ABSTRACT

At the most fundamental level, the scienti®c method is simply a set of tools and procedures used to ®nd more reliable answers to a great variety of questions. What greater purpose this process should be put toward is a matter of opinion, and what these answers say about the world around us depends, in part, on the different assumptions we make about knowledge and what it can tell us about reality. Philosopher Stephen Pepper (1942) maintained that all scientists make one of four sets of relatively adequate pre-analytic assumptions about how scienti®c ®ndings re¯ect or do not correspond to objective reality in an absolute sense. By ``pre-analytic'', Pepper meant that these assumptions are not scienti®cally testable, but rather simply subjective, philosophical beliefs about how knowledge does or does not re¯ect universal truth. One is free to adopt any of these four sets of goals as the ``purpose'' of science, given that they are simply assertions about how science can and should be used. Pepper stated that the most common set of assumptions among scientists, mechanisms, iterate that one knows a scienti®c theory is true when it corresponds accurately to the real world. In other words, a mechanist (or realist) would assume that the ultimate goal of psychological theory and experimentation is a complete understanding of what all the human psychological processes really are and how they really work together, an understanding that would result in perfect prediction of what humans will do under an in®nite variety of circumstances

By contrast, Pepper (1942) stated that contextualists assume that an objective reality is not conclusively knowable. Due to a number of factors, such as human perceptual errors, measure-

ment error, errors in data interpretation, and effects on subjects of study, contextualists assume theories cannot capture objective Truth (with a capital ``T''), but can organize the way we think about the world in ways that allow us to act more effectively within the theory's domain. In other words, a contextualist would assume that the ultimate goal of psychological theory and experimentation is to develop ways of talking about human psychological processes that maximize our ability to accurately predict and control (change) human behaviour. The goal is purely pragmaticÐuse theories and research to ®nd increasingly better ways to change people's behaviour for the better. While a contextual psychologist would certainly believe there is a ``real'' world, they are not concerned with determining what the real components and interactions of that world are. Rather, they tentatively assume the True nature of the worldÐand of human psychologyÐis unknowable, and that a psychological theory is ``true'' to the extent that it allows us to accurately predict and control human behaviour. To add an important caveat, contextualists concerned with prediction and control are called functional contextualists, while those who hold to contextualism's a-realist stance but are concerned only with prediction are called descriptive contextualists.