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Causation Is Not Everything: On Constitution and Trans-Actional View of Social Science Methodology

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John Dewey and the Notion of Trans-action

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Relational Sociology ((PSRS))

Abstract

The chapter outlines two major understandings of the social, which are referred to as “inter-actionalism” and “trans-actionalism” with reference to Dewey and Bentley’s distinction between three understandings of social action (self-action, inter-action, trans-action). It is argued that the major difference between these understandings is not in their emphasis on the centrality of social relations in making sense of social phenomena but in their implicit understanding of the form of those relations: inter-actionalism sees the form of social relations to be causal in nature, whereas trans-actionalism sees them in terms of constitution. By bringing out this distinction between causation and constitution (and their interconnection) and articulating the methodological consequences of causal and constitutive theorizing/explanation, it is clarified in a concise vocabulary the core of deep relational or trans-actional version of relational sociology (promoted among others by Emirbayer, Dépelteau and the author of the current chapter).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    E.g. Norbert Elias, Michel Foucault, Francois Dépelteau, Mustafa Emirbayer, Margaret Somers and others.

  2. 2.

    This holds true even if we discount several legal uses of the word “constitution” and the colloquial usages that are not used in the epistemological-ontological sense: “I concede that some versions of RAT [rational actor theory], namely those informed by either game theory or exchange theory, make considerable steps towards a relational position and for this, amongst other reasons, constitute useful resources for relational sociology” (Crossley 2011, p. 7, italics added); “Both internally within each organization and externally between the potential public of users, the logic of competition constituted an assault upon solidarity” (Donati and Archer 2015, p. 323, italics added to the word “constituted”). In these kinds of constructions “to constitute” is equivalent to the verb “to be”.

  3. 3.

    For the reader to have a basic grasp of the sheer size of these discussions when it comes to causation, let’s just remember that there is even The Oxford Handbook of Causation with 37 chapters from 41 contributors all over the world (see Beebe et al. 2009).

  4. 4.

    Here and elsewhere (e.g. Selg 2016a, b, 2018) I use the hyphenated form of these terms throughout to highlight their character as technical rather than colloquial terms. This deviates from the usage of Emirbayer (1997) who uses these terms to distinguish substantialism from relational approach in his “Manifesto”. His usage is more or less identical to that of Dewey and Bentley: except for “self-action” (which is a neologism), they avoid hyphenation for the most part of their book. However, Dewey and Bentley too make a notable exception of permitting themselves “as a temporary convenience the irregular use of hyphenization in these names as a means of emphasizing the issues involved in their various applications” (1949, p. 132) immediately before they put forth the most concise definitions of the three different views on action. My hyphenated usage of these terms is also in line with that of Dépelteau (2008, 2018b).

  5. 5.

    For an earlier discussion that widely exploits the notion of (social) constitution in international relations, but does not give a full account of this notion see Onuf (2013 [1989]) and Wendt (1992).

  6. 6.

    To put a somewhat controversial issue in a nutshell: description, even if it involves inferential arguments (such as inference from a sample to a population) does not involve appeals to counterfactual dependencies and they are not translatable into responses to why-questions like, for instance, constitutive theories are, as I point out below.

  7. 7.

    Actor or actorhood, of course, being a social kind too.

  8. 8.

    “Property theories” is a synonym for “constitutive theories” used by Cummins (1983, pp. 14–22), one of the earliest discussants of the distinction between causal and constitutive explanation in psychology.

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Acknowledgements

I thank the late Francois Dépelteau for making it all possible in this volume (and numerous others) on relational sociology. The breadth and depth of his work in setting the relational sociology movement truly aflame on a global scale is still partly to be discovered, but its fruits will never be forgotten. I also thank Piret Peiker, Benjamin Klasche, Georg Sootla and Maria Koldekivi for reading and commenting on earlier versions of this chapter. Writing this chapter was supported by the Estonian Research Council with the personal research funding granted to the project PUT1485 A Relational Approach to Governing Wicked Problems.

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  1. Tallinn University, Tallinn, Estonia

    Peeter Selg

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  1. University of Leicester, Leicester, UK

    Christian Morgner

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Selg, P. (2020). Causation Is Not Everything: On Constitution and Trans-Actional View of Social Science Methodology. 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_2

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