The Nature and Value of Scientific System Building: The Case of Interbehaviorism

J. R. Kantor (1888–1984) developed and promoted an often underappreciated psychological system he called interbehaviorism that attempted to organize scientific values into a coherent system of psychology. Kantor insisted that in all scientific behavior the scientist needed to differentiate between constructs and events. If we were to develop constructs it would be only after careful observation of the actual events in context. He felt that his mission of forging naturalistic constructs for psychological events could be achieved only through scientific system building, and this was the activity that consumed his entire career. The present paper focuses on scientific system construction with the intent of (a) clarifying the nature and value of scientific system construction from Kantor’s perspective, (b) articulating Kantor’s system-building procedure, and (c) outlining the system of interbehavioral psychology produced in accordance with that procedure.