Contemporary writing moves quickly from naming a transaction to examining it, and in that movement a prior question is lost: what, precisely, is this transaction?
What description settles
Where two researchers differ in how they represent a transaction, their subsequent disagreement is apparent rather than real — they were never addressing the same object.
Three observations
- Description is field work as much as theoretical work.
- Technical sources belong among the researcher's instruments.
- Changing practice calls for description to be renewed.
Judgement of a thing follows upon conceiving it — a methodological principle before it is a familiar phrase.
This article introduces the Foundation's method and does not examine any particular question.
