J. R. Kantor

Jacob Robert Kantor, known as J. R. Kantor, was born on 8 August 1888 in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and died in 1984 in Chicago. He was an American psychologist who pioneered a naturalistic system called interbehavioral psychology, or interbehaviorism. He studied at the University of Chicago, took his Ph.D. there in 1917 and taught there until 1920, then spent 39 years as a professor at Indiana University, overlapping briefly with B. F. Skinner. Kantor treated psychology as the study of continuous interaction between organism and environment and proposed the interbehavioral field as its unit of analysis, rather than reducing events to any single factor. He thought behaviorism reductionistic and not fully separated from mentalism. In 1936, in An Objective Psychology of Grammar, he was the first to use the term psycholinguistics. He was a founder of the journal The Psychological Record in 1937 and kept working as a research associate at the University of Chicago until his death.