Paradigmatic Contextualism

The idea of paradigmatic contextualism aims to bridge the conflict that emerges when using theories and practices from different traditions.

The standard way of using paradigms consists of defining your way of seeing the world, obtaining valid knowledge, and running with that. You will often regard other traditions as wrong or problematic because their understanding and worldview contrast yours.

Paradigmatic contextualism means that your paradigm varies depending on the context. It also means you have a system to move between paradigms.

Switching between paradigms may feel unauthentic, fake, or manipulative. But hold with me…

A client was talking to me about meeting with his grandma. He is gay and has not come out to her, and he feels that doing so would be painful. We arrived at a point in therapy when he went with his partner to a family wedding, and his grandma saw him with a male partner. He thought that everyone was now accepting him as a gay man in a happy and stable relationship.

At that point, we both knew that the whole family had been talking to each other and that it was some common knowledge. But a few months later, his grandma asked when he would find a woman to marry.

What to do?

We both concluded that his grandma was seeing the situation but that her paradigm could not reconcile it. Her paradigm was so strong that she accepted the partner but could not process her grandson's not having a woman.

Paradigms are a strong thing. They are as vital as breathing and a reality of our human relational field.

When you follow paradigmatic contextualism, you may feel weak or have soft opinions, but the opposite is true.

You have arrived at a point when you accept that different people are around you: different life stories and conceptual and social structures.

Your worldview is so strong that you have also accepted that other worldviews are strong. Your opinions are so clear that you have even ventured to accept and listen to different views.

Paradigmatic contextualism is not the same as a lack of paradigm, perspective or view. This difference is evident when you talk, and you realise that this person has strong opinions on multiple topics but that they would not open up to anyone, but only to the ones who are willing to have a fluid and respectful debate.

When we explore the philosophical traditions behind the knowledge production of our time, we can realise that some paradigms are better suited for some problems. Or maybe even see how a paradigm brings forth or reveals a problem and a possible action.

Paradigms act as a contrast or as a lens that highlights a slice of reality. If I think of the world as physical discrete objects that can be manipulated to obtain an efficient result, I may develop a mathematical equation for it and try to calculate this more sharply. A materialistic and maybe positivistic paradigm may reveal a resonant paradigm to study such a person or help them to go further.

On the other hand, if I explore someone who has this efficiency in object manipulation of objects' view of the world with a hermeneutic approach, I may arrive at a pretty different place. I may use a system like Freud’s and see if these objects represent something like faces or an anal control of the world. I may explore the archetype of the artisan and the technique gods if I use a Jungian symbolic system.

This second paradigmatic approach will create a field of knowledge about this ‘artisan’. If shared, it may inspire this person to develop a deeper connection with their craft and reflect on their spiritual maturation, as happens in Japan when forging a new Katana.

But I may also find lots of resistance because my symbolic analysis may make the work more difficult. As a Western thinker, my hermeneutics is probably not immanent, as the Japanese would. This means that my symbols would not immediately be rooted in nature’s flows, the chi parallel with my body, and the deepening of my participation with the world.

On the other hand, this Western artisan may also find resistance as my lack of numeric efficiency will also slow down the process. This second artisan may feel like I am using absurd and mystical words and saying they are not into religion but only into making some extra money.

Is any of these paradigms and paradigm analyses right or wrong?

None of them is wrong, but each creates and belongs to a different context.

From a cybernetic perspective, we can imagine an app sending messages to their server to get your information after logging in. That would be a fluent flow of information, which is possible because there is a context of encryption that transforms your stored data into your displayed data so nobody else can see it.

As information is contextual, sending my request to the wrong server or the server sending that information to the wrong app would not make sense.

As humans, we constantly process information that is embedded in a context. As we increase our intellectual intelligence and relational intuitions in multiple perspectives, we develop a looser worldview. We slowly begin un-embedding our ways of thinking, allowing us to hold numerous views inside us.

The problem with this process is that without a system to make sense of multiplicity, we start to feel overwhelmed. Some of us accept the uncertainty and run with the unknown.

In my case, I started to draw some lines between these tensions and transitions. I started doing it spontaneously and then found authors who were doing the same (and were more mature thinkers than me).

I think that you should not follow my models. At least not if you do not start drawing your own.

Why would I discourage your to follow me?

I would like to take my ideas as inspiration. Or as a point of reference. Or as some path in the sand that you do not need to follow but helps as a reference.

Maybe as an open-source app, you can send requests to change if something does not work, or you can fork it and make your own.

The point is: I want you to feel like an agent here.

First, I invite you to explore your context. Observe these paradigms in your life as you go about your day.

I would like you to see this as a mixed reality experiment, where the lenses are different ontologies and worldviews.

To hold the question, how would it be to live a day with this idea?

Paradigmatic contextualism is about noticing your context and the contexts you inhabit and asking questions such as: What is the resonance of this space? What system makes sense here? What type of symbolic space am I inhabiting? What plane of reality am I slicing? Which type of video game would this one be? Or, what is the relational field I am entering?

I am explicitly asking similar questions from different angles and paradigms. Do they make a difference? If so, what would that be?