ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at S. C. Pepper's conception of contextualism since it has informed so much provocative discussion. Pepper's four major root metaphors include formism, mechanism, contextualism, and organicism. The root metaphor of formism hinges on similarity and leads to classificatory systems like those of Plato, Aristotle, and the Scholastics. Some of Kurt Lewin's strictures against Aristotelian features of psychological analysis need reconsideration, in light of post-Galilean developments in the formulation of human action. In social and personality psychology, psychologists are struggling to regain and substantiate in research the interactionist approach that Lewin formulated so clearly, which for long was misinterpreted in social psychology as a mere situationism. The culture-and-personality theorists with their commitment to neo-Freudian or neobehavioristic principles fall at the same universalistic pole of contextualism, which is implied by the old anthropological postulate of the "psychic unity of mankind."
