Whilemechanism attempts to explore questions about what makes people the way they are and organicism attempts to understand why people are the way they are, the contextualist philosophy attempts to explore what people are (Goldhaber, 2000). Contextualism taps the "historic event" as its metaphor (Pepper, 1970, p. 232), referring to how individuals experience and understand the things that happen in life (ACBS, 2007; Pepper, 1970).