Association for Contextual Behavioral Science

The root metaphor of contextualism is often called the act-in-context or the historic event (Pepper, 1942, p. 232), and refers to the common-sense way in which we experience and understand any life event. Consider the simple event of brushing your teeth. What is our common-sense understanding of such an event? First, the event consists of a host of related features that all mutually define the event. "Brushing your teeth" doesn’t involve just a toothbrush, or just a person, or just the toothpaste, or just a room, or just squeezing the toothpaste tube, or just making a circular motion with your hand, or just spitting into the sink. It involves all of these things at once, and all of these things (and more) help define and characterize the whole event of "brushing your teeth." Thus, our everyday understanding of an event includes an appreciation of the behavior or action and its current context or setting as an integrated whole "in which the many features of an action blend, both with themselves and with their context" (Gifford & Hayes, 1999, p. 289). Of course, we could also analyze the act of "brushing your teeth" as a collection of individual components. But our everyday experience and understanding of the act is one of a complete and whole event, inseparable from its context.

Our common-sense understanding of an event also includes a sense of the purpose, meaning, and function of the event, and all of these depend on past events—or the historical context of the present event. For example, you probably brush your teeth because you’ve been told that doing so will prevent tooth decay, or because not doing so has resulted in painful visits to the dentist, or because you are getting ready for a date, or because your mother or father asked you to clean your teeth. Likewise, you may brush your teeth in the bathroom because you’ve found it convenient to do so in the past, and you’ve probably learned that a toothbrush and toothpaste are good equipment to use for this task, and that a circular motion is effective. All of these past events or life experiences, and more, contribute to an everyday understanding of why and how you brush your teeth. This is why context in contextualism refers to both the current and historical context of an act. It seems Pepper was basing his use of the term "context" on Dewey’s notion of context as "the historical situatedness of the meaning and function of behavior" (Morris, 1997, p. 533).

Contextualists analyze all phenomena as acts-in-context. Events and their contexts are separated into different parts by contextualists only to achieve some practical purpose. Gifford & Hayes (1999) write that "in a contextual approach we start with whole, situated actions and break them into pieces purely for pragmatic purposes…it is the whole that is primary: useful discriminations and distinctions come second" (p. 294). Thus, when a contextualist constructs theories and analyses that divide the world into parts, it is to aid in the achievement of some goal, not to reveal the one "true" organization and structure of the world. In contextualism, such divisions are utilitarian, not foundational. Indeed, there is no single, "true" unit of analysis in contextualism, and the current and historical context of any event ultimately includes the entire universe and all of time. How, then, does a contextualist know how much and which features of the potentially infinite context must be included in order to adequately characterize an act? In other words, how does a contextualist determine the "truth" or adequacy of a contextual analysis? The answer to these questions lies in the truth criterion of contextualism.