Thank you Alfred.
A very enjoyable read and again and, at least for me, brings up that unit of
anaysis problem again.
And the footnote puts it well in referring to Dewey,
"Psychologists would do well to study one of their best informed early
critics who had started his career as a professor of psychology and then
gone beyond."
Nate
-----Original Message-----
From: Alfred Lang [mailto:alfred.lang@psy.unibe.ch]
Sent: Thursday, August 03, 2000 5:36 PM
To: xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
Subject: Re: transactions
Dear XMCA-friends
Maybe I should take this occasion, after having been occasionally
lurking only or absent totally for some time, to become again active
on the list.
Conceptions of transaction or "Transactionalism" -- like most goods
thrown onto the intellectual market by modern psychology -- comes in
various versions. Some have already been discussed by various
contributors. I had some time ago occasion to comment upon a version
by Rolf Oerter, the Munich developmental psychologist. Since I have
presented his version and my own in a paper published in:
Görlitz, Dietmar; Harloff, Hans Joachim; Mey, Günter & Valsiner, Jaan
(Eds., 1998) Children, Cities, and Psychological Theories --
Developing Relationships. Berlin, DeGruyter. Full text of my
contribution is available on the net at:
http://www.psy.unibe.ch/ukp/langpapers/pap1994-99/1998.03_transactionalism.h
tm
I think the most important thing in understanding the concept of
transaction is (a) putting it in a context of an evolutive system,
i.e. of a unit consisting of an organism and its environment, such as
for example a person in culture, and (b) that it refers to a step or
phase in the evolutive process, be it innovative or regulative. If
something, as a part of a given system can have effects going beyond
its immediate interactional counterpart, be the former or the latter,
the source or the target of the interactive encounter a person or an
artefact, I would speak of transaction. Effecting beyond, is the key
word. This is a conception the essence of which can be found in the
Dewey and Bentley volume "Knowing and the Known" of 1949.
I believe that Dewey early in this century, after some twenty or so
years as a professor of psychology and in the wake of numerous
effectless transactions with his fellow psychologists of the APA
founding time left this discipline behind and let it go its absurd
way as a so-called natural science. For it obviously refused to
listen to his admonition that it cannot be the objective of this
science to find out how things and persons are, but rather how they
come about, how they continuously become and how they change
themselves and how they change their world in that transactional
process. And this how the sciences of the human condition lost
another century, were it not for people like Vygotsky to offer
related conceptions, alas, also with limited success at large.
By the way, both Oerter and myself refer in our chapters to other
authors having attempted to give the term "transaction" a particular
meaning. None is as far-reaching as Dewey's.
Best, Alfred
-- --------------------------------------------------------------------- Alfred Lang, Psychology, Univ. Bern, Switzerland --- alfred.lang@psy.unibe.ch Website: http://www.psy.unibe.ch/ukp/langpapers/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------__________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Talk to your friends online with Yahoo! Messenger. http://im.yahoo.com
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