[Editor’s Note: This essay, acclaimed as "the best account of contextualism in Amercian philosophy" by its most authoritative spokesman, was presented at the Symposium of the International Congress of Philosophy, Fu Jen Catholic University, 28 December 1979--l January 1980, Hsin Chuang, Taipei Hsien, Taiwan: Fu Jen Catholic University, Proceedings, 1981, 168-182. ]

Speculative philosophy and metaphysical world views are not part of the main stream of contemporary philosophy in the West, and many twentieth-century philosophers have regarded their severance from such a role as good riddance. Philosophers today are more concerned with analyzing other problems and with ways of using language to clarify a wide range of concepts. They are less concerned with traditional philosophies of life than with logical and epistemological analysis. In pursuing these investigations, moreover, they have sharpened our philosophical tools and advanced the art of philosophizing. And yet is there anything more important for contemporary philosophy than developing sound philosophies of life and adequate world views?

If there are more important problems of philosophy and religion for our day than those of finding our place in the cosmos and developing ways of making sense of the total range of experience, they are ones intimately related to, if not dependent upon, these two. And these two involve metaphysical world views and speculative philosophy. Accordingly, the reports of the passing of these types of investigation seem to me to be both exaggerations and indications of the need for a clearer facing up to certain fundamental traditional problems. Improving our tools and ways of philosophizing is excellent, but surely the advance is more substantial if it can be applied not merely in areas which perhaps lend themselves more readily to a high degree of precision and clarity but also in the momentous realms of metaphysics where discussions are sometimes more noteworthy for the weight and import of their subject matter than for the clarity of their presentation.

In any event, in this essay I shall attempt to outline a contextualistic philosophy of life. This involves both a metaphysics and some indication of how such critical areas as methodology, knowledge, and values are to be treated in this world view. Our first task, then, is to sketch a contextualistic way of finding our place in the cosmos and making sense of the full range of experience. Before entering on this enterprise, however, perhaps it is well to note that though I am convinced of the merits of my contextualistic hypothesis, it seems to me more important to have a variety of different approaches to these problems than it is to have any one proposed solution to them, no matter how adequate its protagonists may deem it. I hope that my proposal sheds significant light on these problems, but I should not wish to maintain that it is the only adequate way of so doing. Quite the contrary. Indeed, I believe that not infrequently there are more ways than one of making sense of a problematic situation, whether we are confronted with a minor personal difficulty or with developing a world view, and we are the poorer if we restrict ourselves to a single way. Where it is a matter of trying to make comprehensive sense of the full range of experience, moreover, it is even more important that we seek whatever light we can find. On this important topic on which light is so urgently needed we cannot afford to disregard any possible source of light, for careful study of even inadequate world views may lead us to a better understanding of our world and our place in it.

The contextualist denies atomism, and his patterned events or affairs are not discrete atomic units but rather are complex interrelationships of tendencies all interwoven into integral wholes each with its own individual character or quality. Each historical event is a web or network of happenings (strands), a focal center into which features of other histories somehow enter. Strands constitute a texture, and texture, strand, and context are relative to each other. What is a strand or detail in one context may become texture in its own right in another. As I put it in another essay.

So much, then, for a bare outline of the conceptual framework a contextualist uses to describe our world and our place in it. By way of elaborating on this categorial system I should now like to comment on seven sets of implications important for a contextualistic philosophy of life: namely, (l) the pervasiveness of change, (2) analysis as tracing patterns of change, (3) the naturalistic approach, (4) the real as diverse and multiple, (5) fallibilism, (6) the method of critical inquiry, and (7) moral, aesthetic, and spiritual values.

Within this complex the incomplete and the unstable, the contingent and uncertain, the novel and precarious are as real as the relatively complete, stable, and well established. Indeed, our world is a mixture of all these qualities, and to meet its challenges we must seek not an illusory permanence but rather intelligent ways of redirecting ongoing affairs. Permanence we cannot find, but continuities and relative stability we may. We can find patterns of change and constant or relatively invariant relations between changes. Accordingly, we need to stabilize patterns we find good, seek ways of averting or reconstructing, if possible, patterns we find bad, and develop ways of living acceptably with unavoidable evils.

So, whether we wish to understand our world or to do something about something in it, the central fact is one of change. The fixed and the permanent, accordingly, far from being marks of perfection, are much more likely to be illusory expressions of something past and outmoded; and insistence on the unchanging, one fears, will far more probably guarantee botching a current enterprise than guide us to a higher reality.

(2) The second point I want to comment on, analysis as tracing patterns of change, is closely related to our first point on the pervasiveness of change. Philosophers have long recognized analysis as an important philosophical activity, but there are more ideas than one as to its nature, and the contextualist has a new version of its nature and what it means to understand something. What is it to understand or interpret something? The traditional answer has been that analysis is an affair of reducing a complex to fixed and permanent elements; but if change is indeed pervasive, this won't do. The contextualist denies the possibility of element analysis in the sense of breaking down a concrete whole into atomic units or irreducible constituents of some sort and insists that understanding or interpreting a situation means placing it in an appropriate context. To analyze something is to distinguish temporal patterns rather than to unveil timeless distinctions. It is to disentangle or sort strands, remembering that the latter are relative to textures and contexts. Analysis exhibits the texture or structure of an event, and this requires both discrimination of constituent strands and relevant contextual references, for the strands derive part of their quality from environing textures and have a way of leading off into them. So analysis becomes an affair of following references from one texture to another, and how far we follow them or which ones we trace depends on the problem occasioning our analytic inquiry. But we never reach ultimate units.

Analysis for the contextualist may take a number of forms, but the basic pattern remains relatively constant. Two common forms are relating strands to convenient control textures and tracing genetic patterns. If we are analyzing a painting, we may trace the colors off into a schematic control texture such as a color chart or color cone, identifying them as to hue, brightness, and saturation; and the individual colors located in the chart may be correlated further with ranges of vibrations in a physical schematic texture of light waves. The latter scheme in turn may tie in with the conceptual framework of physics and be interconnected in various ways with the schematic structures of the other sciences. These systems of references suggest operations for producing a particular color and guide us to appropriate textures.

In this example I analyze the death of JB and contend that something more than timeless distinctions of ultimate elements is needed.

It won't do, as all of us detective story buffs know, to say that whatever the cause, he is none the less dead, and no considerations of attendant circumstances or of anything before or after the instant of death are needed.

Which considerations of this sort are relevant will depend, of course, on the purpose of the analysis. If homicide is suspected, the attendant circumstances may be crucially important for the police investigation. Hence, although to be sure, after the fact JB is equally dead whatever the cause, the police investigator's analysis of his death will be different in significant ways depending on whether the cause is asphyxiation, cyanide poisoning, food poisoning, strangulation, a stab in the heart, a blow on the head, cancer, or something else. Death from one of these causes will lead into different environing textures from another cause and will involve different control textures, observations, laboratory reports, and so on. And an adequate analysis of JB's death for the purpose cited needs to exhibit the distinctive features of the total texture stemming from whichever cause or complex of causes may be involved along with, of course, pertinent ramifications in more or less distant environing textures; for a different genetic pattern is involved in each of these cases. But there is no such thing as the analysis of anything, whether the death of JB or the flavor of lemonade. There are as many analyses of these things as there are problems or purposes connected with JB's death or the flavor of lemonade.

(3) As we noted earlier, contextualism represents a naturalistic approach. It maintains that it is possible to account for natural events wholly in terms of other natural events without going outside the system. Contextualists are concerned with questions growing out of affairs within nature rather than with attempts to discover some divine design for the totality of things. They reject the notion of a deity who intervenes in arbitrary fashion through special supernatural measures, and they question the supernatural doctrines of special creation, miracles, and revelation.

In spite of their rejection of supernaturalism, however, various contextualistically oriented philosophers have used the term "God", but in general the traditional idea has been reinterpreted naturalistically, usually in terms of values, and they have sometimes noted that their ideas can be formulated without using the term. James and Dewey both wrote of God and religion in terms of values, and even so some of his associates regarded James as too supernaturalistic. Dewey, in A Common Faith, interpreted God as an active relation between the ideal and the actual rather than as an eternal, completed Being; and his account is strongly humanistic. The contextualistically oriented philosopher for whom the notion of God is perhaps most central is Henry Nelson Wieman, who spoke of God as the source of human good, the set of forces making for creativity.

In any event, contextualists place man in nature and assume a basic continuity between him and his environment, natural, social, and cultural. They focus on man as a living creature adjusting or adapting to its environment and view intelligence as a distinctive form of behavior concerned with choosing appropriate means for the attainment of future ends. The live creature has commerce with its environment in multitudinous ways, and some of the multiple interactions or transactions with it are so integral to the events related that the distinction between organism and environment becomes a functional one which may be drawn in different ways, depending on the interaction. The environment supports some interactions and fails to support others so that organism and environment enter into more or less stable integrations, form uneasy equilibriums requiring frequent adjustments or modifications, with survival of the organism depending on making some of them. Contextualists concede that there are many, many things we do not yet understand about nature as human environment, but they are convinced that any new discoveries we may make will only enlarge our knowledge of the natural.

(4) From what I have said already about change one might expect the contextualist to stress the diverse and multiple character of the real; and this is indeed the case. Our concrete experiences are boundlessly multiple and varied. Heterogeneity and diversity rather than homogeneity and sameness characterize existent things; and our world, as William James liked to proclaim, is not a monistic block universe but rather one with a plurality of specifically diverse, heterogeneous existences. Although, he conceded, there are many ways, mainly abstract or mechanical, of referring to the universe as one, we have found no way of reducing all things to a common denominator in any very significant, concrete sense; and contextualists in general share James' suspicion of theories which make the world out to be all crystal clear with each part neatly and tightly fitted into a logical system. The kind of world we encounter in experience seems rather to be one with some mud and cracks in it, with some portions shadowy and others in darkness; and although we try to throw what light we can on these dark areas, we must not make the mistake of assuming that the significance of an experience is always directly proportional to its clarity. There may, indeed, be things not dreamt of in our philosophy.

The pragmatic difference between pluralism and monism, according to James, hinges on the reality or unreality of novelty, and for the contextualist concrete novelty and change are so evident that the issue is readily resolved. We experience a world of change, one shot through with novelties and risks, struggles, real losses, and genuine gains; one in which our choices may make a difference.

Even if we concede that on occasion in ordinary speech we may justifiably speak somewhat loosely of "practical certainty" in a sense which leaves open the possibility of our later discovering we were wrong, cognitive certainty in principle regarding matters of fact seems unattainable; and contextualists challenge claims to certainty, whether based on infallible authority, self-evident principles, or on some sort of indubitable data. For they seem to them to operate as devices for shutting off or blocking further investigation, and with Peirce they want to keep the road to inquiry open. At best, moreover, the feeling of certainty is an evidential item which needs to be weighed with other evidence, and, as the history of philosophy repeatedly shows, the feeling has been reported for a long and varied set of highly dubious claims. Accordingly, whether viewed in terms of current evidence or the historical record, assertions of indubitability or certainty appear to be quite questionable. It is therefore easy to see why Peirce held that attempts to base our reasoning regarding matters of fact on indubitables are likely to lead to scepticism or irrationality. We neither find nor need to find indubitable axioms. If we can base our account on a number of converging lines of evidence even if each of them considered separately is only probable, we can arrive at a belief that is highly probable and a much better guide to action than a so-called indubitable.

(6) If, then, we seek instead of certainty a greater measure of security in a changing world, we need something better than authoritarianism, a priori formulas, plain guesswork, or merely allowing events to run their course. We need an intelligently guided experimental procedure for discovering what changes need to be made in a situation to ward off ills or secure goods, and this program of action for bringing intelligence into a situation is the method of critical inquiry.

What, then, is critical inquiry? It is a way of solving problems or resolving doubts, and contextualists are convinced that the pattern exemplified in it is applicable, with appropriate modifications, to the full range of problems facing us in this changing world. These problems, according to the contextualist, are specific and concrete, or can be made so; and to the extent that we can formulate them in these terms, we can work at overcoming them. If, however, we try to make a problem of everything at once or the cosmos at large, we have no way of solving or getting a handle on it; and the response is likely to be escape or despair. Descartes’ universal doubt seemed to Peirce and his fellow pragmatists to be spurious: we do not doubt in general or wholesale fashion. Genuine doubt arises only when we have a question about a specific item, and this is possible because, for the moment, we accept without question a context of beliefs. This is not to maintain, of course, that these beliefs are indubitable, for they too may be questioned at another time, with a different problem, but once more only within a setting of accepted beliefs.

Perhaps the best way of summarizing the method of critical inquiry is to do so in terms of John Dewey’s analysis of the steps in a complete act of reflective thinking. His version appears in a variety of different books: e.g., in How We Think, 1910, 1933, and in Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, 1938. According to his general account, critical thinking begins with problems or difficulties, defines them in terms of observation and analysis, seeks hypotheses for solving the problems, reasons out the implications of these suggested solutions, and verifies them through observation and experimentation. We determine which proposed solution for a problem is most promising by studying the conditions and consequences of accepting that particular hypothesis rather than one of its alternatives. Because something on the order of this experimental method, as Dewey saw it, had been used with conspicuous success by many generations of natural scientists, he frequently referred to it as the scientific method. But since the method had been used effectively also in various other areas of investigation not commonly designated as scientific, I prefer the term "critical thinking." In any event, contextualists are convinced that this method can be applied to any problematic situation, and they have stressed the importance of applying it to values, both individual and social.

(7) In this connection three very important possible uses of the method are: l. to determine whether a purported value is indeed such; 2. to conserve and make secure old values and to create new ones; and 3. to develop in individuals a habit of reasonableness in considering value problems and in societies institutional procedures for dealing intelligently with value conflicts. In terms of the first use, through considering conditions and consequences of one of our prizings or aversions we can decide whether it is not merely desired or rejected but worthy of being so treated. If, say, a rich dessert we like very much has the unwanted consequence of helping us put on more weight, its value may become negative for us. With reference to the second use, each suggested solution for a value problem proposes a way of selecting or creating a value which will overcome the difficulty. Thirdly, there are obvious advantages in habitually seeking reflectively approved values instead of treating values as irrational or brute desires, something to be accepted on the basis of native prejudices, authoritarian dogma, simple precedent, social pressures, or the like.

The activistic problem-solving emphasis, then, is an important part of the contextualist's view of values; but the realization of quality is also essential. Not merely is the world full of problems we strive to solve; it is also alive with unique vivid qualities which are worth having for their own sake. And if we are indebted to scientists for furthering the method of critical inquiry, we likewise owe a tremendous debt to artists who help us strip away the covers [which] practically efficient habits and routines have placed on qualities so that we may experience them in all their freshness and vividness.

But to summarize the contextualistic view of values, since we are mortal, it behooves us to make the most of this life. Accordingly, what we seek for ourselves and the human community, according to the contextualist, is a life rich in enhanced qualities, amply supplied with opportunities for bettering our world, and increasingly capable of coping with problems. Basic for this outlook are the enjoyments and sufferings, the prizings and aversions of individual human agents who function in natural social contexts. For value in the full sense, however, these immediate valuings are not kept in their raw form but rather are transmuted into reflectively approved values through a critical review of their conditions and consequences and a survey of alternative possibilities. What effect does this prizing as compared with that one, say, have on one's total personality? Does it work for or against development of an integrated personality and one's long-term interests? A similar line of questioning may be undertaken with our ways of associating with others: does this association or this institutional pattern do more than alternative ones to further the growth or development of the individuals in it? Does it maximize the opportunities for many if not all to achieve the values important for their well-being, or does it render these goods less secure and less readily available? Does this social organization promote a wide and generous sharing of our common values?

Perhaps, however, a review of a sampling of six erroneous notions about values will do more to clarify the contextualistic view than further efforts at summarizing it. Accordingly, I shall examine in turn the following misconceptions: (1) To make sense of values there must be a single fixed end or goal for all values, the good; (2) the basic determiner of values is possession of material goods; (3) There is nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so; (4) Values are just matters of taste about which disputing is pointless; (5) What makes a thing beautiful is that it gives pleasure; and (6) Values are strictly an individual affair.

(1) The contextualist denies that to make sense of values there must be a single fixed end or goal for all values, the good. There are indefinitely numerous values, as many unique goods as there are specific problematic situations; and if one is to speak in terms of the good, one does well to interpret it with Dewey as growth or problem-solving. The basic value notion for the contextualist, however, is "better" rather than "good", and one determines which course of action is better in a given situation by applying the method of critical inquiry with its weighing of conditions and consequences.

(2) Nor is it true that the basic determiner of values is possession of material goods; for one's moral, aesthetic, and spiritual needs stand in no one-to-one relation to such possessions, and many of our most important problems turn about other values. Food, shelter, clothing, and a certain degree of material well-being are tremendously important. Without them the distinctively human level of living in our time would not be possible; but it is not the case that the more money one has, the happier and better off one is. Far more important for our total system of values is ability to forecast in the imagination the consequences of alternative lines of action and to use these forecasts in choosing what we shall do or become.

(3) To those who argue that there is nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so, the contextualist answers that it takes more than thinking something is a good solution for a problem to solve it, and a course of action which has disastrous consequences is none the less ruinous because we do not think it bad.

(4) The contention that values are just matters of taste about which disputing is pointless, as the contextualist sees it, is a misleading oversimplification which is often advanced as a way of closing off discussion and blocking further inquiry. The world is interesting because tastes and needs differ--the lion does not share the horse's taste for grain; and the contextualist agrees that imposing one's own standard of taste on others is undesirable, but is there any more interesting or significant area to discuss than matters of taste? Where differences of taste occur we may go into great detail to explain why we like what we do, and on occasion as a result of such a discussion we may come to discern features we had not previously noted in, say, a particular work of art and in consequence re-appraise it. I dare say that it is a rare individual who has never come through later hearings to appreciate some musical composition which was first experienced as distasteful. Do we not normally assume, more-over, that our tastes can be improved in the sense of becoming broader and more discriminating and think that we have evidence in regard to ourselves that such is the case? And those who claim that to say that something is good is merely to say that we like it seem to overlook the fact that at least some of our likes and dislikes, fortunately, can be modified through a reflective consideration of conditions and consequences.

(5) In terms of the contextualistic aesthetic view it is not the case that what makes a thing beautiful is that it gives pleasure. Many if not most aesthetic experiences are pleasant, but, according to the contextualist, what both the artist and the appreciator aim for is vivid enhanced quality, and the characteristic aesthetic experience is clear, intense, vivid, and organized. To say that a work of art is pleasant may be a way of damning it with faint praise, for a great work is moving rather than simply pleasant. The prominence of conflict, even tragic conflict, in much great art presents a problem for the pleasure view but supports the contextualistic interpretation, for conflict is a major way of generating quality.

(6) The declaration that values are strictly an individual affair, a matter of individual likes and dislikes, appears to the contextualist to be clearly an overstatement. The very language the individual uses to make the assertion brings in the community with whom we share the language even when we are alone. It neglects the importance of cooperation, joint efforts, and shared experiences and minimizes the attitudes, appreciations, and aspirations we have in common. Without the human community, past and present, and its interactions with nature we should not have the values we prize most. As human, we are social creatures, and our spiritual values like most of our other values gain from being shared. Even scarce material goods cannot be fully enjoyed in the presence of those who need and lack them. In community, then, we find our highest values; and in our common pursuit of the better we reinforce each other and enhance our values.

In conclusion, then, in this essay I have maintained that the most important problem of our time is one of developing sound philosophies of life and adequate world views. In an effort to shed further light on this matter and various related problems I have attempted to sketch a contextualistic philosophy of life which finds change to be the salient feature of our heterogeneous and diverse world, holds that analysis is a matter of tracing patterns of change, is committed to the method of critical inquiry as our best way of dealing with the many specific problems of our day but recognizes our fallibility, and maintains that our values grow out of the enjoyments and sufferings of individual human agents functioning in social contexts. With such a philosophy of life and a measure of good fortune we can remake ourselves and our world into something better.

1. For a fuller account of contextualism and its categories see my Contextualistic Theory of Perception (University of California Publications, Vol. XXII, eds. George Plimpton Adams et al. Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1942 ), pp.6-19.

2. "Contextualism and Cosmic Evolution-Revolution" in Evolution—Revolution: Patterns of Deveopment in Nature, Society, Man and Knowledge, Rubin Gotesky and Erwin Laszlo, eds, (New York, London, Paris: Gordon & Breach, Science Publishers, 1971), pp. 7-8. This essay also appears in The Philosophy Forum, Vol. 11 ( March, 1972), 3-39.

3. Experience and Nature, Lectures upon the Paul Carus Foundation, First Series, (Chicago, London: Open Court Publishing Co. 1925 ), p.28, 2nd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1929).

4. Lewis E. Hahn, "John Dewey and Our Time," Baylor Educator, Vol. 3, No. 1, (Spring 1978), 1-7, 14.

5. See e.g., A Pluralistic Universe (London, Bombay, and Calcutta: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1909), p. 79.

6. Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, eds. Charles Hartshorne, Paul Weiss, and A. W. Burks, 8 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1931-58), Vol. 1, p.141.