Contextualism

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The contextualism is a mindset of Humanities and Social Sciences .

Contextualism looks at politics and other processes in the context of their environment. Class , geography , climate , ethnicity , language , culture , economy , demography , technology , ideology and religion, and finally institutions, influence politics, but are not influenced by it. Thus institutions are independent factors.

Contextualism in the philosophical sense is the view that every decision, action or utterance takes place in a respective context (context, environment) and can only be understood in this context. For example, the descriptions of the laws that try to predict human behavior (see forecasting from a social science perspective and forecasting (psychology) ) are always context-specific. The strict interpretation of contextualism also implies that even fundamental concepts like truth may only be context-specific. Some philosophers claim that this view leads to relativism .

In the field of ethics , contextualism is most closely related to ethical particularism ( situation ethics ) and ethical relativism . In epistemology , contextualism is an attempt to answer the problem of skepticism . The skeptic denies the sheer possibility of knowledge and justified this by pointing out that many situations ( states of affairs ) with any views and their justifications consistent are, while these views are wrong nevertheless. In contrast, the contextualist hides certain states of being in the discussion about knowledge as not relevant for this.

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