  Recent research has exposed disagreements over the nature and usefulness of
what may (or may not) be Human-Computer Interaction's fundamental phenomenon:
'interaction'. For some, HCI's theorising about interaction has been deficient,
impacting its capacity to inform decisions in design, suggesting the need
either to perform first-principles definition work or broader administrative
clarification and formalisation of the multitude of formulations of the
concepts of interaction and their particular uses. For others, there remain
open questions over the continued relevance of certain 'versions' of
interaction as a useful concept in HCI at all. We pursue a different
perspective in this paper, reviewing how HCI treats interaction through
examining its 'conceptual pragmatics' within HCI's discourse. We argue that
articulations of the concepts of interaction can be a site of productive
conflict for HCI that for many reasons may resist attempts of formalisation as
well as attempts to dispense with them. The main contribution of this paper is
in specifying how we might go about talking of interaction and the value of
interaction language as promiscuous concepts.
