In philosophy, contextualism is the view that any decision or action or utterance always takes place in a context and can only be understood within that context (cf indexicality). Therefore, any 'laws' which attempt to predict (for example) human behaviour will only ever be context-specific. More controversially, the strong version of this thesis implies that even fundamental concepts like 'truth' might only be context-specific. Some philosophers argue that the idea that this view might lead to relativism. Nevertheless, contextualist views are increasingly popular within philosophy.

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Article on 'The Fallacy of Contextualism'