IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2015 - 68

Psychology" set the foundation for cybernetics by revealing "the inadequacy of a stimulus-response model to
explicate human behavior or action":
"[Dewey] emphasizes the dichotomous nature of
stimulus and response in behaviorism and makes
the case that it is totally antithetical to an understanding of human behavior and activity. Dewey

Dewey, in fact, considered experience
an evolving, iterative process.

can thus be considered a precursor of cybernetics - a proto-cybernetician. While the meaning of
stimulus and response is totally different, the language and meaning of control theory and systems
are already there. The notion of systems was thus
introduced in 1896, and the terms communication and control in Democracy and Education"
[7], [3, p. 126].
In Democracy and Education - published in 1916,
the year after Wiener studied with Dewey - the elder
philosopher continued arguing against the arc and pointing toward the need for "transactions." The term transactions stands for evaluative information about an action,
event, or process to the original source and suggests that
the circuit of being and knowledge is incomplete without
the dualisms of "mind and body, mental percept and
the world, theory and practice" [17, p. 7]. Dewey wanted
to view the individual as part of a process or system of
"checking and re-checking," a way to gain "an awareness
of the instrumentality of role-based concepts" - "a feedback loop oriented to the future" [17, pp. 7-8].
By the 1930s, Dewey, working with Arthur Bentley,
began publicly calling these interactions "transactions"
[17, p. 8], [9]. In correspondence with Bentley, a political
scientist and philosopher who became intrigued by cybernetics, Dewey suggests that he look at "an old memo on
logic" that cites Wiener's definition of science from his
book Quantum Mechanics, Haldane, and Leibniz:
"N Wiener: Science is an explanation in time, and
consumes time and refers to time - well-defined
only as going through actual process of definition
- not possible under either a rationalism or an
empiricism. Logic will always appear imperfect to
later scholars" [6, n.p.].

Dewey and Bentley co-authored Knowing and the
Known [9], and their controversial ideas around a philosophy of transaction as a successor to pragmatism have
since been associated with cybernetics [23]. As Phillips and
Orton explain, Dewey and Bentley believed "that science
had moved from stages where explanations were 'selfactional' and then 'inter-actional' to a stage (still emerging)
where explanations were 'transactional'" and generative
based on past experience [22, p. 160]. Or, as Dewey and
Bentley wrote, "If inter-action is procedure such that its
inter-acting constituents are set up in inquiry as separate
'facts,' each in independence of the presence of the others,
then - Trans-action is the Fact such that no one of its constituents can be adequately specified as 'a fact apart from
the specification of the other constituents of the full subject
matter'" [9, p. 536]. Through the lens of Wiener, transaction indeed seems similar to the feedback of cybernetics,
"a method of controlling a system by reinserting into it the
results of its past performance" [29, p. 61].
The concept of transaction, as Maharg explains,
"powerfully conditions the idea of reality," and as other
researchers have suggested, "the phrase 'transactional
realism' probably is closest to what Dewey wanted to
describe" [17, p. 9]. It may also be close to what Wiener,
again, considered relativistic pragmatism. Both terms
suggest feedback that is a result of action and transformation of organism in the world. The terms move
beyond the stimulus-response theory of the reflex arc,
with its White Queen's sense of completed actions:
"memory that only works backwards," or in retrospect
[2, p. 26], [31]. Dewey, in fact, considered experience an
evolving, iterative process:
to "'learn from experience' is to make a backward and forward connection between what we
do to things and what we enjoy or suffer from
things in consequence. Under such conditions,
doing becomes a trying; an experiment with the
world to find out what it is like; the undergoing
becomes instruction-discovery of the connection
of things" [9, p.164].
For Wiener, feedback can be "as simple as that
of the common reflex," but is most valuable when
thought of as a "high order," when "the property of
being [is] able to adjust future conduct by past performance" [29, p. 33]. Again, the views of Wiener and
Dewey intertwine.
Yet, some scholars stop at Wiener's view of feedback, at only the results of a system's past performance. They do not recognize Wiener's push past what
he called "simple feedback" (the reflex arc), or the feedback of "control engineers" [29, p. 61]. Instead, Wiener
suggested that if "information which proceeds backward

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