, known to most psychology students, in which a laboratory rat says of its experimenter, 'I have trained that man so that every time I press this lever, he gives me food.' Obviously the rat sees the S-R (stimulus-response) sequence quite differently than the experimenter does. To the experimenter, the rat's pressing the lever is a conditioned reaction to a preceding stimulus administered by him, while to the rat, the pressing of the lever is its stimulus administered to the experimenter. To the human, the food is a reward; to the rat, a reaction. In other words, the two punctuate the communicational sequence differently. Ordering sequences in one way or another creates what, without undue exaggeration, may be called different realities."