Contextualism

Description of the Strategy

Contextualism is a pragmatic philosophy that uses the ongoing act in context as its model or root metaphor. Acts of this kind are historical, purposive, and situated. For example, “going to the store” implies a historical reason for going (e.g., not enough food in the house), a current purpose (e.g., needing to make the evening meal), and a situational context (e.g., a place to go from and to, money to make the purchase, time to get there). In psychology, philosophies of science based on contextualistic perspectives lead to approaches that emphasize (a) a focus on the whole event, (b) sensitivity to the role of context in establishing the nature and function of an event, and (c) a pragmatic truth criterion; that is, what is “true” is what works in a particular context and with regard to a particular goal. As a result of its pragmatic truth criterion, contextualists adopt a radically psychological epistemology and refrain from ontological declarations of all kinds. What is “true” in one context may not be “true” in another.

Clarity about the goals of analysis is critical to contextualists because goals specify how a pragmatic [Page 219]truth criterion can be applied. There are two broad categories of contextualism in psychology. Descriptive contextualists seek a personal understanding of the participants in the whole event. Psychologists of this kind see psychological science as a field that is similar to history. Narrative psychology, hermeneutics, dramaturgy, Marxism, feminism, and similar approaches are examples. Functional contextualists seek the prediction and influence of events as a single, integrated goal. Psychologists of this kind see psychological science as a pragmatic experimental field. Behavior analysis is an example.

Understanding the contextualistic nature of certain approaches helps make sense of features that would otherwise be mere dogmatism. For example, the “environmentalism” of behavior analysis is a direct result of its goals and pragmatic philosophy. Verbal analyses generate rules for people, not rules for the world. Scientists who seek to predict and influence psychological events must have rules that start with in the environment because that is where the scientists (the rule followers) are with regard to the behavior of others. Thus, factors are sought that are external to the behavior of the individual being studied and are manipulable, at least in principle. Only variables of this kind could lead directly to behavioral influence as an outcome.

Similarly, the behavior-analytic objection to analyses that point to relations between one form of psychological action and another are understandable given the functional contextual nature of behavior analysis. A scientist saying, for example, that thinking leads to overt behavior is pointing to a relationship between two psychological dependent variables. From the point of view of functional contextualism, the analysis must be incomplete until the manipulable context that gave rise to both forms of psychological activity and (importantly) their relation is specified. This is one reason that behavior analysis is often called the experimental analysis of behavior, because without manipulation of independent variables, it is difficult to know whether its analytic goals have been accomplished. These independent variables will never be the psychological actions that are being analyzed.

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