Functional Contextualism
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Transcript of Functional Contextualism
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Functional Contextualism
Steven C. HayesUniversity of Nevada
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What is Philosophy of Science?
• Philosophy is a process of specifying your assumptions, detecting inconsistencies among them, and acknowledging their implications
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Why Does it Matter?• Concepts unplugged
from their orienting assumptions lose vitality
• Incoherence can lead to dead ends
• Assumptions provide coherent measures of progress
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Stephen C. Pepper
• We are not so cognitively advanced that we can deal with complexity without the guidance of underlying root metaphors, drawn from common sense
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Why Contextualism?• The unit: The
situated, historical, purposive act
• Truth criterion: successful working
• Why? This is when behaviorism became “radical”
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Types• Descriptive: a
personal experience of the participants in the whole
• Functional: prediction and influence with precision, scope, and depth
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The Weirdest Feature
• A-ontological: multiple language games are possible
• It is an essential part of contextualism and of radical behaviorism
• Necessary to the truth criterion
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The Weirdest Feature
• Descriptive contextualists have used it to tear down science
• But that is a kind of ontology
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How Do You Know?• The mind demands an
answer• But there is more to us
that the answer why• Consider values
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Where it Goes in Functional Contextualism
• Keeps us focused on what works, not who is right
• Keeps us flexible• Grounds knowledge in
experience• But most of all …
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Helps Us Shut Up• When we have
nothing useful to say beyond experience itself