Abstract
John Dewey’s ‘habit’-centred, transactional theory of action gets rid of the Cartesian mind–world dualism by replacing ‘mind-first’ explanations of action with ‘action-first’ explanations of the mind. Dewey embraced Darwinian thinking, and built his theory of action in an evolutionary framework. Of course, he could not have foreseen all the developments in theory and research on human evolution that have unfolded since his time; evolutionary theory and understanding have been elaborated, for example, with the idea of co-evolutionary niche construction. This chapter outlines an update of Dewey’s transactional theory of action, drawing on, among others, Daniel Dennett’s, Andy Clark’s, and Kim Sterelny’s works, and some recent developments in theories and research on the brain, mind, and the evolution of human culture. A sort of ‘four E’—extensive, enactive, embodied, and embedded—notion of the mind is considered, as well as other recent ideas and conceptual tools, such as (socio-cultural) niche construction, the Sterelnian apprentice learning setup, the Clarkian conception of predictive processing as a central function of the brain, affordances of action, and the Dennettian understanding that in evolution, competence comes before comprehension, and the latter could arise only with culture.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
In this chapter, consistently with a long line of our previous works going back for decades, we write the term ‘transaction’ and its derivatives without the hyphen.
- 2.
The switch from the ‘mind-first’ to the ‘action-first’ explanation, to put it briefly, is the idea that we should not seek to explain action with anything in the mind—beliefs and desires, or volition—but instead, conceive action, channelled by habits, as the baseline of all life that also explains whatever content we might want to say there is to someone’s mind (see, e.g., Joas and Kilpinen 2006).
- 3.
In fact, pragmatism was unpopular in those days, in Europe in particular. An important change started in America in the 1970s, with Putnam’s (1975) and Rorty’s (1979) neo-pragmatism overcoming the subject–object dualism by emphasizing the importance of language for the human mind and the Wittgensteinian and Deweyan insight that there is no private language, that linguistic ‘“meanings” just ain’t in the head’ (Putnam 1975, p. 144).
- 4.
It is akin to certain much older ideas, though, for instance, those that go under the name of ‘Baldwin effect’ (after James Mark Baldwin), which somewhat similarly emphasized the role of behavioural plasticity and learning in evolution, and took into account ‘the social aspect of evolution’—‘social relations and traditions’ in the evolving population—as an important part of the environment of selection (Richards 1987, p. 484; see Weber and Depew 2003).
- 5.
‘The organism acts in accordance with its own structure, simple or complex, upon its surroundings,’ Dewey (1988a [1922]) said, and stressed that ‘[a]s a consequence the changes produced in the environment react upon the organism and its activities. The living creature undergoes, suffers, the consequences of its own behavior’ (129). ‘The higher’ (that is to say, the more neurologically complex and phenotypically flexible) ‘the form of life,’ he also knew, ‘the more important is the active reconstruction of the medium’ (128). ‘Of human organisms it is especially true that activities carried on for satisfying needs so change the environment that new needs arise which demand still further change in the activities of the organism by which they are satisfied; and so on in potentially endless chain’ (Dewey 1991, p. 35).
- 6.
This may be said of any life form. The most well-worn example of animal niche construction is probably beaver dams, but even relatively simple animals (spiders are a good example) utilize tools, such as traps to catch prey, and many more build nests, or store food; even plants and bacteria may be said to be engaged in some niche construction, because in their transactions with the environment, they tend to change the composition of their surroundings in many ways (see Odling-Smee et al. 2003; Sterelny 2005).
- 7.
- 8.
As Hutto (2018; Hutto and Myin 2017, pp. 82–85, see 2013, Ch. 7) argues, Clark still clings to an unfortunate cognitivist framework where (the majority of) cognitive processing is thought to take place inside the body (only sometimes ‘extending’ partially out of it). Most cognitive scientists have been talking in terms of representations, and thus, arguably unnecessarily keeping the door open for ‘creeping Cartesianism’ which pragmatists like Dewey expelled (Solymosi 2013, p. 594).
- 9.
Dennett is indifferent to the terminological novelty of niche construction because he is well aware of Baldwinian and related ideas having been around for more than a century under different names, and thinks that they were incorporated even in mainstream evolutionary synthesis in the 1980s (see Dennett 2004, pp. 725–726).
- 10.
Of course, this is well in keeping with the Dewey’s action-first vein of explanation.
References
Allis, C. D., Caparros, M.-L., Jenuwein, T., & Reinberg, D. (Eds.). (2015). Epigenetics (2nd ed.). Cold Spring Harbor: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press.
Barkow, J. H., Cosmides, L., & Tooby, J. (Eds.). (1992). The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture. New York: Oxford University Press.
Bickerton, D. (2009). Adam’s Tongue: How Humans Made Language, How Language Made Humans. New York: Hill and Wang.
Bourdieu, P., & Wacquant, L. (1992). An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Cambridge: Polity.
Boyd, R., Richerson, P., & Henrich, J. (2011). The Cultural Niche: Why Social Learning Is Essential for Human Adaptation. PNAS, 108(suppl. 2), 10918–10925.
Buller, D. (2005). Adapting Minds: Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Buss, D. M. (1995). Evolutionary Psychology: A New Paradigm for Psychological Science. Psychological Inquiry, 6, 1–30.
Chemero, A. (2009). Radical Embodied Cognitive Science. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Chomsky, N. (2002). On Nature and Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Chomsky, N. (2008). Biolinguistic Explorations: Design, Development, Evolution. International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 15, 1–21.
Clark, A. (2005). Book Review of Kim Sterelny’s Thought in a Hostile World. Mind, 114, 777–782.
Clark, A. (2008). Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action and Cognitive Extension. New York: Oxford University Press.
Clark, A. (2015). Predicting Peace: An End to the Representation Wars. In T. K. Metzinger & J. M. Windt (Eds.), Open MIND (Vol. 7). Frankfurt am Main: MIND Group.
Clark, A. (2016). Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action and the Embodied Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Clark, A., & Chalmers, D. (1998). The Extended Mind. Analysis, 58, 7–19.
Dawkins, R. (2006 [1976]). The Selfish Gene (30th Anniversary ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Deacon, T. (1997). The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Human Brain. London: Penguin.
Deacon, T. (2003). Multilevel Selection in a Complex Adaptive System: The Problem of Language Origins. In B. H. Weber & D. J. Depew (Eds.), Evolution and Learning: The Baldwin Effect Reconsidered (pp. 81–106). Cambridge: MIT Press.
Dennett, D. C. (1987). The Intentional Stance. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Dennett, D. C. (1991). Consciousness Explained. London: Allen Lane.
Dennett, D. C. (1995). Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life. London: Allen Lane.
Dennett, D. C. (2003). The Baldwin Effect: A Crane, Not a Skyhook. In B. H. Weber & D. J. Depew (Eds.), Evolution and Learning: The Baldwin Effect Reconsidered (pp. 69–79). Cambridge: MIT Press.
Dennett, D. C. (2004). An Evolutionary Perspective on Cognition: Through a Glass Lightly. Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 35, 721–727.
Dennett, D. C. (2017). From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds. New York: W. W. Norton.
Dewey, J. (1896). The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology. Psychological Review, 3, 357–370.
Dewey, J. (1977 [1909]). The Influence of Darwinism on Philosophy. In J. A. Boydston (Ed.), The Middle Works of John Dewey (Vol. 4, pp. 3–14). Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
Dewey, J. (1983 [1922]). Human Nature and Conduct: The Middle Works of John Dewey (Vol. 14, J. A. Boydston, Ed.). Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
Dewey, J. (1985 [1916]). Democracy and Education: The Middle Works of John Dewey (Vol. 9, J. A. Boydston, Ed.). Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
Dewey, J. (1988a [1920]). Reconstruction in Philosophy. In J. A. Boydston (Ed.), The Middle Works of John Dewey (Vol. 12, pp. 77–201). Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
Dewey, J. (1988b [1925]). Experience and Nature: The Later Works of John Dewey (Vol. 1, J. A. Boydston, Ed.). Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
Dewey, J. (1988c [1929]). The Quest for Certainty. The Later Works of John Dewey (Vol. 4, J. A. Boydston, Ed.). Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
Dewey, J. (1991 [1938]). Logic. The Theory of Inquiry. The Later Works of John Dewey (Vol. 12, J. A. Boydston, Ed.). Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
Dewey, J., & Bentley, A. (1991 [1949]). Knowing and the Known. In J. A. Boydston (Ed.), The Later Works of John Dewey (Vol. 16, pp. 1–294). Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
Donald, M. (2001). A Mind So Rare: The Evolution of Human Consciousness. New York: W. W. Norton.
Dunbar, R. (1996). Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language. London: Faber and Faber.
Durham, W. H. (1991). Coevolution: Genes, Cultures, and Human Diversity. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Fleetwood, S. (2008). Structure, Institution, Agency, Habit, and Reflexive Deliberation. Journal of Institutional Economics, 4, 183–203.
Gallagher, S. (2008). Intersubjectivity in Perception. Continental Philosophy Review, 41, 163–178.
Gallagher, S. (2017). Enactivist Interventions: Rethinking the Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gibson, J. (1986). The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. New York: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Gergely, G., & Csibra, G. (2005). The Social Construction of the Cultural Mind: Imitative Learning as a Mechanism of Human Pedagogy. Interaction Studies, 6, 463–481.
Hall, B. K. (1992). Evolutionary Developmental Biology. New York: Chapman & Hall.
Haugeland, J. (1995). Mind Embodied and Embedded. In L. Haaparanta & S. Heinämaa (Eds.), Mind and Cognition: Philosophical Perspectives on Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence (pp. 209–237). Helsinki: Societas Philosophica Fennica.
Hauser, M. D., Chomsky, N., & Fitch, W. T. (2002). The Faculty of Language: What Is It, Who Has It, and How Did It Evolve? Science, 298, 1569–1579.
Henrich, J. (2017). The Evolution of Our Species: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Heras-Escribano, M., & De Pinedo-Garcia, M. (2018). Affordances and Landscapes: Overcoming the Nature-Culture Dichotomy Through Niche Construction Theory. Frontiers in Psychology, 8, 2294. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.02294.
Heyes, C. (2012). New Thinking: The Evolution of Human Cognition. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 367, 2091–2096.
Heyes, C. (2016). Born Pupils? Natural Pedagogy and Cultural Pedagogy. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 11, 280–295.
Heyes, C. (2018). Cognitive Gadgets: The Cultural Evolution of Thinking. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Hodgson, G. M. (2004). The Evolution of Institutional Economics: Agency, Structure and Darwinism in American Institutionalism. London: Routledge.
Holliday, R. (2006). Epigenetics: A Historical Overview. Epigenetics, 1, 76–80.
Hurley, S. (1998). Vehicles, Contents, Conceptual Structure, and Externalism. Analysis, 58(1), 1–6.
Hutto, D. S. (2018). Getting into Predictive Processing’s Great Guessing Game: Bootstrap Heaven or Hell? Synthese, 195(6), 2445–2458.
Hutto, D. D., Kirchhoff, M. D., & Myin, E. (2014). Extensive Enactivism: Why Keep It All in? Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 8. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2014.00706.
Hutto, D. D., & Myin, E. (2013). Radicalizing Enactivism: Basic Minds Without Content. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Hutto, D. D., & Myin, E. (2017). Evolving Enactivism: Basic Minds Meet Content. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Joas, H. (1996). The Creativity of Action. Cambridge: Polity.
Joas, H., & Kilpinen, E. (2006). Creativity and Society. In R. Shook & J. Margolis (Eds.), A Companion to Pragmatism. Blackwell Companions to Philosophy (pp. 323–335). Oxford: Blackwell.
Keller, E. F. (2000). The Century of the Gene. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Keller, E. F. (2005). The Century Beyond the Gene. Journal of Biosciences, 30, 3–10.
Kendal, J., Tehrani, J. J., & Odling-Smee, J. (2011). Introduction: Human Niche Construction in Interdisciplinary Focus. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 366, 785–792.
Kilpinen, E. (2000). The Enormous Fly-Wheel of Society: Pragmatism’s Habitual Conception of Action and Social Theory. Helsinki: University of Helsinki.
Kivinen, O., & Piiroinen, T. (2004). The Relevance of Ontological Commitments in Social Sciences: Realist and Pragmatist Viewpoints. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 34, 231–248.
Kivinen, O., & Piiroinen, T. (2006). Toward Pragmatist Methodological Relationalism: From Philosophizing Sociology to Sociologizing Philosophy. Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 36, 303–329.
Kivinen, O., & Piiroinen, T. (2007). Socializing Metaphysics and Mind: A Pragmatist Point of View on the Methodology of the Social Sciences. Human Studies, 39, 97–114.
Kivinen, O., & Piiroinen, T. (2012). On the Distinctively Human: Two Perspectives on the Evolution of Language and Conscious Mind. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 42, 87–105.
Kivinen, O., & Piiroinen, T. (2013). Human Transaction Mechanisms in Evolutionary Niches—A Methodological Relationalist Standpoint. In F. Dépelteau & C. Powell (Eds.), Applying Relational Sociology: Relations, Networks, and Society (pp. 83–100). New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Kivinen, O., & Piiroinen, T. (2018a). The Evolution of Homo Discens: Natural Selection and Human Learning. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 48, 117–133.
Kivinen, O., & Piiroinen, T. (2018b). Pragmatist Methodological Relationalism in Sociological Understanding of Evolving Human Culture. In F. Dépelteau (Ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Relational Sociology (pp. 119–141). New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Kivinen, O., & Piiroinen, T. (2018c). Relationalism. In G. Ritzer & C. Rojek (Eds.), The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology. Wiley. First published online April 27, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781405165518.wbeosr090.pub2.
Kivinen, O., Piiroinen, T., & Saikkonen, L. (2016). Two Viewpoints on the Challenges of ICT in Education: Knowledge-Building Theory vs. a Pragmatist Conception of Learning in Social Action. Oxford Review of Education, 42, 377–390.
Kivinen, O., & Ristelä, P. (2002). Even Higher Learning Takes Place by Doing: From Postmodern Critique to Pragmatic Action. Studies in Higher Education, 27, 419–430.
Laland, K., & O’Brien, M. (2010). Niche Construction Theory and Archaeology. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, 17, 303–322.
Laland, K. N., Odling-Smee, F. J., & Feldman, M. W. (1999). Evolutionary Consequences of Niche Construction and Their Implications for Ecology. PNAS, 96, 10242–10247.
Laland, K. N., Odling-Smee, J., & Feldman, M. W. (2001). Cultural Niche Construction and Human Evolution. Journal of Evolutionary Biology, 14, 22–33.
Laland, K. N., Odling-Smee, J., & Gilbert, S. F. (2008). EvoDevo and Niche Construction: Building Bridges. Journal of Experimental Zoology (Mol Dev Evol), 310B, 549–566.
Laland, K., Odling-Smee, J., & Myles, S. (2010). How Culture Shaped the Human Genome: Bringing Genetics and the Human Sciences Together. Nature Reviews Genetics, 11, 137–148.
Laland, K., & Sterelny, K. (2006). Perspective: Seven Reasons (Not) to Neglect Niche Construction. Evolution: International Journal of Evolution, 60, 1751–1762.
Lewontin, R. (2000). The Triple Helix: Gene, Organism, and Environment. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Lieberman, P. (1998). Eve Spoke: Human Language and Human Evolution. New York: W. W. Norton.
Meloni, M. (2016). Political Biology: Science and Social Values in Human Heredity from Eugenics to Epigenetics. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Müller, G. B. (2007). Evo-Devo: Extending the Evolutionary Synthesis. Nature Reviews Genetics, 8, 943–949.
Noë, A. (2004). Action in Perception. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Noë, A. (2009). Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness. New York: Hill & Wang.
Odling-Smee, J., & Laland, K. N. (2011). Ecological Inheritance and Cultural Inheritance: What Are They and How Do They Differ? Biological Theory, 6, 220–230.
Odling-Smee, F. J., Laland, K. N., & Feldman, M. W. (2003). Niche Construction: The Neglected Process in Evolution. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Oyama, S., Griffiths, P. E., & Gray, R. D. (2001). Cycles of Contingency: Developmental Systems and Evolution. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Pinker, S. (2002). The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. London: Allen Lane.
Popp, J. (2007). Evolution’s First Philosopher: John Dewey and the Continuity of Nature. New York: SUNY.
Putnam, H. (1975). The Meaning of ‘Meaning’. In K. Gunderson (Ed.), Language, Mind and Knowledge (pp. 131–193). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota.
Raff, R. A. (2000). EvoDevo: The Evolution of a New Discipline. Nature Reviews Genetics, 1, 74–79.
Richards, R. J. (1987). Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Richerson, P., & Boyd, R. (2005). Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Rorty, R. (1979). Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton: University of Princeton Press.
Rowlands, M. (1999). The Body in Mind: Understanding Cognitive Processes. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Searle, J. R. (2010). Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Solymosi, T. (2013). Against Representation: A Brief Introduction to Cultural Affordances. Human Affairs, 23, 594–605.
Sterelny, K. (1990). The Representational Theory of Mind: An Introduction. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Sterelny, K. (2001). Niche Construction, Developmental Systems, and the Extended Replicator. In S. Oyama, P. E. Griffiths, & R. D. Gray (Eds.), Cycles of Contingency: Developmental Systems and Evolution (pp. 333–349). Cambridge: MIT Press.
Sterelny, K. (2003). Thought in a Hostile World: The Evolution of Human Cognition. Oxford: Blackwell.
Sterelny, K. (2005). Made By Each Other: Organisms and Their Environment. Biology and Philosophy, 20, 21–30.
Sterelny, K. (2007). Social Intelligence, Human Intelligence and Niche Construction. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 362, 719–730.
Sterelny, K. (2010). Minds: Extended or Scaffolded? Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 9, 465–481.
Sterelny, K. (2011). From Hominins to Humans: How Sapiens Became Behaviourally Modern. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 366, 809–822.
Sterelny, K. (2012). The Evolved Apprentice: How Evolution Made Humans Unique. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Sterelny, K. (2016). Cumulative Cultural Evolution and the Origins of Language. Biological Theory, 11, 173–186.
Stringer, C. (2012). Lone Survivors: How We Came to Be the Only Humans on Earth. New York: Times Books.
Varela, F., Thompson, E., & Rosch, E. (1991). The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Weber, B. H., & Depew, D. J. (Eds.). (2003). Evolution and Learning: The Baldwin Effect Reconsidered. Cambridge: MIT Press.
West-Eberhard, M. J. (2003). Developmental Plasticity and Evolution. New York: Oxford University Press.
Wilson, R. A. (1995). Cartesian Psychology and Physical Minds: Individualism and the Sciences of the Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Kivinen, O., Piiroinen, T. (2020). Updating Dewey’s Transactional Theory of Action in Connection with Evolutionary Theory. In: Morgner, C. (eds) John Dewey and the Notion of Trans-action. Palgrave Studies in Relational Sociology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26380-5_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26380-5_7
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-26379-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-26380-5
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)