ABSTRACT
Transactionalism is consistent with the contention of both process philosophers, such as Whitehead [Ki20], and pragmatists, such as Dewey [Ki3], that it is better to think of reality in terms of events rather than in terms of objects. Birch and Cobb summarize the process perspective as follows:
Instead of taking for granted that the world is composed of the substantial objects of sense experience or of the substances which underlie them, one may think instead of a world composed of events and the smaller events which in turn constitute them. What is to be explained, then, is why things happen as they do. And the explanation will consist in analysis of the causal relations among events and of the component occurrences which make up the larger ones. [Kb1: 86]
Causation, in this view, is not a single procession from A to B, but rather a complex phenomenon which cannot be explained at a single level. Different explanations of the same event can be given at both proximate and ultimate levels of causation, for example. Birch and Cobb suggest that it is possible to “ . . . seek the explanation of behaviour at one level in terms of behaviour at other levels and to recognise that behaviour at any level is to be accounted for in terms of complex interacting. This complex interacting is an event, not a substance” [Kb1: 86]. In mechanistic thinking, which divides the world into discrete objects (or “substances” in traditional philosophy), the relations an object has with other objects are regarded as external and as not affecting the essential nature of the object itself. In Birch and Cobb’s ecological model, however, events instead are seen as being constituted by the relations they have with other events. These relations are internal in the sense that they are “ . . . constitutive of the character and even the existence of something” [Kb1: 88]. Given that events are constituted in part by the relations they have with other events, they cannot be fully understood apart from the larger context in which these relations occur. Events can be analyzed not only reductively by subdividing them into smaller and more
basic events but also contextually by looking at how they are interconnected with other events. Depending on the level of analysis, events can be construed in a variety of ways, precisely because they are fl uid and not clearly demarcated.
