“Putting culture in the middle”: A transactional reconstruction

ABSTRACT

This paper revisits Michael Cole’s influential Cultural Psychology. The goal is to reconstruct Cole by putting him into critical and creative dialogue with John Dewey’s theory of transaction. It explores four advantages that arise by reconstructing Cole as a fully consistent Darwinian naturalist understood in terms of an equally consistent Deweyan transactionalism. One advantage is that transactional coordination can replace Cole’s reliance on mediation. Second, one can recognize potentiality as a category of existence. Third, it becomes easier for Cole to engage the embodied aspects of mental functioning. Finally, transactionalism overcomes Cole’s residual culture versus nature dualism.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the reviewers of this journal for many helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. “Naturalism” is a slippery word. For Dewey, it means a rejection of supernaturalism and respect for sciences such as Darwinian evolution that do not fall into reductive materialism.

2. I would like to thank Alfredo Jornet for his guidance and the reviewers of this journal for their many helpful comments.

3. Cole recognizes that Dewey can be read as a cultural psychologist. At one point, Dewey (1939/1991) even characterizes his standpoint as one of “biological-cultural psychology” (p. 39, see also p. 21). Nowhere has emphasis been added to any citation.

4. For a more detailed account of the problems with mediation see, Roth and Jornet (2019). Among other things they “show how characterizations of activity that focus on mediators all too easily retain the Cartesian dualism that mediation is supposed to overcome” (325). Dualisms are typical of interactional thinking, which requires mediation “between” things that are already transactionally integrated. The next section suggests transactional coordination can replace mediation.

5. For Dewey, emergent arising of the unexpected and unpredictable in nature forecloses reductive materialism. For example, hydrogen is highly combustible while oxygen sustains combustion. For instance, a hydrogen engine mixes hydrogen and oxygen. Meanwhile, H₂O (i.e., water) extinguishes class B fires. Interestingly, Vygotsky (1934/1987/1987) draws on the same example to dramatize the dangers that may arise from analysis when it extinguishes the emergent properties of a larger whole (p. 45). The following passage could almost have been written by Dewey and Bentley: “[O]nce the researcher has decomposed the unified psychological formation of verbal thinking into its component elements, he is forced to establish a purely external form of interaction between these elements” (pp. 44–45). As Roth and Jornet (2019) make clear, transactions do not require any such external mediating forms.

6. I will not address artistic artifacts. Dewey (1934/1987) is devoted to these “expressive meanings.”

7. For an analogous argument regarding Cole’s mediational triangle, see, Roth and Jornet (2019, pp. 327–330). Here they refer to how other cultural theorists draw on the triangle of Ogden and Richards (1923). They refer to Dewey and Bentley’s (1949/1989) explicit rejection of such a stance (see p. 9). The Carbondale edition of Knowing and the Known contains a short unpublished type script by Dewey, “What Is It to Be a Linguistic Sign or Name?,” that provides a devastating critique of the “causal” theory of Ogden and Richards.

8. Dewey died in 1952.

9. Interestingly, Cole (1996) conceives of “context” etymologically as “to weave together” while the reciprocal, mutually co-constituting, functional coordination of Deweyan transactionalism might better express what he apparently intends to say by replacing mediation altogether (p. 135).

10. Integration here indicates organism-environment transacting simultaneously and reciprocally as a single unified system. This is the transactional sense of “integration” used in the present paper.

11. The past is present in our bodies whether we know it or not; an idea that is important for any historical-cultural psychology.

12. Here is the full title of one of Dewey’s most influential books: Human Nature And Conduct: An Introduction to Social Psychology. One could replace the word “Social” with “Cultural” and little else would need to change.

13. Elsewhere, Dennett (1995) comments, “John Dewey made it clear that Darwinism should be assumed to be the foundation of any naturalistic theory of meaning” (p. 403).

14. Coevolution is common throughout nature; examples include predator-prey and herbivores-plants.

15. For one possibility of intergenerational inheritance due to enduring cultural triggers, see, Kuzawa and Sweet (2009).