A Probe Into The Contextualism In Psychology

Psychology has a lengthy foretime and an ephemeral history. In the lengthy foretime, psychology has been in the custody of philosophy. Psychology has always wanted to be independence, which becomes realization in virtue of the development and support of science. The world view of mechanism prevails in science at this moment, and the psychological mainstream influenced by science regards mechanism as its own main world view. From Wundt, traditional mainstream psychology has looked for its road, simulating the nature science, so it expresses strong tendency of mechanism in the process of development. In psychology, mechanism has different embodiments, from research object, method, to humanistic view. The great limitation of the tendency of mechanism mainly lies in the objectivism, reductionism and method-centered in research. Many psychologists start to look for another world view to induct psychology, which is contextualism. In western counties, contextualism has gotten high attention and produced wide influence. But in China, few psychologists has introduced the contextualism. Through discussing the development, basic hypothesis, various wings and the meaning of contextualism, the article outspreads the picture of contextualism in psychology. Moreover, the article hopes to make the psychologists think much of context. In contextualism,human activity does not develop in a social vacuum, but rather it is situated within a sociohistorical and cultural context of meaning and relationships. To study human can not miss the context like mechanism, because human actions are embedded in a context of time, space, culture. Contextualism seeks to replace what it sees as the currently rival dominant metatheory, mechanism. Contextualism is growing rapidly and is being advocated by a diverse variety of psychologists, many of whom otherwise have little in common. Each variety of contextualism that has a different perspective can be seen as unique. One wing of contextualism, descriptive contextualism, rejects...