Functional Contextualism

Steven C. Hayes

University of Nevada

What is Philosophy of Science?

• Philosophy is a process of specifying your assumptions, detecting inconsistencies among them, and acknowledging their implications

Why Does it Matter?

• Concepts unplugged from their orienting assumptions lose vitality

• Incoherence can lead to dead ends

• Assumptions provide coherent measures of progress

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

Why Contextualism?

• The unit: The situated, historical, purposive act

• Truth criterion: successful working

• Why? This is when behaviorism became “radical”

Types

• Descriptive: a personal experience of the participants in the whole

• Functional: prediction and influence with precision, scope, and depth

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

The Weirdest Feature

• Descriptive contextualists have used it to tear down science

• But that is a kind of ontology

How Do You Know?

• The mind demands an answer

• But there is more to us that the answer why

• Consider values

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 …

Helps Us Shut Up

• When we have nothing useful to say beyond experience itself