The Third Nordic Pragmatism Conference – Uppsala, 1-2 June 2010
Matz Hammarström
On the Concepts of Transaction and Intra-action
Using the two key concepts “transaction”1 and “intra-action”2, I will outline a
dynamic relationalist perspective, which aims not so much at reconciling realism
and relativism, as at transcending the realism-relativism debate. John Dewey
uses the term trans-action predominantly in Knowing and the Known, written
together with Arthur Bentley in 1949. The term intra-action is coined by the
American feminist and physicist Karen Barad and is a key-concept of her
agential realism as developed in Meeting the Universe Halfway from 2007.
Relationalism challenges the very basis for the traditional debate between
realism and relativism by cutting across the alleged divide between these two
perspectives. In the relationalist perspective outlined, it is the relational intraactivity that constitutes reality and defines subject and object.
Is this, then, a way to understand reality, or is it (just) a way to understand our
understanding of reality? That is: are we dealing with ontology or
epistemology? Possibly the safest route would be to restrict the claim to the
epistemological (like Dewey does in Knowing and the Known), but with the aid
of Barad’s thinking, presenting the key elements of her agential realism, I dare
to make it into an onto-epistemological claim.
Let us start with the problem to which a relationalist approach is a possible
solution. In his Pragmatism without Foundations Joseph Margolis, sets out, as
the subtitle tells us, to reconcile realism and relativism. What is needed,
according to Margolis’, to secure the possibility of objectivity and thereby the
1
From John Dewey’s Knowing and the Known (together with Arthur F. Bentley), Boston 1949.
Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway – Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning,
Durham & London 2007.
2
matz.hammarstrom@teol.lu.se
reliability of science, is an integration of ontic and epistemic internalism with an
ontic externalism, according to which there is some mindindependent reality. Margolis’ calls his position “internal relativism”3, a position
that has much in common with, but also is contrasted to Putnam’s internal
realism. Margolis presents Putnam’s position at length, describing it as
“misleading”, but at the same time “helpful”, as it helps us to see “what more is
required”. This search for a way to secure the possibility of objectivity seems to
be the main goal for efforts like Margolis’ and Putnam’s, and it is also an often
used argument against relativism and pragmatism that these rule out this
possibility of objectivity.
But there are ways of keeping the possibility of objectivity and the reliability
of science without resorting to ontic externalism.
Dewey’s concept of ‘trans-action’
Another way of solving the problem of objectivity (although this is not what he
explicitly sets out to do) is offered by John Dewey’s use of the concept of ‘transaction’, which opens a possibility of ensuring a minimal scientific objectivity,
without having to resort to ontic externalism. In Dewey’s trans-actional
perspective there is no place for the idea of something mind-independent in the
world of man, and still there is a possibility for knowledge and science.
Dewey contrasts the transactional perspective with the antique view of selfaction and the interactional view of classical mechanics: Self-action means that
an object is viewed as acting under its own power; inter-action, means that
object is balanced against object in causal interconnection; while trans-action
means that systems of description and naming are employed to deal with aspects
3
Margolis:289.
2
and phases of action, without final attribution to ‘elements’ or other
presumptively detachable or independent entities or realities.
The fundamental difference is that in the transactional perspective, no radical
separation is made between the subject and the object of knowledge, between
the observer and that which is observed – the determination of objects as
themselves is trans-actional.
This means that knowing is co-operative, open and flexible in character, in a
way that excludes assertions of fixity, and that knowledge is viewed as itself
inquiry – as a goal within inquiry, not as a terminus outside or beyond inquiry.
(97)
Dewey demands a treatment of all of man’s “behavings, including his most
advanced knowings, as activities not of himself alone, nor even as primarily his,
but as processes of the full situation of organism-environment”. An “object” is
to be seen as an “unfractured observation”, which is neither existing separately
apart from any observation, nor existing only in our head “in presumed
independence of what is observed” (131).
The term transaction is used early by Dewey to stress system more effectively
than done by ‘interaction’. It is introduced in the paper “Conduct and
Experience” from 19304 (published in Psychologies of 1930), where he writes:
The structure of whatever is had by way of immediate qualitative presences
is found in the recurrent modes of interaction taking place between what we
term organism, on one side, and environment, on the other. This interaction is
the primary fact, and it constitutes a trans-action. Only by analysis and
selective abstraction can we differentiate the actual occurrence into two
factors, one called organism and the other, environment.(411)
Even if Dewey did not use the term by then, the necessity of a transactional
seeing together of man-environment and stimulus-response was already a
4
Even if Dewey did not use the term by then, the necessity of a transactional seeing together of manenvironment and stimulus-response was already a pivotal idea in his article “The Reflex Arc Concept in
Psychology”, published in Psychological Review 3, 1896.
3
pivotal idea in his article “The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology”, published in
Psychological Review in 1896.
It is not enough to consider the organism-as-a-whole, what is needed is to
consider the organism-in-environment-as-a-whole. Dewey admits that the
transactional point of view may be difficult to acquire at the start:
If we watch a hunter with his gun go into a field where he sees a small
animal already known to him by name as a rabbit, then, within the
framework of half an hour and an acre of land, it is easy—and for immediate
purposes satisfactory enough—to report the shooting that follows in an
interactional form in which rabbit and hunter and gun enter as separates and
come together by way of cause and effect. If, however, we take enough of the
earth and enough thousands of years, and watch the identification of rabbit
gradually taking place, arising first in the subnaming processes of gesture,
cry, and attentive movement, wherein both rabbit and hunter participate, and
continuing on various levels of description and naming, we shall soon see the
transaction account as the one that best covers the ground5.
According to Dewey transaction represents a level in inquiry in which
observation and presentation could be carried on without attribution of the
aspects and phases of action to independent self-actors, or to independently
inter-acting elements or relations (136). In a transactional perspective there is no
basic differentiation of subject and object, no knower to confront what is known
as if in a different realm of being, no ‘entities’ or ‘realities’ of any kind intruding
from behind or beyond the knowing-known events, no constituent that can be
adequately specified as fact apart from the specification of other constituents,
and a thing is not something static, but always in action.
In Knowing and the Known, Dewey underlines physics increasing use of the
transactional perspective and gives a brief sketch of the history of physics from
5
Dewey 1949:141f.
4
Aristotle’s physics built around self-acting substances, via Galileo’s and later
Newton’s inter-acting particles, to Einstein’s physics which brought time and
space into the investigation, using the transactional approach, a seeing together
of what earlier had been seen in separation – a physics in which “a particle by
itself without the description of the whole experimental set-up is not a physical
reality”6 (Dewey quotes, with approval, Philipp Frank’s Foundations of
Physics).
When it comes to the question of how we are to understand the concept of
‘physical reality’, Dewey refers to a discussion between Einstein and Bohr from
the 1930s, and makes the remark that Einstein, “in contrast with his transactional
[…] treatment of physical phenomena […] remained strongly self-actional […]
in his attitude towards man’s activity in scientific enterprise”. Dewey contrasts
this position with Bohr’s “much freer view of the world that has man as an
active component within it, rather than one with man by fixed dogma set over
against it”. Dewey’s explicit preference for Bohr’s approach makes it eligible to
take a closer look at Bohr and his concept of ‘phenomena’, which will
eventually lead us to the second of the two key concepts of this paper: intraaction.
Bohr developed a philosophy-physics as a response to the enigmas
accentuated by the developments in theoretical physics at the beginning of the
1920s. By then the wave-particle duality was an established quandary for
physics – not only concerning the nature of light, but also concerning the
nature of matter – showing that the nature of the observed phenomenon
changes with corresponding changes in the experimental apparatus.
6
Dewey quotes, with approval, from Philipp Frank’s Foundations of Physics.
5
The wave-particle-dualism was solved in two different ways by Bohr and
Heisenberg in 1927. Bohr’s solution was the principle of complementarity,
Heisenberg’s was the uncertainty principle. The uncertainty principle is
epistemological in character, focussing on what knowledge we, under specific
circumstances, can have about a particle’s properties; a question of being
uncertain of a value, existing independently of, but rendered impossible to
attain
accurately
due
to,
the
measurement.
Bohr’s
principle
of
complementarity, in contrast, has ontological implications.
To Bohr properties like ‘momentum’ and ‘position’ have no observerindependent physical reality, and “‘wave’ and ‘particle’ are classical
descriptive concepts that refer to different mutually exclusive phenomena, not
to independent physical objects”7.
A major point for Bohr, as for Dewey, is that we are ourselves part of the
reality we are investigating, and that there is no definite and self-evident cut
between ourselves as investigating subjects and the world as investigated
object. According to Bohr the object and the agencies of observation
constitute a whole, and he uses the term ”phenomena” to denote these, what
he calls, ”particular instances of wholeness”. The interaction between the
object and the agencies of observation constitutes, according to Bohr, an
inseparable part of the phenomenon, and it is to these phenomena that
observations refer, not to “objects in an independent reality”8. This position is
very similar to the one expressed by Dewey in “Conduct and Experience”:
There is something in the context of the experiment which goes beyond the
stimuli and responses directly found within it. There is for example, the
problem which the experimenter has set and his deliberate arrangement of
apparatus and selection of conditions with a view to disclosure of facts that
bear upon it.
(411f)
7
8
Barad 2007:179 (italics in the original).
Ibid:170 (italics in the original).
6
According to Bohr there is no given distinction between the object and the
agencies of observation; each measurement or observation implies a choice of
the apparatuses of observation, made for the specific occasion, that provides a
constructed cut, separating ‘the object’ from ‘the agencies of observation’.
This specific cut is only applicable in a given context, it delimits and is part of
a specific phenomenon. Thus, the idea of “mind-indepence” or “contextindependence” is a chimera.
A property or a measurement value cannot be attributed to an observerindependent object. Neither is it possible to see the property as created by the
measurement (which would fly in the face of any sensible meaning of the
word “measurement”). What empirical properties refer to are phenomena, that
is, in the Bohrian meaning of ”particular instances of wholeness”, where the
measurement interaction is part of the phenomenon.
Bohr questioned Einstein’s view of physical reality as something separated
from the agencies of observation, and stressed that the agencies of observation
“constitute an inherent element of the description of any phenomenon to
which the term ’physical reality’ can be properly attached”9.
The Bohr – Einstein debate can be judged as a philosophical dispute
concerning the truth of the intrinsic-properties theory; a theory that
presupposes a clear-cut separation between the subject and the object of
knowledge, that there are properties of an object there, in a fixed state, before
and independently of the agencies of observation.
According to Bohr, we cannot speak of the reality of objects apart and
separated from or preceding the interactions with the agencies of observation.
Bohr renounces the idea of separability, and holds that each object we observe
is given the character it has by the phenomenon in which that object is
observed.
9
Ibid:127.
7
Still, to Bohr, a phenomenon is “objective” in its being intersubjectively valid,
and since there is no explicit reference to any individual observer, not because
it reveals a pre-existent intrinsic property of the object. This relationalproperties theory, holds properties to be objective but not absolute, that is,
they are things-in-phenomena, not observer-independent things.
Everything hinges on the question of separateness or relatedness. Einstein
never abandoned his ontology of separateness, an ontology that is very
difficult to reconcile with quantum physics. The choice of separateness or
relatedness seems to be the basic ontological divide. The position outlined in
this paper is an onto-epistemology of relatedness.
While Bohr focused on physical-conceptual agencies of observation and
laboratory-style apparatuses, Barad uses the concept of agencies of
observation and apparatuses more generally, to denote “open-ended and
dynamic material-discursive practices through which specific ‘concepts’ and
‘things’ are articulated”10.
To Barad, phenomena are ”neither individual entities, nor mental impressions,
but entangled material practices”11, a position that comes close to Dewey’s view
on the object (referred to earlier) as an “unfractured observation”, which is
neither existing separately apart from any observation, nor existing only in our
head “in presumed independence of what is observed” (131).
Barad means that the concept of phenomena makes it possible to “get the
referent right”; the objective referent being the phenomenon (in the sense here
explained), and not a pre-existing object.
10
11
Barad 2007: 334.
Ibid:55f.
8
The relationality that the wave-particle-dualism bears witness to, does not
concern a particular aspect or property of nature, but, in Barad’s words: ”the
very nature of nature”. It is a question of ontology:
nature’s lack of a fixed essence is essential to what it is. That is […]
nature is an intra-active becoming (where intra-action’ is not the classical
comforting concept of ‘interaction’ but rather entails the very disruption
of the metaphysics of individualism that holds that there are discrete
objects with inherent characteristics).12
Intra-action is a neologism coined by Barad to underline the mutual
constitution of subject and object, that is, that they are only relationally
distinct and do not exist as separate individual elements.
The view that we cannot have access to an observer-independent reality,
means that we must accept that our thinking lacks a solid foundation. But,
according to Barad, scientific knowledge is no haphazard construction that is
independent of what is ‘out there’, since this is not separated from us; and
given a specific set of constructed cuts, some descriptive scientific concepts
are well defined and can be used to reach reproducible results. But: These
results cannot be decontextualized.
The possibility of objectivity does not hinge upon the belief in an observerindependent external reality. On the contrary, given that there is no observerindependent reality, holding on to the dogma that observer-independency and
externality is a necessary prerequisite for objectivity is what threatens to
undermine the idea of objectivity.
Barad’s solution to the problem of objectivity lies in her view of
referentiality, namely that the referent is not an observation-independent
object, but a phenomenon; this Barad sees as “a condition for objective
knowledge”13. The point, according to Barad, is that “phenomena constitutes
reality”. That is, reality in itself is material-cultural; it is not “built by things12
13
Ibid:422, n15.
Barad 20:198.
9
in-themselves or things-behind-phenomena, but of things-in-phenomena”14.
And it is the fact “that scientific knowledge is socially constructed that leads
to reliable knowledge and reproducible phenomena”15; science gives us no
information about an independent reality.
Barad’s agential realism is a form of constructivism that is not relativist, but
relationalist, that is, building on the idea of an intra-active interdependence
between man and reality, that makes both parties contribute to the
“construction” of the other. It is not relativist in the sense that “anything
goes”, but it agrees with relativism in its repudiation of absolutist conceptions
of reality, truth, and knowledge.
The inseparability of the object from the phenomena and the agencies of
observation amounts to “a final renunciation of the classical ideal of causality,
and a radical revision of our attitude towards the problem of physical
reality”16. The ground for another way of looking at causality and reality lies
in Dewey’s, Bohr’s and Barad’s denial of the usual assumption that there are
separately existing entities preceding a causal relation, where the one preexisting entity causes some effect to another pre-existing entity. The concepts
of trans-action and intra-action, and the view of the “agencies of observation”
as part of the phenomenon, rules out a clear cut subject-object distinction.
In a relational understanding of the concept of ‘phenomena’, phenomena are
ontologically primitive relations – relations without pre-existing relata, thus
the relata are not prior to the relation, they emerge through it, and they are in
and simultaneous with the phenomena.
While Margolis stresses the need for an integration of ontic and epistemic
internalism with an ontic externalism, according to which there is some mindindependent reality, this idea of independency – mind-independency and/or
14
Ibid.
Barad 1996:186.
16
Ibid:129, and Bohr 1963.
15
10
context-independency – has no place in a relationalist position. There is no
independent or separate “something”, “out there”, because there is nothing
“there” as a determinate “something”, before or independently of its being
intra-actively articulated in and through a phenomenon, of which the agencies
of observation are an inseparable part. In my view Margolis’ internal
relativism (like Putnam’s internal realism) is an interesting effort to reconcile
realism and relativism. But a viable alternative to combat absolutism without
giving up the possibility of objectivity is a relationalism that not so much
reconciles as transcends the realism-relativism-debate, by renouncing the
ideas of separateness and context-independency, using trans-action and intraaction as key concepts17.
Literature
Barad, Karen. 1996. “Meeting the Universe Halfway: Realism and Social Constructivism
Without Contradiction”. Feminism, Science, and the Philosophy of Science, ed Nelson &
Nelson, Dordrecht.
-- 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway – Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter
and Meaning. Durham.
Bohr, Niels. 1963. The Philosophical Writings of Niels Bohr. Vol 2, Essays, 1933-1957, on
Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge. Woodbridge.
Dewey, John. 1896. ”The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology”, in Psychological Review 3:
357-370.
-- 1930. “Conduct and Experience”, in Psychologies of 1930. Worcester.
-- 1949. Knowing and the Known. With Arthur F. Bentley. Boston.
Margolis, Joseph. 1986. Pragmatism Without Foundations – Reconciling Realism and
Relativism. Oxford.
Murdoch, Dugald. 1987. Niels Bohr’s Philosophy of Physics. Cambridge.
17
Recently the physicist John G. Cramer has developed a transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics. An
interesting question, lying outside the scope of this paper, is if this interpretation lends support to Dewey’s transactionalism, and if it, with its critique of Bohr’s Principle of Complementarity, could help to detect important
differences between Dewey’s trans-actional perspective and the intra-actional perspective Barad has developed
inspired by Bohr’s philosophy-physics.
11
Matz Hammarström