An Analysis of Contextualism and its Consequences in Richard Paul’s Theory of “Fair-minded Critical Thinking”

Richard Paul is a renowned thinker in the field of critical thinking who believes in the implementation of critical thinking in human decisions and actions. By analyzing reasoning and thinking, he found certain ideas that turned out to be significant in analyzing thinking. Here his contextualism is blatant which along with foundationalism and coherenticism seem to be a kind of reaction to skepticism. From this perspective, in epistemology, there is a turn towards social contexts. In this way, contextualism enjoys certain contextual elements such as actions, social relations, culture, and other human situations in justifying a belief or vice versa. Context, in this sense, can formulate Paul’s inclination towards textulism, pluralism, and relativism. The main objective of the present work is to explore the consequences of Richard Paul’s theory. Resolving the problem of contextualism by critical thinking is one of the Paul’s innovations that so far has remained unnoticed. So universal attention towards his ideas made this research necessary for analyzing his views. According to this research, Paul has succeeded to follow a moderate method that contains in itself certain universal standards which at the same time attended to context. Consequently, in his fair-minded critical thinking, Paul has sought to be saved from falling into reductionism, and in this way he has succeeded to reduce the consequences of contextualism.