John Dewey, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
The term you are using belongs, in its popular form, to Eric Berne's psychiatric framework — the ego-states, the games people play, the transactional scripts of therapeutic encounter. That is not what Arthur Bentley and I meant when we built the concept of transaction in Knowing and the Known (1949), and the difference is worth marking.
What Bentley and I meant is this: the traditional language of epistemology, psychology, and sociology shatters its subject-matter into fragments before inquiry even begins, and then wonders why it cannot put the pieces back together.1 The self-actional view treats organisms and environments, knowers and knowns, as separately existing things that subsequently bump into one another; the interactional view improves on this by at least holding the components in balance, but still treats them as separates that come together by way of cause and effect.
Our transactional procedure asserts the right to see together, extensionally and durationally, what conventional talk treats as irreconcilable separates.2 The hunter illustration makes the point as plainly as I know how to make it. Within the frame of half an hour and an acre of land, you can report the shooting interactionally — rabbit, hunter, gun, cause, effect, three separable items.3
But take enough of the earth and enough thousands of years, watch the identification of rabbit gradually taking place in the sub-naming processes of gesture, cry, and attentive movement wherein both rabbit and hunter participate, and the transactional account becomes the only one that covers the ground.4 No one would successfully speak of the hunter and the hunted as isolated with respect to hunting; yet it is equally absurd to set up hunting as an event in isolation from the spatio-temporal connection of all its components.5
The point generalizes. A billiard game can be studied interactionally — balls, forces, trajectories. But a cultural account of money-lending in its full spread of social growth and human adaptation is already transactional from the start.6 The organism is not a self-contained agent that then encounters an environment; the knowing is not a mental act that then reaches out to a known object.
Organism and environment, knower and known, are aspects of one ongoing process, and the terminology Bentley and I developed — behavior-agent, behavior-object as provisional place-holders within the wider transactional presentation — is designed to hold that continuity in view rather than legislate the separateness back in through the vocabulary.7
the traditional language currently used about knowings and knowns (and most other language about behaviors, as well) shatters the subjectmatter into fragments in advance of inquiry and thus destroys instead of furthering comprehensive observation for it.Knowing and the Known + Essays, pp. 67–68
Our own procedure is the transactional, in which is asserted the right to see together, extensionally and durationally, much that is talked about conventionally as if it were composed of irreconcilable separates.Knowing and the Known + Essays, pp. 67–68
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.Knowing and the Known + Essays, pp. 125–126
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 sub-naming 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 transactional account as the one that best covers the ground.Knowing and the Known + Essays, pp. 125–126
No one would be able successfully to speak of the hunter and the hunted as isolated with respect to hunting. Yet it is just as absurd to set up hunting as an event in isolation from the spatio-temporal connection of all the components.Knowing and the Known + Essays, pp. 125–126
If we confine ourselves to the problem of the balls on the billiard table, they can be profitably presented and studied interactionally. But a cultural account of the game in its full spread of social growth and human adaptations is already transactional.Knowing and the Known + Essays, pp. 125–126
As place-holders in this region of nomenclature we shall provisionally set down behavior-agent and behavior-object. They represent specialized interactional treatments within the wider transactional presentation, with organisms or persons or actors named uncertainly on the one hand and with environments named in variegated forms on the other.Knowing and the Known + Essays, pp. 67–68