Root metaphors are based on seemingly well-understood, common-sense, everyday objects or ideas, and serve as the basic analogy by which an analyst attempts to understand the world.
Contextualism is Pepper's term for the philosophical pragmatism developed by Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, John Dewey, and others.
[6] Without a clear analytic goal, the contextualist could analyze the endless context of an act in perpetuity, without ever knowing when the analysis was complete or good enough to be deemed "true" or "useful".
Descriptive contextualists seek to understand the complexity and richness of a whole event through a personal and aesthetic appreciation of its participants and features.
This approach reveals a strong adherence to the root metaphor of contextualism and can be likened to the enterprise of history, in which stories of the past are constructed in an attempt to understand whole events.
This approach reveals a strong adherence to contextualism's extremely practical truth criterion and can be likened to the enterprise of science or engineering, in which general rules and principles are used to predict and control events.