Kantor's Interbehaviorism

Major Contributions to the Field

The intellectual movement that gave rise to behaviorism, the foundational perspective of behavior modification [Page 347]and cognitive behavior therapy, was based on the idea that it was possible to take a natural science approach to human psychological events. J. R. Kantor (1888–1984) worked to advance an objective science of psychology as an independent member of the family of natural sciences. Kantor offered an advanced form of behaviorism that contained little of the remnants of earlier thinking that troubled most other behavioral postulate systems. The greatest roadblocks to an authentic behavioral psychology have their basis in the dualistic position that separates behavioral occurrence into separate and distinct physical (or behavior) and mental (or psychological) components. Kantor provided a nondualistic psychology that incorporated the distinctly psychological components (e.g., emotive and cognitive events) into a framework that remained consistent with the dictate that the subject matter of science is always part of the natural world (i.e., spatiotemporal occurrence).

Behavior therapists (e.g., Cyril Franks) occasionally have argued that behavioral therapy's tendency to ignore philosophical and theoretical issues has hindered progress toward central goals such as professional practice that is soundly based on science. In answer, Kantor's interbehaviorism is a complete approach to behavior that begins with historical and philosophical analysis, proceeds through theoretical foundations for psychology, continues with analysis of scientific research operations, and ends up with postulates for applied work. In this way, interbehaviorism is very much consistent with the foundational behavior therapy position that theory and practice are interrelated and of equal importance and that behavior therapy is not merely a collection of deductively derived techniques or relegated to the arena of technological application.

Interbehaviorism is distinguished from other behavioral perspectives by its field (or system) orientation. Kantor argued that despite the many scientific advances associated with behaviorism, its failure to take more of a systemic perspective left it open to further emendation, adding the prefix inter- to behaviorism. This prefix was designed to communicate explicitly that behavior must always be described in system terms. Nonsystemic versions of behavioral theory rely on one or more versions of linear thinking and analysis. Examples include direct S→R conditioning, cognitive mediation in the form of S→cognition→R, and the Skinnerian three-term contingency of discriminative stimulus→operant response→ consequence. In all of these cases, cause proceeds in a linear and one-directional fashion to effect. Furthermore, this classic form of causal thinking underlies reductionist attempts to understand behavior, according to which biological structures and processes are independent causes of behavior.

Interbehaviorism's systemic approach to causality, on the other hand, is nonlinear. The empirical fact of temporal sequencing of events is not taken as prima facie evidence of linearity in the functional relations between events. For example, the fact that a distinctive stimulus compound is consistently followed by anxiety-like responses does not imply that the stimulus compound creates the subsequent response pattern and that knowledge of this relation is the end point of behavior analysis. Behavior therapists routinely adopt the nonlinearity principle, but their conventional nonsystemic behavioral frameworks fail to provide a coherent perspective from which to generally apply the principle of nonlinearity and to communicate it to trainees.

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