Relativism

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Relativism is the idea that views are relative to differences in perception and consideration. There is no universal, objective truth according to relativism; rather each point of view has its own truth.^[1]
The major categories of relativism vary in their degree of scope and controversy.^[2] Moral relativism encompasses the differences in moral judgments among people and cultures.^[3] Truth relativism is the doctrine that there are no absolute truths, i.e., that truth is always relative to some particular frame of reference, such as a language or a culture (cultural relativism).^[4] Descriptive relativism, as the name implies, seeks to describe the differences among cultures and people without evaluation, while normative relativism evaluates the morality or truthfulness of views within a given framework.

"There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so." - Hamlet: Act 2, Scene 2.

Forms of relativism

Anthropological versus philosophical relativism

Anthropological relativism refers to a methodological stance, in which the researcher suspends (or brackets) his or her own cultural biases while attempting to understand beliefs and behaviors in their local contexts. This has become known as methodological relativism, and concerns itself specifically with avoiding ethnocentrism or the application of one's own cultural standards to the assessment of other cultures.^[5] This is also the basis of the so-called "emic" and "etic" distinction, in which:

• An emic or insider account of behavior is a description of a society in terms that are meaningful to the participant or actor's own culture; an emic account is therefore culture-specific, and typically refers to what is considered "common sense" within the culture under observation.
• An etic or outsider account is a description of a society by an observer, in terms that can be applied to other cultures; that is, an etic account is culturally neutral, and typically refers to the conceptual framework of the social scientist. (This is complicated when it is scientific research itself that is under study, or when there is theoretical or terminological disagreement within the social sciences.)

Philosophical relativism, in contrast, asserts that the truth of a proposition depends on the metaphysical, or theoretical frame, or the instrumental method, or the context in which the proposition is expressed, or on the person, groups, or culture who interpret the proposition.^[6]

Methodological relativism and philosophical relativism can exist independently from one another, but most anthropologists base their methodological relativism on that of the philosophical variety.^[7]

Descriptive versus normative relativism

The concept of relativism also has importance both for philosophers and for anthropologists in another way. In general, anthropologists engage in descriptive relativism, whereas philosophers engage in normative relativism, although there is some overlap (for example, descriptive relativism can pertain to concepts, normative relativism to truth).

Descriptive relativism assumes that certain cultural groups have different modes of thought, standards of reasoning, and so forth, and it is the anthropologist's task to describe, but not to evaluate the validity of these principles and practices of a cultural group. It is possible for an anthropologist in his or her fieldwork to be a descriptive relativist about some things that typically concern the philosopher (e.g., ethical principles) but not about others (e.g., logical principles). However, the descriptive relativist's empirical claims about epistemic principles, moral ideals and the like are often countered by anthropological arguments that such things are universal, and much of the recent literature on these matters is explicitly concerned with the extent of, and evidence for, cultural or moral or linguistic or human universals.^[8]

The fact that the various species of descriptive relativism are empirical claims, may tempt the philosopher to conclude that they are of little philosophical interest, but there are several reasons why this isn't so. First, some philosophers, notably Kant, argue that certain sorts of cognitive differences between human beings (or even all rational beings) are impossible, so such differences could never be found to obtain in fact, an argument that places a priori limits on what empirical inquiry could discover and on what versions of descriptive relativism could be true. Second, claims about actual differences between groups play a central role in some arguments for normative relativism (for example, arguments for normative ethical relativism often begin with claims that different groups in fact have different moral codes or ideals). Finally, the anthropologist's descriptive account of relativism helps to separate the fixed aspects of human nature from those that can vary, and so a descriptive claim that some important aspect of experience or thought does (or does not) vary across groups of human beings tells us something important about human nature and the human condition.

Normative relativism concerns normative or evaluative claims that modes of thought, standards of reasoning, or the like are only right or wrong relative to a framework. ‘Normative’ is meant in a general sense, applying to a wide range of views; in the case of beliefs, for example, normative correctness equals truth. This does not mean, of course, that framework-relative correctness or truth is always clear, the first challenge being to explain what it amounts to in any given case (e.g., with respect to concepts, truth, epistemic norms). Normative relativism (say, in regard to normative ethical relativism) therefore implies that things (say, ethical claims) are not simply true in themselves, but only have truth values relative to broader frameworks (say, moral codes). (Many normative ethical relativist arguments run from premises about ethics to conclusions that assert the relativity of truth values, bypassing general claims about the nature of truth, but it is often more illuminating to consider the type of relativism under question directly.)^[9]

Postmodernism and relativism

The term "relativism" often comes up in debates over postmodernism, poststructuralism and phenomenology. Critics of these perspectives often identify advocates with the label "relativism". For example, the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis is often considered a relativist view because it posits that linguistic categories and structures shape the way people view the world. Stanley Fish has defended postmodernism and relativism.^[10]

These perspectives do not strictly count as relativist in the philosophical sense, because they express agnosticism on the nature of reality and make epistemological rather than ontological claims. Nevertheless, the term is useful to differentiate them from realists who believe that the purpose of philosophy, science, or literary critique is to locate externally true meanings. Important philosophers and theorists such as Michel Foucault, Max Stirner, political movements such as post-anarchism or post-Marxism can also be considered as relativist in this sense - though a better term might be social constructivist.

The spread and popularity of this kind of "soft" relativism varies between academic disciplines. It has wide support in anthropology and has a majority following in cultural studies. It also has advocates in political theory and political science, sociology, and continental philosophy (as distinct from Anglo-American analytical philosophy). It has inspired empirical studies of the social construction of meaning such as those associated with labelling theory, which defenders can point to as evidence of the validity of their theories (albeit risking accusations of performative contradiction in the process). Advocates of this kind of relativism often also claim that recent developments in the natural sciences, such as Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, quantum mechanics, chaos theory and complexity theory show that science is now becoming relativistic. However, many scientists who use these methods continue to identify as realist or post-positivist, and some sharply criticize the association.^[11][12]

Related and contrasting positions

Relationism is the theory that there are only relations between individual entities, and no intrinsic properties. Despite the similarity in name, it is held by some to be a position distinct from relativism—for instance, because "statements about relational properties [...] assert an absolute truth about things in the world".^[13] On the other hand, others wish to equate relativism, relationism and even relativity, which is a precise theory of relationships between physical objects:^[14] Nevertheless, "This confluence of relativity theory with relativism became a strong contributing factor in the increasing prominence of relativism".^[15]

Whereas previous investigations of science only sought sociological or psychological explanations of failed scientific theories or pathological science, the 'strong programme' is more relativistic, assessing scientific truth and falsehood equally in a historic and cultural context.

Relativism is not skepticism. Skepticism superficially resembles relativism, because they both doubt absolute notions of truth. However, whereas skeptics go on to doubt all notions of truth, relativists replace absolute truth with a positive theory of many equally valid relative truths. For the relativist, there is no more to truth than the right context, or the right personal or cultural belief, so there is a lot of truth in the world.^[16]

Catholic Church and relativism

The Catholic Church, especially under John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI, has identified relativism as one of the most significant problems for faith and morals today.^[17]

According to the Church and to some theologians, relativism, as a denial of absolute truth, leads to moral license and a denial of the possibility of sin and of God. Whether moral or epistemological, relativism constitutes a denial of the capacity of the human mind and reason to arrive at truth. Truth, according to Catholic theologians and philosophers (following Aristotle) consists of adequatio rei et intellectus, the correspondence of the mind and reality. Another way of putting it states that the mind has the same form as reality. This means when the form of the computer in front of someone (the type, color, shape, capacity, etc.) is also the form that is in their mind, then what they know is true because their mind corresponds to objective reality.

The denial of an absolute reference, of an axis mundi, denies God, who equates to Absolute Truth, according to these Christian theologians. They link relativism to secularism, an obstruction of religion in human life.

Leo XIII

Pope Leo XIII (1810–1903) was the first known Pope to use the word relativism in the encyclical Humanum genus (1884). Leo XIII condemned Freemasonry and claimed that its philosophical and political system was largely based on relativism.^[18]

John Paul II

John Paul II in Veritatis Splendor

As is immediately evident, the crisis of truth is not unconnected with this development. Once the idea of a universal truth about the good, knowable by human reason, is lost, inevitably the notion of conscience also changes. Conscience is no longer considered in its primordial reality as an act of a person's intelligence, the function of which is to apply the universal knowledge of the good in a specific situation and thus to express a judgment about the right conduct to be chosen here and now. Instead, there is a tendency to grant to the individual conscience the prerogative of independently determining the criteria of good and evil and then acting accordingly. Such an outlook is quite congenial to an individualist ethic, wherein each individual is faced with his own truth, different from the truth of others. Taken to its extreme consequences, this individualism leads to a denial of the very idea of human nature.

In Evangelium Vitae (The Gospel of Life), he says:

Freedom negates and destroys itself, and becomes a factor leading to the destruction of others, when it no longer recognizes and respects its essential link with the truth. When freedom, out of a desire to emancipate itself from all forms of tradition and authority, shuts out even the most obvious evidence of an objective and universal truth, which is the foundation of personal and social life, then the person ends up by no longer taking as the sole and indisputable point of reference for his own choices the truth about good and evil, but only his subjective and changeable opinion or, indeed, his selfish interest and whim.

Benedict XVI

In April 2005, in his homily^[19] during Mass prior to the conclave which would elect him as Pope, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger talked about the world "moving towards a dictatorship of relativism":

How many winds of doctrine we have known in recent decades, how many ideological currents, how many ways of thinking. The small boat of thought of many Christians has often been tossed about by these waves – thrown from one extreme to the other: from Marxism to liberalism, even to libertinism; from collectivism to radical individualism; from atheism to a vague religious mysticism; from agnosticism to syncretism, and so forth. Every day new sects are created and what Saint Paul says about human trickery comes true, with cunning which tries to draw those into error (cf Ephesians 4, 14). Having a clear Faith, based on the Creed of the Church, is often labeled today as a fundamentalism. Whereas, relativism, which is letting oneself be tossed and "swept along by every wind of teaching", looks like the only attitude acceptable to today's standards. We are moving towards a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as certain and which has as its highest goal one's own ego and one's own desires. However, we have a different goal: the Son of God, true man. He is the measure of true humanism. Being an "Adult" means having a faith which does not follow the waves of today's fashions or the latest novelties. A faith which is deeply rooted in friendship with Christ is adult and mature. It is this friendship which opens us up to all that is good and gives us the knowledge to judge true from false, and deceit from truth.

On June 6, 2005, Pope Benedict XVI told educators:

Today, a particularly insidious obstacle to the task of education is the massive presence in our society and culture of that relativism which, recognizing nothing as definitive, leaves as the ultimate criterion only the self with its desires. And under the semblance of freedom it becomes a prison for each one, for it separates people from one another, locking each person into his or her own 'ego'.^[20]

Then during the World Youth Day in August 2005, he also traced to relativism the problems produced by the communist and sexual revolutions, and provided a counter-counter argument.^[21]

In the last century we experienced revolutions with a common programme–expecting nothing more from God, they assumed total responsibility for the cause of the world in order to change it. And this, as we saw, meant that a human and partial point of view was always taken as an absolute guiding principle. Absolutizing what is not absolute but relative is called totalitarianism. It does not liberate man, but takes away his dignity and enslaves him. It is not ideologies that save the world, but only a return to the living God, our Creator, the Guarantor of our freedom, the Guarantor of what is really good and true.

Criticisms

A common argument^{[22][23][24][25]} against relativism suggests that it inherently contradicts, refutes, or stultifies itself: the statement "all is relative" classes either as a relative statement or as an absolute one. If it is relative, then this statement does not rule out absolutes. If the statement is absolute, on the other hand, then it provides an example of an absolute statement, proving that not all truths are relative. However, this argument against relativism only applies to relativism that positions truth as relative–i.e. epistemological/truth-value relativism. More specifically, it is only extreme forms of epistemological relativism that can come in for this criticism as there are many epistemological relativists^[who?] who posit that some aspects of what is regarded as factually "true" are not universal, yet still accept that other universal truths exist (e.g. gas laws or moral laws).

Another argument against relativism posits a Natural Law. Simply put, the physical universe works under basic principles: the "Laws of Nature". Some contend that a natural Moral Law may also exist, for example as argued by Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion (2006)^[26] and addressed by C. S. Lewis in "Mere Christianity" (1952).^[27] Dawkins said "I think we face an equal but much more sinister challenge from the left, in the shape of cultural relativism - the view that scientific truth is only one kind of truth and it is not to be especially privileged".^[28] Philosopher Hilary Putnam,^[29] among others,^[30] states that some forms of relativism make it impossible to believe one is in error. If there is no truth beyond an individual's belief that something is true, then an individual cannot hold their own beliefs to be false or mistaken. A related criticism is that relativizing truth to individuals destroys the distinction between truth and belief.

Views

Indian religions

Indian religions tend to view the perceivable universe and cosmos as relativistic.^{[citation needed]}  Mahavira (599-527 BC), the 24th Tirthankara of Jainism, developed an early philosophy regarding relativism and subjectivism known as Anekantavada. Hindu religion has no theological difficulties in accepting degrees of truth in other religions. A Rig Vedic hymn states that "Truth is One, though the sages tell it variously." (Ékam sat vipra bahudā vadanti)

Madhyamaka Buddhism, which forms the basis for many Mahayana Buddhist schools and was founded by Nagarjuna, discerns two levels of truth, absolute and relative. The two truths doctrine states that there is Relative or common-sense truth, which describes our daily experience of a concrete world, and Ultimate truth, which describes the ultimate reality as sunyata, empty of concrete and inherent characteristics. The conventional truth may be interpreted as "obscurative truth" or "that which obscures the true nature" as a result. It is constituted by the appearances of mistaken awareness. Conventional truth would be the appearance that includes a duality of apprehender and apprehended, and objects perceived within that. Ultimate truths, are phenomena free from the duality of apprehender and apprehended.^[31]

In Sikhism the Gurus (spiritual teacher ) have propagated the message of "many paths" leading to the one God and ultimate salvation for all souls who tread on the path of righteousness. They have supported the view that proponents of all faiths can, by doing good and virtuous deeds and by remembering the Lord, certainly achieve salvation. The students of the Sikh faith are told to accept all leading faiths as possible vehicles for attaining spiritual enlightenment provided the faithful study, ponder and practice the teachings of their prophets and leaders. The holy book of the Sikhs called the Sri Guru Granth Sahib says: "Do not say that the Vedas, the Bible and the Koran are false. Those who do not contemplate them are false." Guru Granth Sahib page 1350;^[32] later stating "The seconds, minutes, and hours, days, weeks and months, and the various seasons originate from the one Sun; O nanak, in just the same way, the many forms originate from the Creator." Guru Granth Sahib page 12,13.

Sophists

Sophists are considered the founding fathers of relativism in the Western World. Elements of relativism emerged among the Sophists in the 5th century BC. Notably, it was Protagoras who coined the phrase, "Man is the measure of all things: of things which are, that they are, and of things which are not, that they are not." The thinking of the Sophists is mainly known through their opponents, Plato and Socrates. In a well known paraphrased dialogue with Socrates, Protagoras said: "What is true for you is true for you, and what is true for me is true for me."^[33][34][35]

Bernard Crick

Another important advocate of relativism, Bernard Crick, a British political scientist, wrote the book In Defence of Politics (first published in 1962), suggesting the inevitability of moral conflict between people. Crick stated that only ethics could resolve such conflict, and when that occurred in public it resulted in politics. Accordingly, Crick saw the process of dispute resolution, harms reduction, mediation or peacemaking as central to all of moral philosophy. He became an important influence on the feminists and later on the Greens.

Paul Feyerabend

The philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend is often considered to be a relativist, though he denied being one.^[36]

Feyerabend argued that modern science suffers from being methodologically monistic (the belief that only a single methodology can produce scientific progress).^[37] Feyerabend summarises his case in his work Against Method with the phrase "anything goes".^[38]

In an aphorism [Feyerabend] often repeated, "potentially every culture is all cultures". This is intended to convey that world views are not hermetically closed, since their leading concepts have an "ambiguity" - better, an open-endedness - which enables people from other cultures to engage with them. [...] It follows that relativism, understood as the doctrine that truth is relative to closed systems, can get no purchase. [...] For Feyerabend, both hermetic relativism and its absolutist rival [realism] serve, in their different ways, to "devalue human existence". The former encourages that unsavoury brand of political correctness which takes the refusal to criticise "other cultures" to the extreme of condoning murderous dictatorship and barbaric practices. The latter, especially in its favoured contemporary form of "scientific realism", with the excessive prestige it affords to the abstractions of "the monster 'science'", is in bed with a politics which likewise disdains variety, richness and everyday individuality - a politics which likewise "hides" its norms behind allegedly neutral facts, "blunts choices and imposes laws".^[39]

Thomas Kuhn

Thomas Kuhn's philosophy of science, as expressed in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is often interpreted as relativistic. He claimed that as well as progressing steadily and incrementally ("normal science"), science undergoes periodic revolutions or "paradigm shifts", leaving scientists working in different paradigms with difficulty in even communicating. Thus the truth of a claim, or the existence of a posited entity is relative to the paradigm employed. However, it isn't necessary for him to embrace relativism because every paradigm presupposes the prior, building upon itself through history and so on. This leads to there being a fundamental, incremental, and referential structure of development which is not relative but again, fundamental.

From these remarks, one thing is however certain: Kuhn is not saying that incommensurable theories cannot be compared - what they can’t be is compared in terms of a system of common measure. He very plainly says that they can be compared, and he reiterates this repeatedly in later work, in a (mostly in vain) effort to avert the crude and sometimes catastrophic misinterpretations he suffered from mainstream philosophers and post-modern relativists alike.^[40]

But Thomas Kuhn denied the accusation of being a relativist later in his postscript.

scientific development is ... a unidirectional and irreversible process. Latter scientific theories are better than earlier ones for solving puzzles ... That is not a relativist's position, and it displays the sense in which I am a convinced believer in scientific progress.^[41]

Some have argued that one can also read Kuhn's work as essentially positivist in its ontology: the revolutions he posits are epistemological, lurching toward a presumably 'better' understanding of an objective reality through the lens presented by the new paradigm. However, a number of passages in Structures do indeed appear to be distinctly relativist, and to directly challenge the notion of an objective reality and the ability of science to progress towards an ever-greater grasp of it, particularly through the process of paradigm change.

In the sciences there need not be progress of another sort. We may, to be more precise, have to relinquish the notion, explicit or implicit, that changes of paradigm carry scientists and those who learn from them closer and closer to the truth.^[42]

We are all deeply accustomed to seeing science as the one enterprise that draws constantly nearer to some goal set by nature in advance. But need there be any such goal? Can we not account for both science’s existence and its success in terms of evolution from the community’s state of knowledge at any given time? Does it really help to imagine that there is some one full, objective, true account of nature and that the proper measure of scientific achievement is the extent to which it brings us closer to that ultimate goal?^[43]

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson define relativism in their book Metaphors We Live By as the rejection of both subjectivism and metaphysical objectivism in order to focus on the relationship between them, i.e. the metaphor by which we relate our current experience to our previous experience. In particular, Lakoff and Johnson characterize "objectivism" as a "straw man", and, to a lesser degree, criticize the views of Karl Popper, Kant and Aristotle.^{[page needed]}

Robert Nozick

In his book Invariances, Robert Nozick expresses a complex set of theories about the absolute and the relative. He thinks the absolute/relative distinction should be recast in terms of an invariant/variant distinction, where there are many things a proposition can be invariant with regard to or vary with. He thinks it is coherent for truth to be relative, and speculates that it might vary with time. He thinks necessity is an unobtainable notion, but can be approximated by robust invariance across a variety of conditions—although we can never identify a proposition that is invariant with regard to everything. Finally, he is not particularly warm to one of the most famous forms of relativism, moral relativism, preferring an evolutionary account.

Joseph Margolis

Joseph Margolis advocates a view he calls "robust relativism" and defends it in his books: Historied Thought, Constructed World, Chapter 4 (California, 1995) and The Truth about Relativism (Blackwells, 1991). He opens his account by stating that our logics should depend on what we take to be the nature of the sphere to which we wish to apply our logics. Holding that there can be no distinctions which are not "privileged" between the alethic, the ontic, and the epistemic, he maintains that a many valued logic just might be the most apt for aesthetics or history since, because in these practices, we are loath to hold to simple binary logic; and he also holds that many-valued logic is relativistic. (This is perhaps an unusual definition of "relativistic". Compare with his comments on "relationism"). "True" and "False" as mutually exclusive and exhaustive judgements on Hamlet, for instance, really does seem absurd. A many valued logic—"apt", "reasonable", "likely", and so on—seems intuitively more applicable to Hamlet interpretation. Where apparent contradictions arise between such interpretations, we might call the interpretations "incongruent", rather than dubbing either "false", because using many-valued logic implies that a measured value is a mixture of two extreme possibilities. Using the subset of many-valued logic, fuzzy logic, it can be said that various interpretations can be represented by membership in more than one possible truth sets simultaneously. Fuzzy logic is therefore probably the best mathematical structure for understanding "robust relativism" and has been interpreted by Bart Kosko as philosophically being related to Zen Buddhism.

It was Aristotle who held that relativism implied we should, sticking with appearances only, end up contradicting ourselves somewhere if we could apply all attributes to all ousiai (beings). Aristotle, however, made non-contradiction dependent upon his essentialism. If his essentialism is false, then so too is his ground for disallowing relativism. (Subsequent philosophers have found other reasons for supporting the principle of non-contradiction).^{[clarification needed]}

Beginning with Protagoras and invoking Charles Sanders Peirce, Margolis shows that the historic struggle to discredit relativism is an attempt to impose an unexamined belief in the world's essentially rigid rule-like nature. Plato and Aristotle merely attacked "relationalism"—the doctrine of true-for l or true for k, and the like, where l and k are different speakers or different worlds, or the something similar (Most philosophers would call this position "relativism"). For Margolis, "true" means true; that is, the alethic use of "true" remains untouched. However, in real world contexts, and context is ubiquitous in the real world, we must apply truth values. Here, in epistemic terms, we^[who?] might retire "true" tout court as an evaluation and keep "false". The rest of our value-judgements could be graded from "extremely plausible" down to "false". Judgements which on a bivalent logic would be incompatible or contradictory are further seen as "incongruent", though one may well have more weight than the other. In short, relativistic logic is not, or need not be, the bugbear it is often presented to be. It may simply be the best type of logic to apply to certain very uncertain spheres of real experiences in the world (although some sort of logic needs to be applied to make that judgement). Those who swear by bivalent logic might simply be the ultimate keepers of the great fear of the flux.^{[citation needed]}

Richard Rorty

Philosopher Richard Rorty has a somewhat paradoxical role in the debate over relativism: he is criticized for his relativistic views by many commentators, but has always denied that relativism applies to much anybody, being nothing more than a Platonic scarecrow. Rorty claims, rather, that he is a pragmatist, and that to construe pragmatism as relativism is to beg the question.

'"Relativism" is the traditional epithet applied to pragmatism by realists'^[44]

'"Relativism" is the view that every belief on a certain topic, or perhaps about any topic, is as good as every other. No one holds this view. Except for the occasional cooperative freshman, one cannot find anybody who says that two incompatible opinions on an important topic are equally good. The philosophers who get called 'relativists' are those who say that the grounds for choosing between such opinions are less algorithmic than had been thought.'^[45]

'In short, my strategy for escaping the self-referential difficulties into which "the Relativist" keeps getting himself is to move everything over from epistemology and metaphysics into cultural politics, from claims to knowledge and appeals to self-evidence to suggestions about what we should try.'^[46]

Rorty takes a deflationary attitude to truth, believing there is nothing of interest to be said about truth in general, including the contention that it is generally subjective. He also argues that the notion of warrant or justification can do most of the work traditionally assigned to the concept of truth, and that justification is relative; justification is justification to an audience, for Rorty.

In Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity he argues that the debate between so-called relativists and so-called objectivists is beside the point because they don't have enough premises in common for either side to prove anything to the other.

Isaiah Berlin

The late Sir Isaiah Berlin expressed a relativistic view when he stated that, to "confuse our own constructions with eternal laws or divine decrees is one of the most fatal delusions of men."^[47] And again when he said, "the concept of fact is itself problematic…all facts embody theories...or socially conditioned, ideological attitudes."^[48]

Transactionalism

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

Transactionalism is a philosophical approach that addresses the fundamental nature of social exchange or human transaction; that all human exchange is best understood as a set of transactions within a reciprocal and co-constitutive whole. A transactionalist demands that all human exchange, including learning,^[1] is best understood as a transactional whole shaped and defined by a set of experiences in an ecology that are all-at-once biological, socio-linguistic, and intellectual; "man is an information-processing, organizing, open-energy system."^[2][3] Attention must be paid to organizing acts within, and as-if always, a reciprocal and co-constitutive, exchange whether it be in buying and selling, teaching and learning, in a marital contract, or a social situation in-person or online.

Definition

Stemming from the Latin transigere ("˜to drive through", "to accomplish"), the root word "transaction" is not restricted to the economic sense of buying and selling or merely a financial transaction. A much larger field of exchange is employed such as, "any sort of social interaction, such as verbal communication, eye contact, or touch. A 'stroke' [of one's hand] is an act of recognition of a transaction" as employed in psychology with transactional analysis^[4] It not only examines exchanges, or "transactions," between borrower and lender, but encompasses any transaction involving people and objects whether it involves "borrowing-lending, buying-selling, writing-reading, parent-child, and husband-wife."^[5] A transaction, then is "a creative act, engaged in by one who, by virtue of his participation in the act – of which he is always an aspect, never an entity – together with the other participants, be they human or otherwise environmental, becomes [,] in the process [,] modified."^[6]

Background

The contributions of American philosopher John Dewey

While John Dewey is viewed by many transactionalists as a principal architect,^[7] social anthropologist Fredrik Barth was among the first to articulate the concept as it is understood in contemporary study.^[8] Political scientists Karl W. Deutsch^[9] and Ben Rosamond have also written on the subject.^[10] Transactionalist analysis is a core paradigm advanced by social psychologist Eric Berne in his book Games People Play.^[11] A transactionalist view of psychology, for instance, views an individual as "embedded and integrated" in an ever-evolving world of situations, actors, and exchange.^[1]

The discourse of transactionalist problem-solving is applied to a vast array of academic and professional discourses including educational philosophy in the humanities;^[12] social psychology,^[13][14] political science,^[15] and political anthropology^[16] in the social sciences; and occupational science^[17] in the health sciences; cognitive science,^[18] zoology,^[19] and quantum mechanics^[20][21] in the natural sciences; and transactional competence^[22] and leadership-as-practice^[23] in business.^[24]

John Dewey offered a sophisticated, yet pragmatic approach to understanding man as an organism-environment purposefully designed to correct the "fragmentation of experience" often found in other philosophical approaches found in Subjectivism, Objectivism, Constructivism and Skepticism.^[1]

He asserted that human life is not organized into separate entities, as if the mind (emotions, feelings, creativity, imagination) and the world outside it (raw and manufactured goods as well as social roles and institutions such as family, school, and media) are irreconcilable, leading to the question "How does the mind know the world?"^[25]

Historical antecedents

Galileo refused to seek the causes of the behavior of physical phenomena in the phenomena alone and sought the causes in the conditions under which the phenomena occur.^[26][3]

The writing of John Dewey and Arthur Bentley in Knowing and the Known offers a deep dive into transactionalism but its historical antecedents date back to Polybius and Galileo. Trevor J. Phillips (1927–2016), American professor emeritus in educational foundations and inquiry^[27] at Bowling Green State University from 1963 to 1996, wrote a comprehensive review of the historical, philosophical, psychological, and educational development of transactionalism in his 1966 dissertation "Transactionalism: An Historical and Interpretive Study" republished in 2013 by Influence Ecology. Phillips traced transactionalism's philosophical roots to Greek historians Polybius and Plato, 17th century polymath and architect of the scientific revolution Galileo, as well as the architect of modern western philosophy, René Descartes. Galileo's contributions to the scientific revolution rested on an understanding of transactionalism from which he argued Aristotelian physics was wrong, as he wrote in Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (1632):

"In that case, if it is denied that circular motion is peculiar to celestial bodies, and affirmed to belong to all naturally movable bodies, then one must choose one of two necessary consequences. Either the attributes of generable-ingenerable, alterable-inalterable, divisibleindivisible, etc., suit equally and commonly all world bodies – as much the celestial as the elemental – or Aristotle has wrongly and erroneously deduced, from circular motion, those attributes which he has assigned to celestial bodies^[28]

The philosophy abandons self-actional and interaction-al beliefs or suppositions as problem-solving in an objective world where co-operative exchange creates value in learning,^[1] and the foundation of transactional competence, how objects including people behave. Galileo deviated from the then current Aristotelian thinking, which was defined by mere interactions rather than co-constituetive transacting among people with different interests who may be solving competing intentions or conditions of life.

Modern antecedents

Trevor Phillips also outlined the philosophy's more recent developments found in the American philosophical works of Charles Sanders Peirce, sociologist George Herbert Mead (symbolic interactionism),^[29] pragmatist William James, educational philosopher John Dewey,^[30] and political scientist Arthur Bentley.

Several sources credit anthropologist Fredrik Barth as the scholar first to apply the term 'transactionalism" in 1959.^[31][32][33] In a critique of structural functionalism, Barth offered a new interpretation of culture that did not portray an overly cohesive picture of society without attending to the "roles, relationships, decisions, and innovations of the individual."^[31] Humans are transacting with one another at multiple levels of individual, group, and environment. Barth's study appears to not fully articulate how this is happening all-at-once as opposed to as if separate entities interacting (interactional):

[T]he "environment" of any ethnic group is not only defined by natural conditions, but also by the presence and activities of other ethnic groups on which it depends. Each group exploits only a section of the total environment [perhaps in keeping with the idea of a "transactional whole"], and leaves large parts of it open for other groups to exploit (p. 1079).^[16]

Using examples from the people of the Swat district of North Pakistan^[16] and, later, in 1966, organization among Norwegian fishermen, Barth set out to demonstrate that social forms like kinship groups, economic institutions, and political alliances are generated by the actions and strategies of the individuals who deploy organized acts against a context of social constraints. "By observing how people interact with each other [through experience], an insight could be gained into the [interactional] nature of the competition, values and principles that govern individuals' choices."^[31]

This insight would be interactional at best and not transactional—reciprocal and co-constituetive transactions at the levels of individual, group, and environment (including man-as-organism and its ecological situations).

Some scholars argue transactionalism is a theory rather than philosophical approach.^[34] Barth's contribution was initially criticized for paying insufficient attention to cultural constraints on individualism though it influenced the qualitative method known as symbolic interactionism used in the social sciences.^[35] As a pragmatic and philosophical approach, transactionalism is recognizable in the theory of the "sociological imagination" by American sociologist C. Wright Mills (1959), in which personal troubles are linked to public issues. In other words, the transactional whole is not readily apparent at the level of individuals who at that level operate in a self-actional manner when larger forces of sociality, history, biology, and culture are all-at-once at work as part of a global dynamic. Humans are never outside this dynamic current; operating the system in some self-actional or even interactional way.

21st century applications

Transactional competence

Modern architects of the philosophy are John Patterson and Kirkland Tibbels, co-founders of Influence Ecology, acquired, edited, and published, Phillips' dissertation (as is) in 2013. With a foreword written by Tibbels, a hardback and Kindle version was published under the title Transactionalism: An Historical and Interpretive Study (2013).^[36] The monograph is an account of how human phenomena came to be viewed less as the behavior of static and/or mutually isolated entities, and more as dynamic aspects of events in the process of problem-solving, and thereby becoming or satisfying, the unavoidable and inescapable conditions of human life.

Transactional leadership (LAP)

In a new model of organizational management known as the "leadership-as-practice" Dewey and Bentley's Knowing and the Known categories of action—self-action, inter-action, and trans-action brings transactionalism into the C-suite.^[37] A transactional leadership practice is defined by its "trans-actors" who "enact new and unfolding meanings in on-going trans-actions"^[38] situated in contrast to an older model leadership defined by self-actional (self-actors) and inter-actional (inter-actors) practices. In the latter, actors and situations often remain unchanged. In Leadership-as-Practice, Joseph A. Raelin distinguishes between a "practice" that extends and amplifies the meaning of work and its value vs. "practices" that are habitual and sequential activities evoked to simplify everyday routines. A transactional approach—leadership-as-practice—focuses attention on "existing entanglements, complexities, processes, [while also] distinguishing problems in order to coordinate roles, acts, and practices within a group or organization." Said another way, "trans-action attends to emergent becoming"—a kind of seeing together--"rather than substantive being (Tsoukas and Chia 2002)" among the actors involved.^[39]

Philosophy

Metaphysics: transactional (vs. self-actional or interactional)

The transactional view of metaphysics—studying the nature of reality or what is real—deals with the inseparability of what is known and how humans inquire into what is known—both knowing and the known.^[40] Since the age of Aristotle, humans have shifted from one paradigm or system of "logic" to another before a transactional metaphysics evolved with a focus that examines and inquires into solving problems first and foremost based on the relationship of man as a biological organism (with a brain and a body) shaped by its environment. In the book Transactionalism (2015), the nature of reality is traced historically from self-action to interaction to transactional competence each as its own age of knowing or episteme.

The pre-Galilean age of knowing is defined by self-action "where things [and thereby people] are viewed as acting on their own powers."^[41] In Knowing and the Known, Dewey and Bentley wrote, "The epistemologies, logics, psychologies and sociologies [of our day] are still largely [understood] on a self-actional basis."^[7]

The result of Newtonian physics, interaction marks the second age of knowing; a system marked especially by the "third 'law of motion'—that action and reaction are equal and opposite".^[7]

The third episteme is transactional competence.^[40][42] With origins in the contributions of Darwin, "man's understandings are finite as opposed to infinite. In the same way, his views, goals, commitments, and beliefs have relative status as opposed to absolute."^[43] John Dewey and Arthur Bentley asserted this competence as "the right to see together, extensionally and durationally, much that is talked about conventionally as if it were composed of irreconcilable separates."^[7] We tend to avoid considering our actions as part of a dynamic and transactional whole, whether in mundane or complex activities; whether in making an invitation, request, or offer or in the complex management of a program or company. We tend to avoid studying, thinking, and planning our moves and moods for a comprehensive, reciprocal, and co-constitutive—in other words, transactional—whole.^[44]

A transactional whole includes the organized acts including ideas, narratives, people as resources implementing ideas, services, and products, the things involved, settings, and personalities, all considered in and over time. With this competence, that which acts and is acted upon become united for a moment in a mutual or ethical exchange, where both are reciprocally transformed^[44] contradicting "any absolute separation or isolation"^[45] often found in the dualistic thinking and categorization of Western thought.

Dualistic thinking and categorization often lead to over-simplification of the transactional whole found in the convenient but ineffective resorting to "exclusive classifications." Such classifications tend to exclude and reify man as if he has dominion over his nature or the environment.

In his seminal 20th century work Physics and Philosophy, Warner Heisenberg reflects this kind of transactionalist thinking: "What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.” The together-at-once reality of man as organism-environment is often overlooked in the dualistic thinking of even major philosophers like Descartes who is often referenced for his "I think, therefore I am" philosophy. Of a transactionalist approach, Heisenberg writes, "This was a possibility of which Descartes could not have thought, but it makes the sharp separation of the world and I impossible."^[46]

Dualistic thinking prevents man from thinking. "In the spirit of [Charles Sanders] Peirce, transactionalism substitutes continuity for discontinuity, change and interdependence for separateness."^[47]

For example, in problem solving, whenever we "insert a name instead of a problem," when words like "soul," "mind," "need," "I.Q." or "trait" are expressed as if real, they have the power to block and distort free inquiry into what is known in fact or as fact in the transactional whole.^[48]

In the nature of change and being, "that which acts and that which is acted upon" always undergo a reciprocal relationship that is affected by the presence and influence of the other.^[45] We as human beings, as part of nature as an organism "integral to (as opposed to separate from, above or outside of) any investigation and inquiry may use a transactionalist approach to expand our personal knowledge so as to solve life's complex problems.^[49]

The purpose of transactionalism is not to discover what is already there, but for a person to seek and interpret senses, objects, places, positions, or any aspect of transactions between one's Self and one's environment (including objects, other people, and their symbolic interactions) in terms of the aims and desires each one needs and wants to satisfy and fulfill. It is essential that one simultaneously take into account the needs and desires of others in one's environment or ecology to avoid the self-actional or self-empowerment ideology of a rugged and competitive individualism. While other philosophies may discuss similar ethical concerns, this co-constitutive and reciprocal element of problem-solving is central to transactionalism.

To put it simply, "to experience is to transact; in point of fact, experience is a transaction of organism-environment."^[47] In other words, what is "known" by the knower (or organism) is always filtered and shaped by both internal and external moods and narratives, mirrored in and through our relationships to the physical affordances and constraints in our environment or in specific ecologies.

The metaphysics of transactional inquiry is characterized in the pragmatic writing of William James who insists that "single barreled terms," terms like "thought" and "thing," actually stop or block inquiries into what is known and how we know it. Instead, a transactional orientation of ‘double-barreledness’ or the "interdependence of aspects of experience" must always be considered.^[50] James offers his readers insight into the "double-barreledness" of experience with an apt proposition:

Is the preciousness of a diamond a quality of the gem [the thing] or is it a feeling in our mind [the thought]? Practically we treat it as both or as either, according to the temporary direction of our thought. The ‘experienced’ and the ‘experiencing,’ the ‘seen’ and the ‘seeing,’ are, in actuality, only names for a single fact.^[51][52]

What is real then, from a transactionist perspective, must be constantly reevaluated relative to man as organism-environment in a co-constituitive and reciprocal dynamic with people, personalities, situations, aims, and given the needs each party seeks to satisfy.

Epistemology: truth from inquiry

Transactionalists are firmly intolerant of "anything resembling an 'ultimate' truth -- or 'absolute' knowledge."^[53] Due to the evolution of psychology about the nature of man, transactionalists reject the notion of a mind-body split or anything resembling the bifurcation of what they perceive as the circuitry in which our biological stimulus-response exists. Examples transactionalists reject include the self-acting notions of Aristotle who posited that "the soul -- the psyche -- realized itself in and through the body, and that matter and form were two aspects involved in all existence." Later, the claims of French philosopher René Descartes, recognized as the father of modern Western philosophy, were examined and defined as "interactional". Descartes suggested stimulus-response as the realm where the mind controls the body and the body may influence the rational mind out of the passion of our emotions.

Transactionalists recognize Cartesian dualism as a form of disintegrating the transactional whole of man "into two complete substances, joined to another no one knows how."^[54][55] The body as a physical entity, on the one hand, and the soul or thought, on the other, was regarded in a Cartesian mindset as "an angel inhabiting a machine and directing it by means of the pineal gland"^[54][55] This tranactionalists reject.

Man has the propensity to treat the mind and thought or the mind and body as abstractions and this tendency to deny the interrelatedness or coordinated continuity results in misconceptions in learning and inaccurate thinking as humans move and thrive with an ecology. Accurate thinking and learning begins and is constantly developed through action resulting from thought as a repetitive circuit of experience known in psychology as deliberate practice. Educational philosopher Trevor Phillips, now deceased, frames this tendency to falsely organize our perception: "[W]e fail to realize that we can know nothing about things [or ourselves] beyond their significance to us," otherwise we distort our "reality" and treat things we perceive within it, including our bodies or mind, as if concrete thereby "denying the interconnectedness of realities" (plural).^[56] Transactionalists suggest that accurate (or inaccurate) thinking is rarely considered an unintended consequence of our propensity for abstractions.

When an individual transacts through intelligent or consequential actions circumscribed within the constraints and conditions of her/his environment in a reflexive, repetitive arc of learned experience, there is a "transaction between means and ends" (see reference below). This transactional approach features twin aspects of a larger event rather than merely manipulating the means to an end in our circumstances and situations. For instance, a goal can never be produced by abstraction, by simply thinking about or declaring a promise to produce a result. Nor can it be anticipated or foreseen (an abstraction at best) without a significant "pattern of inquiry," as John Dewey later defined and articulated, into the constraints and conditions that happen and are happening given the interdependence of all the people and objects involved in a simple or complex transaction. The nature of our environment affects all these entities within a transaction. Thus, revealing the limiting and reductive notion of manipulating a psychology around stimulus and response found in Aristotilian or Cartesian thought.

A transaction is recognized here as one that occurs between the "means and ends;" in other words, transactional competence is derived from the "distinctions between the how, the what (or subject-matter), and the why (or what for)." This transactional whole constitutes a reciprocal connection and a reflexive arc of learned and lived experience.^[57] From a transactional approach one can derive a certain kind of value from one's social exchange. Value in knowing how, what, and why the work done with your mind and body fulfill on the kinds of transactions needed to live a good and satisfying life that functions well with others. Truth from actual inquiry is foundational for organism-environment to define and live by a set of workable ethical values that functions with others.

Ethics: reciprocal and co-constitutive

While self-interest governs the ethical principles of Objectivism, here the principle is that man as an organism is in a reciprocal, constitutive relationship with her/his environment. Disabusing the psychological supposition of our "skin-boundedness" (discussed further below), transactionalism rejects the notion that we are apart from our environment or that man has dominion over it. Man, woman, and child must view life and be viewed in the undifferentiated whole of organism-environment. This reciprocal and co-constitutive relationship is what sets Transactionalism apart from other philosophies.

What John Dewey meant by "reciprocal" was that:

... consequences have to be determined on the grounds of what is selected and handled as means in exactly the same sense in which the converse holds and demands constant attention if activities are to be intelligently conducted.^[58][57]

In order for a human being to know, in order for a human being to acquire intelligence, it must learn to relate to its Self as part of, not separate from the internal and/or external environments in which it lives as an organism-environment. Whether the environment is natural or man-made, whether discussing biology, sociology, culture, linguistics, history and memory, or economics and physics, every organism-environment is reciprocal, constitutive, socially-conditioned and constantly in flux demanding our ethical attention to conditions and consequences as we live life. John Dewey and Arthur Bentley, like Charles Sanders Peirce before them, were out to distinguish an ethical "living" logic rather than a static one.^[43] Both rejected the supposition that man had dominion over or governed behavior in his/her environment embracing a presupposition of transactionalism; we are reciprocal, co-constitutive, socially-conditioned, and motivated "together-at-once" as we seek solutions to living a good life.^[59]

Transactionalists reject the "localization" of our psychology as if "skin-bound."^[3] Bentley wrote, "No creature lives merely under its skin." In other words, we should not define and distinguish experience in and from the subjective mind and feelings. Conversely, we cannot rely solely on external circumstances or some static or inherited logic. Galileo said of followers of Aristotle in seeking ethical knowledge that one should "come with arguments and demonstrations of your own...but bring us no more texts and naked authorities, for our disputes are about the sensible world and not a paper one."^[49] Humans are always transacting, "together-at-once,"^[60] part of, shaped by, and shap-ing the experience we call "knowledge" as an organism-environment.^[40]

Dewey and Bentley were intrigued by, and ultimately questioned, "the significance of the concept ‘skin’ and its role in philosophical and psychological thought."^[43] They offered a biological or natural justification that came to define a transactionalist approach. The known and what is known are both a function of man having "evolved among other organisms" within natural selection or evolution.

Man's most intellectual and advanced "knowings" are not merely outgrowths of his own doing or being. The natural evolution of things outside our knowingness creates the very context in which our known and knowings arise. We are not inventing what is known outside or, in a vacuum beyond, who we are and who we are is an organism-environment together-at-once.^[44][3] We are not creatures separated by skin with an internal world of the mind and body "in here" separate from an environment of objects and people "out there". Human beings intelligently live, adapt to, and organize life in a reciprocal, co-constitutive experience that is what Dewey and Bentley term "trans-dermal".

A "trans-dermal" experience demands knowledgeable and accurate inquiry into the conditions and consequences of each transaction where the organizing of ideas and acts (knowledge), is itself a transaction which grows out of the problem-solving and creative exploring within the universe of social situations in which we exist. Dewey and Bentley wrote, "truth, or for that matter falsity, is a function of the deliberately striven for consequences arising out of inquiry."^[56]

Our behavior and acts in knowing, or transacting, must be considered "together" and "at-once" with its conditions and consequences for any ambitious movement or fulfillment to occur alone and among other people in any setting with objects and constructd inherited from others known and unknown over time. Transacting demands study, a slowing down of our movement, and the development of a transactional competence in order to fulfill certain needs or solve problems while functioning among others.

In Dewey's final days, wrote Phillips, he emphasized the twin aspects of attending to both the means and the ends of any transaction: "It is…impossible to have an end-in-view or to anticipate the consequences of any proposed line of action." A "trans-dermal" consciousness is, therefore, key to moving ethically. To move, experience life, or transact in a principled manner, considering the reciprocal and co-constituitive nature of organism-environment becomes an object lesson governing both social behavior as well as in transacting from a trans-dermal view with objects or other bodies.

Trans-dermal experience

The work of Australian educational philosopher Vicki L. Lee further elucidates and breaks down what is "trans-dermal" experience—how it works and why it matters—based on her work in the philosophy of cognitive science,^[61] educational philosophy, and radical behaviorism about which she has published extensively.^[62][59] This complex paradigm is clearly evidenced by Lee in this thickly described example:

Acts are more than movements. ...Our discriminations depend on movements and their contexts seen together-at-once or as an undifferentiated whole. In discriminating watering the garden from hosing the driveway, we see the bodily movements and their occasion and results. We see the garden, the watering implement, and so forth, as much as we see the body's activities. The notion of together-at-once emphasizes that we do not see movements and contexts separately and then infer the action. Rather the context is internal to the action, because without the context, the action would not be the action it is.^[60]

A basic presupposition of the philosophy of transactionalism is to always consider that that which is known about the world (extra-dermal) is "directly concerned with the activity of the knower" which is merely from some sense of "skin-boundedness" (intra-dermal). The known and the knower, as Dewey and Bentley examined in detail in their collaborative publication, must always be considered "'twin aspects of common fact."^[3]

Behavior, movement, and acts are not merely a function of the mind, of wishful or positive thinking or belief in external forces, nor can it be determined ethically from the philosophers of the past or knowledge written in a book. It is our ability to transact trans-dermally—to be and become ecologically-fit as an organism-environment—that begets truthful inquiry into living a good and satisying life, functioning well among others.^[44]

Philosophy and Women's Studies Professor Shannon Sullivan explores and applies "transactional knowing through embodied and relational lived experience"^[63] as a feminist epistemology developed out of the pragmatist tradition. See “pragmatist-feminist standpoint theory”.^[64]

Politics: Cooperation and knowing-as-inquiry

The branch of philosophy recognized as "politics" concerns the governance of community and group interaction, not merely that of the state as conceived when thinking of a local or national government.^[65]

In Laws of Motion (1920), physicist James Clerk Maxwell articulated the modern conception of "transaction" used here—one that is not exclusive to an economic context limited to only the opposition of a buyer-seller in a trade or other analougous uses. Unlike its use in commercial affairs, there is a radical departure from any tendency to perceive buyer-seller (as well as organism-environment) as opposing or separate forces. In a transactionalist approach, Maxwell (as well as others) view the former and latter as "two parts of the same phenomenon."^[66][3]

Dewey and Bentley apply this notion of 'transactional' to learning more than any other context. In the educative process, acting without knowing is a separation of the same phenomenon enjoined in inquiry. Without inquiry acting does not work. Acting and knowing cooperate to provide knowledge to an organism-environment which must essentially involve inquiry into things that have happened and are happening:

Knowledge – if the term is to be employed at all – is a name for the product of competent inquiries, and is constituted only as the outcome of a particular inquiry.^[3]

It is not "a process taking place, or as a status located in or at an animal organism."^[3] Knowledge arises from inquiry and the testing of that inquiry to insure the fitness of not only the solution but the organism-environment. While a human being is central or "nuclear" to its organism-environment,^[3] it must abdicate any sense of dominion over the socio-biological cosmos of which human being is part and never outside of. Each situation—and this transactionalists assert is radical—must be examined and determined by a construction of moves and action based on the capacity of that organism to fulfill its intentions and thrive (or not). Dewey and Bentley later insisted that knowing "as inquiry, [is therefore] a way, or distinct form, of behavior."^[3]

Transactionalists define politics in this philosophy as a cooperative, genuine interaction between all participating parties whether buyer-seller, student-teacher, or worker-boss given that we are biological and social subjects^[67] involved not merely in "transacting" for our own advantage or gain. "[S]ocial phenomena cannot be understood except as there is prior understanding of physical conditions and the laws of their [socio-biological] interactions," wrote John Dewey in Logic: The Theory of Inquiry.^[67] He added further, "Inquiry into [social phenomena], with respect both to data that are significant and to their relations or proper ordering, is conditioned upon extensive prior knowledge of physical phenomena and their laws. This fact accounts in part for the retarded and immature state of social subjects." Thus, cooperation and knowing as inquiry is foundational to governing communal affairs of any kind including economic trade and the educative process.

In our existing models of formal education, we bifurcate what Dewey viewed as indispensable. We, as a rule, segregate "utility and culture, absorption and expression, theory and practice....in any educational scheme"^[68] In 1952, progressive educator Elsie Ripley Clapp distinguished a similar commitment to "cooperative transaction of inquiry" in her vision that enjoined community and school.^[69]

Intelligence, meaning that which is acquired through inquiry and testing, allows man to foresee consequences and take control of his actions without dogma or beliefs (that might be wrong) derived from past experience or expectations. If the study of politics in philosophy is a "study of force," of knowing "what actions are permissible" given that man is an organism-environment,^[70] then transactionalists assert that cooperation and knowing-as-inquiry are vital to functioning among others.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy noted that Dewey was critical of the classical neoliberal stance that the asbtract individual precedes a conception of society or social institutions. Dewey maintained that social institutions were not a "means for obtaining something for individuals. They are means for 'creating' individuals" (Reconstruction in Philosophy, MW12, 190-192). In this way, classical liberalism seems to exemplify ‘the most pervasive fallacy of philosophical thinking’ (‘Context and Thought’, LW5, 5). Transactionalism is a radical form of governing that resists the tendency to "divide up experienced phenomena, and to take the distinct analysed elements to be separate existences, independent both of the analysis and of each other."^[71]

Intelligent thinking is anti-dualistic, accurate, forethought taking into account other people, communities, and cultures that stems from a "deliberate control of what is done with reference to making what happens to us and what we do to things as fertile as possible of suggestions (of suggested meanings)." ^[72] Furthermore, intelligent thinking is a means for trying out the validity of those suggestions. The political governing of thinking towards dualisms and bifurcation as well as the "false conception of the individual" is what Dewey argued limited man's free, meaning "liberal", thought and action. All of this served as the core reasoning behind Dewey's development of an experimental philosophy that offset elite distortions regarding a public and transactional interest in education and learning.^[71]

Individual as co-constitutive, organism-environment

Transationalist psychologists and educational philosophers reject the ideologies precipitated from Western ideologies of "do-it-yourself" or the "if it's up to me, it will be" mentality that leads to entitlement and the naiveté of slogans like "follow your passion" that deny any consideration of our trans-dermal condition.^[73] Transactionalists assert that the "advancing conformity and coercive competition so characteristic of our times" demands reassessment.^[74] A new "philosophical-psychological complex" is offered that confronts the "ever increasing growth of bureaucratic rule and the attendant rise of a complacent citizenry."^[74] Given the intensification of globalization and migration, a trans-dermal consciousness allows for a transactional emphasis on "human dignity and uniqueness" despite "a matrix of anxiety and despair [and] feelings of alienation."^[74]

Transactionalist psychologists and philosophers replace once sought-after Existentialism as a remedy to feelings of alienation with a trans-dermal orientation to living. Rather than applying a theory or approach that emphasizes the individual as a "free and responsible agent determining their own development through acts of the will,"^[75] subjects are invited to co-create as an organism-environment functioning among all other organism-environments, including the conditions and consequences of objects and personalities, in order to intelligently structure existence in and amongst it all. The very act of participating in co-creation, according to transactionalists, gives and allows each person her/his unique status and dignity in their environment.^[74]

Aesthetics: Value-satisfaction from an assumptive world

Distinct from an aesthetic theory of taste or a rationale for the beauty in an object of art,^[76] a transactionalist theory of aesthetics concerns the perceptual judgments we use to define value, purposeful activity or satisfaction in any experience. Based on studies by transactionalist psychologists Adelbert Ames, Jr. (known for The Ames Demonstrations^[77]), William Howard Ittelson, Hadley Cantril, along with John Dewey, the biological role of perception is key to understanding transactionalism. Perceiving is viewed as "part of the process of living by which each one of us, from his own particular point of view, creates for himself the world within which he has his life’s experiences and through which he strives to gain his satisfactions."^[78] The sum total of these assumptions was recognized as the "assumptive world."^[79]

The assumptive world stems from all that we experience, all the things and events we assess and assign meaning to, which function as a contextual whole also known as a transactional whole. Dewey also referred to the assumptive world as a "situation" (where organism and environment are inseparable) or as a "field" in which behavior, stimulus, and response are framed as if a reflexive circuit.^[80] "To the modern transactionalist, experiences alter perceptual processes, and in the act of altering them, the purposing aspect of perception is either furthered or its fulfillment interfered with."^[81] It is through action, through movement, that man is capable of bringing forth a value-satisfaction to his or her experience. Man's capacity to "sense value in the quality of his experience" was registered through his serial expectations and standards stemming from previous transactions throughout life.^[82]

A theory of value is therefore derived from one's behavioral inquiry within an assumptive world. "Knowledge is a transaction that develops out of man's explorations within [that] cosmos."^[83] Transactionalists reject the notion that any truth is inherently settled or beyond question. The consequences of any inquiry will be dependent on the situation or transactional whole in which man as an organism-environment finds him- or her-self.

To clarify the theory of valuation for man, John Dewey wrote:

To declare something satisfactory [vs. satisfying] is to assert that it meets specifiable conditions. It is, in effect, a judgment that the thing 'will do'. It involves a prediction; it contemplates a future in which the thing will continue to serve; it will do. It asserts a consequence the thing will actively institute, it will do."^[84][85]

Ultimately, transactionalism is a move away from the conclusion that knowledge depends on an independent knower and something to be known.^[3] The reality of a particular situation depends, transactionally speaking, on the interpretation place[d] upon the situation by a particular person. Interpretation is possible only through the accumulation of experience which, in effect, is what is meant by “assumptions”.^[79] Without the hitches and mistakes one encounters in the welter of daily living, the nature of the assumptive world would never arise into consciousness. The assumptive world, initially highlighted in the 25 experiments in perception known as The Ames demonstrations, becomes the seeming reality of our world.^[86] Man’s transactions of living involve, in sum, capacities, and aspects of his nature operating together. To transact is to participate in the process of translating the ongoing energies of the environment into one’s own perceptual awareness, and to transform the environment through the perceptual act. Value-satisfaction arises when the inadequacies of man's assumptive world are revealed or invalidated.^[79] Thereby, the consequences of any transactional experience determines what is valuable or what will do vs. that which is satisfying but will not do. The good life, for the transactionalist, consists of a unity of values, achieved by means of reflective thought, and accepted in the full light of their conditions and consequences.^[87]

To transact is to act intelligently with an aim in mind while avoiding the tendency to surrender one's awareness to complacency or indifference that stems from mere information or untested knowledge. Without action, a person can fool herself, distort her sense of satisfaction or value on behalf of consequences she or others prefer.^[88] Through action, the individual perceptions and the shared perceptual common sense of an assumptive world are validated and modified.^[86] We predict and refine our conditions of life yet "any standard set for these value qualities is influenced by the individual’s personal biological and life history."^[89] Transactionalism is a creativee process that takes into account the unique biology and biography of persons involved.

Generational significance

The importance of the study of transactionalism arose in the late 1960s in response to an "alienation syndrome"^[90] among youth of that generation. As the counter-culture challenged and reassessed society's "philosophical-psychological complex, its Weltanschauung,"^[90][91] their political and social alienation sparked protests against the war and the draft as well as historic racial rebellions in various U.S. cities. The Long hot summer of 1967 and the counterculture movement named the Summer of Love also in 1967 reflected the antipathy of young people who questioned everything. American society's norms and values were perceived as denying dignity to all. Riots of the period were studied in a report by the U.S. Kerner Commission and scholars began to study the patterns of alienation expressed by youth in the sixties.^{[92][93][94][95][96]} Youth sought a kind of existentialism expressed by a need to be "true to oneself." This current of alienation unfortunately veered away from a relevant understanding of the transactional whole taking into account the reciprocal and co-constitutive nature of man as an organism-environment fulfilling important conditions of life with others all the time. It resembles the famous line from Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, written by English poet John Donne -- "No man is an island". Transactionalism presented an alternative to the limitation and unintended outcomes of the alienation syndrome.^[90]

Benefits and Applications

Designed to account for all aspects of experience—subjective and objective—transactionalism requires a slowing down in assessing all the facts involved with the how, what, when, where, and why as we move to transact with others. It demands and requires always considering how a transaction with another and one's self (e.g., a parent or spouse spending additional hours socializing at the gym) is or is not beneficial to all involved in a transaction (e.g., other members of the family). The costs may be in time, attention, or money or in a condition of life (e.g., family, career, sleep). Transactionalism requires an interdependence of thought, study, and action.

A transactionalist must account for one's biology and cognition (metaphysics); the ways knowing reality (epistemology); the reciprocal, co-constitutive, relationship (or ethics) between our social self and the interactions constrained by both our natural and man-made environment. We as human beings live in distinct sociological patterns with people, material and immaterial culture shaped by specific and ever-changing times and places further articulated by increasing migration and globalization. Transactionalism insists that one attend to the political distribution of goods and services along with the ways its value has and is exchanged and changing among people and groups (politics) as well as how persons are socialized to understand what it means to live a good life as well as fulfill those conditions over time (aesthetics).

Transactionalism offers more than existentialism offered with its aim of being "true to oneself." The alienation that results from its orientation to the self at the expense of societal norms and values, even in small groups, often leads to naiveté, despair, frustration, agitation, and even indifference, at the expense of consciously organizing one's acts, while functioning among others, to fulfill one's unique and necessary interests in living a good and satisfying life. Transactionalism counters the naive "do as I see fit" mentality of authenticity regardless of other's needs and concerns, which inevitably leads to negative consequences and outcomes over time. Transactionalism depends upon the "integration of man and his surroundings."^[90]

Phillips' dissertation documented the evolution of a "transactional approach;" one that rests on the fact that we are biological, linguistic, and that we must transact considering a trans-dermal experience of our thoughts, behavior, and exchange on every level imagined while ethically functioning with others well.

A series of podcasts exemplify the application of a transactional approach to a diverse array of professionals from various countries .^[97]