transactionalism

Mike Cole (mcole who-is-at weber.ucsd.edu)
Fri, 25 Jul 1997 08:28:04 -0700 (PDT)

This exchange from the Dewey list seems relevant to our current
discussions. Dewey was a pragmatist. He was also a transactionalist.
What is Dewey's ontology?
mike
------
Date: Thu, 24 Jul 1997 20:57:35 -0500
Reply-To: Hans Seigfried <hseigfr who-is-at ORION.IT.LUC.EDU>
Sender: John Dewey Discussion List <JDEWEY-L who-is-at VM.SC.EDU>
>From: Hans Seigfried <hseigfr who-is-at ORION.IT.LUC.EDU>
Subject: Existential Transformation
To: JDEWEY-L who-is-at VM.SC.EDU
Status: R
At 12:23 AM 7/24/97 -0700, Kelly Booth wrote:

>...
>I think that it is very difficult for most people to thoroughly grasp
>this perspective. They want to hang on to some version of the
>environment side as being somehow and in some way prior to the organism
>side. Of course, we are mostly unconscious everyday realists in the
>sense that we have the idea that things really are how they look to us
>to be, especially if a whole society sees it the same way. We also tend
>to view people, including ourselves, from a self-actional perspective.
>We feel ourselves to be spectators of the world to a great extent. This
>kind of common sense realism doesn't hold up under close inquiry, but it
>does seem to often pop up in philosophical positions of people who would
>claim to be seeing things from a transacional perspective. Do you think
>that seeing a kind of realism in Dewey is a case of this?

Yes, I agree.

>I feel very strongly that a transactional perspective is a superior one
>in all aspects of human understanding, from physical science to family
>counselling to religious experience and everything in between. My own
>interest is not so much determining exactly what Dewey meant in this or
>that passage, but rather making progress in the elaboration of a
>thoroughly transactional perspective in any and all areas of human
>understanding.

I couldn't agree more. I feel that Dewey's idea of inquiry as existential
transformation is a new and promising idea, and with should get on with
seeing how it works concretely.

Hans