Contextualism: Is the act in context the adequate metaphor for scientific psychology?

Abstract

According to some, psychology as it has been practiced is based on a world view known as mechanism. Individuals from a number of different areas of psychology, most recently within the behavior-analytic community, have strongly argued that psychology should be based on a different world view, contextualism. They emphasize a variety of characteristics that, in their view, differentiate a contextualistically based psychology from one based on mechanism. We examine these characteristics and find them to be of dubious value for differentiating a contextualistic approach to psychology from others. One proposal of some advocates of contextualism is that contextualistic approaches should develop independently from most of the remainder of psychology, which they regard as mechanistic. This proposal is said to be derived from the metaphilosophy of Pepper (1942). We evaluate this proposal and reject it. We go on to suggest that the mechanis-tic/contextualistic dichotomy is too constraining to realistically describe various approaches to psychology. © 1994 Psychonomic Society, Inc.