| Abstract: In the 1980s, behavior analysts were introduced to Stephen Pepper’s (1942) world hypotheses. Scholars such as Reese and Overton used the world hypotheses as a taxonomy to classify psychological systems, with cognitive psychology an exemplar of organicism and behavioral psychology an exemplar of mechanism. Other scholars argued that modern behavioral psychology – behavior analysis – is better represented as contextualism. Our purpose is to consider a classification not discussed in the 1980s – organicism and J. R. Kantor’s interbehavioral psychology. This seemingly incongruous relation is consistent with Kantor’s writings. In his earliest papers, Kantor identified his psychology as organismic. To our knowledge, though, Kantor did not explicitly say from where he derived the descriptor organismic – from its use in psychology, biology, or elsewhere. However, Kantor saw the relevance of organismic biology for his organismic psychology, which suggests why he used the term. Accordingly, in this presentation, we explore the relation between the organismic biology of Kantor’s day and organismic (interbehavioral) psychology, focusing on similarities between the two and the relevance of one for the other. |