All the World Is Not a Stage: Emerging Contextualist Themes in Counseling and Development

Classical stage-based theories of human development, drawn from organismic worldviews, possess many shortcomings when extended to counseling applications. In attempting to reduce development to linear, hierarchical sequences, these theories fail to account for the interactional nature of change processes and implicitly pathologize developmental diversity. Responding to these shortcomings, counselors are turning to contextualist models of development that emphasize process over outcome. In this article I review key assumptions of contextualism, as embodied in social role theory and the life-span developmental tradition, highlighting relevant theory and research. I propose that two vital forces within current counseling—constructivism and interactional counseling—are animated by contextualist notions of development. Specific implications of contextualism for future counseling research and practice are outlined.     

Placing Our Counseling Texts in Context: A Reply to Lyddon

Following Lyddon (1995), contextualist understandings of development, including dialectical change and cognitive construction, are distinguished from organismic perspectives on the basis of the distinction between formal and final causation. Life-span developmental and postmodern contextualist trends are offered as a viable framework for emerging counseling theories that seek to capture the diversity of human development.     

A systems view of psychological trauma: Developing post-traumatic stress response paradigms

This article traces the development of traumatic stress paradigms within the context of emerging psychological and organizational theories. It traces the evolution of the systems view of trauma from an early stimulus-response model using a biological perspective through the development of cybernetic, information-processing to the field systems perspectives of trauma. This article concludes by examining the evolutionary and contextualist paradigms of trauma theory and its value to the psychotherapist working with trauma victims.     

SSI DISINTERRED

I reply to Martin Blaauw's recent article about subject sensitive invariantism, in which he argues that SSI, unlike its contextualist and contrastivist competitors, cannot give a proper account of memorial knowledge. I argue that these theories are on a par when it comes to such an account.     

Problems for contrastive closure: resolved and regained

The standard contextualist solution to the skeptical paradox is intended to provide a way to retain epistemic closure while avoiding the excessive modesty of radical skepticism and the immodesty of Moorean dogmatism. However, contextualism’s opponents charge that its solution suffers from epistemic immodesty comparable to Moorean dogmatism. According to the standard contextualist solution, all contexts where an agent knows some ordinary proposition to be true are contexts where she also knows that the skeptical hypotheses are false. It has been hoped that contrastivist theories of knowledge can mirror the contextualist solution while avoiding this epistemic immodesty. I review the main problems for contrastive closure and argue that none of the arguments currently in the literature pose an insurmountable problem for the contrastivist solution. However, I argue that contrastivist theories of knowledge, like their contextualist rivals, are indeed committed to epistemic immodesty.     

Indigenous, cultural, and cross-cultural psychology: A theoretical, conceptual, and epistemological analysis

This paper compares indigenous, cultural, and cross-cultural psychology by examining their theoretical, conceptual, and epistemological foundations. They have been influenced by the three research traditions in psychology: (1) universalist, (2) contextualist, and (3) integrationist approaches. The goal of the universalist approach is to test and verify universality of existing psychological theories. Cultural psychologists, in contrast, point out that presumed universals are actually Western impositions and not universals. They affirm the contextualist approach and argue that every culture possesses its own unique characteristics, and they should be understood from within the culture. Integrationists argue that search for universals should include the content and context of culture, and they reject absolute universalism and relativism. In cross-cultural psychology, two integrationist approaches can be identified: the derived etic approach (Berry, 1980) and the indigenous psychologies approach (Kim, Park, & Park, 1999). In the derived etic approach, researchers adapt and integrate existing theories to fit local knowledge. Indigenization as articulated by Sinha (1997) represents this approach. In the indigenous psychologies approach, the primary goal is to understand how people think, feel, and behave in a particular context. It advocates a bottom-up model-building paradigm that examines the generative capabilities of human beings. Detailed analysis of the indigenous psychologies approach is provided.     

NETWORKS AND THEORIES: The Place of Connectionism to Cognitive Science

This article considers how connectionist modeling can contribute to understanding of human cognition. I argue that connectionist networks should not be thought of as theories or simulations of theories, hut may nevertheless contribute to the development of theories.     

World views and the concept of development: A reply to Lerner and Kauffman

I reply here to the argument of R. M. Lerner and M. B. Kauffman (1985, Developmental Review, 5, 309–333) that an adequate concept of human development is incompatible with a mechanist “world view” but rests instead on a principled integration of contextualist and organicist “world views.” I review how each of these metatheoretical positions is described by the philosopher who proposed them and conclude that the version of contextualism and organicism presented by Lerner and Kauffman is so diluted as to lose the essence of their original meaning. In consequence, the concept of development they propose, which includes the notion of integrative levels, causal variables that interact differently at different times in the course of ontogeny, and probabilistic outcomes is more compatible with the mechanistic metatheory they eschew than with the contextualist and organismic ones they ostensibly espouse.     

Social class, solipsism, and contextualism: how the rich are different from the poor

Social class is shaped by an individual's material resources as well as perceptions of rank vis-à-vis others in society, and in this article, we examine how class influences behavior. Diminished resources and lower rank create contexts that constrain social outcomes for lower-class individuals and enhance contextualist tendencies--that is, a focus on external, uncontrollable social forces and other individuals who influence one's life outcomes. In contrast, abundant resources and elevated rank create contexts that enhance the personal freedoms of upper-class individuals and give rise to solipsistic social cognitive tendencies--that is, an individualistic focus on one's own internal states, goals, motivations, and emotions. Guided by this framework, we detail 9 hypotheses and relevant empirical evidence concerning how class-based contextualist and solipsistic tendencies shape the self, perceptions of the social environment, and relationships to other individuals. Novel predictions and implications for research in other socio-political contexts are considered.     

Career in context

Mainstream career theories have been criticised for their scanty conceptualisation of the environment that influences individuals' careers. There are few foundations upon which to build an appropriate conceptualisation of the dramatically changing environment of career today. The implications of Pepper's contextualist world hypothesis are discussed. Compared with orthodox approaches, the world as seen from this perspective is as different as the Internet is from a library; its understanding of the environment, and indeed career, is also significantly different. The contextualist perspective upon career research, theory and practice is outlined and the possibility of its adoption in the mainstream of the career field is explored     

Evaluating Complex Collaborative Expertise: The Case of Climate Change

Science advisory committees exercise complex collaborative expertise. Not only do committee members collaborate, they do so across disciplines, producing expert reports that make synthetic multidisciplinary arguments. When reports are controversial, critics target both report content and committee process. Such controversies call for the assessment of expert arguments, but the multidisciplinary character of the debate outstrips the usual methods developed by informal logicians for assessing appeals to expert authority. This article proposes a multi-dimensional contextualist framework for critical assessment and tests it with a case study of the controversies over reports issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The case study shows (1) how the critical contextualist framework can illuminate the controversy and guide evaluation of the various arguments and counterarguments; (2) how cases of this sort open up avenues for fruitful interdisciplinary collaboration between argumentation theorists and other fields; and (3) where further work is required in argumentation theory.     

Factors Influencing the Development of Psychology in Sub-Saharan Africa

Psychology is an ethnocentric science, cultivated mainly in the developed world and then exported to sub-Saharan Africa. The major facilitators or deterrents—local, international, and systemic—to its development pertain to the extent to which training, research, and practice are driven by Eurocentric theories, epistemologies, and methods, and how they undermine, ignore, or exclude folk psychology and local issues. Africa has her own frames of reference and social reality; these differ in some remarkable ways from the Euro-American. Efforts to indigenize psychology or to use it to solve the multiple problems Africa faces have merely begun, and need to be hastened. The eco-cultural framework, which compels sensitivity to local cultures and conditions, can promote the process of indigenizing psychology. A few contextualist or Afrocentric studies have yielded evidence pointing to the necessity for the reconsideration of Eurocentric conceptualization.     

Methodology in the Philosophy of Linguistics

I demonstrate that the theory of persistence defended in Sider [2001] does not accommodate our intuitions about counting sentences. I develop two theories that improve on Sider's: a contextualist theory and an error theory. I argue that the latter is stronger, simpler, and better fitted to some important ordinary language judgments than rival four-dimensionalist theories of persistence.     

Contextual Trends in Intellectual Development

I argue that the historical rupture between paradigms and theories rooted in the acontextual processing accounts of classical physics (e.g., Ebbinghaus, 1885/ 1913) and those rooted in contextualist accounts like Bartlett′s (1932) is being bridged by an emerging trend to incorporate elements from both traditions into a unified account of cognitive development. Two such accounts are the Bio-ecological Theory of intellectual development and the Triarchic Theory of intelligence. I draw on these two theories for illustrative examples of what I perceive to be a more general trend among cognitive developmentalists. Both theories are multipronged frameworks for conceptualizing individual differences in intellectual development. In this paper, however, I focus on only one of these prongs, namely, the contextually dependent nature of processing resources. Regardless of the ultimate success of these two theories, I believe that their successors will continue the trend of incorporating context into processing accounts of cognitive growth, thus bridging the paradigms of Ebbinghaus and Bartlett.     

Cogency in Motion: Critical Contextualism and Relevance

If arguments are to generate public knowledge, as in the sciences, then they must travel, finding acceptance across a range of local contexts. But not all good arguments travel, whereas some bad arguments do. Under what conditions may we regard the capacity of an argument to travel as a sign of its cogency or public merits? This question is especially interesting for a contextualist approach that wants to remain critically robust: if standards of cogency are bound to local contexts of evaluation, then how may arguments legitimately travel at all? The key to a contextualist conception of cogent travel, I argue, lies in the way local contexts are linked to broader contexts of evaluation by relations of relevance. The burden of the article is to elaborate the different forms these relations can take in the travel of scientific arguments.     

Development of personality in early and middle adulthood: set like plaster or persistent change?

Different theories make different predictions about how mean levels of personality traits change in adulthood. The biological view of the Five-factor theory proposes the plaster hypothesis: All personality traits stop changing by age 30. In contrast, contextualist perspectives propose that changes should be more varied and should persist throughout adulthood. This study compared these perspectives in a large (N = 132,515) sample of adults aged 21-60 who completed a Big Five personality measure on the Internet. Conscientiousness and Agreeableness increased throughout early and middle adulthood at varying rates; Neuroticism declined among women but did not change among men. The variety in patterns of change suggests that the Big Five traits are complex phenomena subject to a variety of developmental influences.     

Dialectical pluralism: A theoretical conceptualization of pluralism in psychology

A theoretical conceptualization of pluralism in psychology called dialectical pluralism is proposed in this paper. It is argued that this approach provides an effective and efficient basis for scientific progress in psychology. Three primary components of dialectical pluralism are developed. First, drawing on Royce's constructive dialectics, it is contended that tension between competing theories should be sustained in the hope of producing evaluative or integrative solutions. Second, the unity-disunity debate in psychology is reframed as a continuum and it is argued that oscillating periods of convergent and divergent pluralism would provide a productive model for scientific progress. Finally, intercontextualism is discussed as the underlying philosophical foundation for dialectical pluralism. This alternative to both mainstream psychology's positivist-empiricist foundations, as well as competing positions that may be more contextualist in orientation, is expounded as the justification for this new conceptualization. In particular, the limits of a methodological unity based on positivist-empiricist foundations, as well as of a pragmatic pluralism based on contextualist foundations, are both addressed by intercontextualism. As a result, dialectical pluralism may provide a middle ground between these two distinctive factions within psychology, while alleviating the fragmentation of the discipline.     

Grades of meaning

In this paper, I lend novel support to H. P. Grice’s account of speaker meaning (GASM) by blunting the force of a significant objection. Stephen Schiffer has argued that in order to make GASM sufficient, one must add restrictions that are psychologically impossible to fulfill, thereby making GASM untenable. In what follows, I explain the elements of GASM that require it to invoke these psychologically unrealizable restrictions. I then accept Schiffer’s criticism, but modify its significance to GASM. I argue that the problem that Schiffer notes is not a reason to reject GASM, but a reason to embrace it. GASM shows that meaning is best understood as an absolute concept—an unrealizable ideal limit. Taking some inspiration from contextualist theories of knowledge attribution, I argue that my version of GASM offers a useful contextualist account of meaning attribution. Hence, pragmatic theories of meaning and communication should not wholly exclude GASM from their theorizing, at least not for the reasons that are commonly given.