Quotes

J. R. Kantor's Contributions

to Scientific Psychology (cont.)

Dennis J. Delprato

Eastern Michigan University

This year's second issue of the newsletter contained some brief comments on J. R. Kantor's contributions to scientific psychology, followed alphabetically by a list of quotations from prominent psychologists who had acknowledged as much (Delprato, 1987). The quotations presented below complete that little survey of such material.

Sapir (1926)

A notable contribution to the understanding of language as a particular type of behavior is J. R. Kantor's paper on An Analysis of Psychological Language Data, in which the peculiar characteristics of speech, whether communicative or expressive, are sought in its indirect nature as a response, the "adaptive stimulus" being responded to not directly but in the form of a reference, while a secondary stimulus, generally the person spoken to, is substitutively reacted to. (p. 112)

Schoenfeld (1969)

Sometimes when the work of a man of scholarship and intellectual daring plunges ahead of the learned community he is addressing, it does not immediately receive the honor it deserves. Instead, as it blends unmarked into the scholarly landscape, it becomes somehow taken for granted. Something like this has happened to the writings of J. R. Kantor. (p. 329)

Skinner (1938)

Although I continued to use the concept of drive for many years, J. R. Kantor eventually convinced me of its dangers.... (p. x)

Skinner (1979)

[The Kantor's house] was a small intellectual and cultural oasis in the university community... (p. 284)

When I first met Robert Kantor at a meeting in Urbana, Illinois, I was impressed by his scholarship and intellectual vigor. He was a behaviorist, though of a very special kind. (p. 283)

Stephenson (1953)

At bottom, our proposals depend upon a belief that scientific behavior is concrete (Kantor), and never the object of any absolute principles of deduction or induction. (p. 46)

Kantor's principle lies behind the main thesis of these chapters, in a grass-roots manner. (p. 341)

Tolman (1932)

This molar notion of behavior -- this notion that behavior presents characterizable and defining properties of its own, which are other than the properties of the underlying physics and physiology -- has been defended by other theorists than ourselves. In particular, acknowledgment must be made to Holt, de Laguna, Weiss, and Kantor. (p. 8)

Verplanck (1983)

So long as investigators continue to interact with their subject matter, they will move forward to fuller understanding and scientific knowledge in psychology. Passing trends and fads of equipment, or "sophisticated" methodology, of systematic viewpoint, and of theories may accelerate or slow this movement, but they will not stop it. Time, in which research (however misguided) continues, will inevitably lead us all to interbehaviorism, if not necessarily to its vocabulary. (p. xxv)

This personal history may prove the paradigm -- where time after time, when I thought I had reached a new position, I'd stop myself short.... "Hey, wait a minute, Kantor wrote that" -- or "that's what Kantor would say." He's always been there first. (p. xxv)

This is the way it will happen for others, over coming years. (p. xxv)

References

Sapir, E. (1926). Philology. In Encyclopaedia Britannica (13th ed., pp. 112-115). New York: Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Schoenfeld, W. N. (1969). J. R. Kantor's Objective Psychology of Grammar and Psychology and Logic: A retrospective appreciation. Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 12, 329-347.

Skinner, B. F. (1938). The behavior of organisms. New York: Appleton-Century.

Skinner, B. F. (1979). The shaping of a behaviorist. New York: Knopf.

Stephenson, W. (1953). The study of behavior: Q-Technique and its methodology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Tolman, E. C. (1932). Purposive behavior in animals and men. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.

Verplanck, W. S. (1983). Preface. In N. W. Smith, P. T. Mountjoy, & D. H. Ruben (Eds.), Reassessment in psychology: The interbehavioral alternative (pp. xi-xxv). Washington, DC: University Press of America.

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