In pursuit of precision: the calibration of minds and machines in late nineteenth-century psychology

Annals of Science
R Benschop, D Draaisma

Abstract

A prominent feature of late nineteenth-century psychology was its intense preoccupation with precision. Precision was at once an ideal and an argument: the quest for precision helped psychology to establish its status as a mature science, sharing a characteristic concern with the natural sciences. We will analyse how psychologists set out to produce precision in 'mental chronometry', the measurement of the duration of psychological processes. In his Leipzig laboratory, Wundt inaugurated an elaborate research programme on mental chronometry. We will look at the problem of calibration of experimental apparatus and will describe the intricate material, literary, and social technologies involved in the manufacture of precision. First, we shall discuss some of the technical problems involved in the measurement of ever shorter time-spans. Next, the Cattell-Berger experiments will help us to argue against the received view that all the precision went into the hardware, and practically none into the social organization of experimentation. Experimenters made deliberate efforts to bring themselves and their subjects under a regime of control and calibration similar to that which reigned over the experimental machinery. In Leipzig psychol...Continue Reading

Citations

Jul 19, 2005·History of Psychology·Thomas Sturm, Mitchell G Ash
Jun 6, 2009·Journal of Theoretical Biology·Donald R Forsdyke
Nov 9, 2005·Journal of the American Geriatrics Society·Daniel Schäfer
Jul 9, 2004·Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences·Cezary W Domanski
Apr 11, 2007·Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences·Silvia DegniGiovanni Pietro Lombardo
Nov 26, 2013·Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences·Alan F Collins
Sep 10, 2015·Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews. Cognitive Science·Kourken Michaelian
Nov 13, 2012·Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences·Alison Winter
Jun 12, 2014·Frontiers in Human Neuroscience·Donald R Forsdyke
Oct 5, 2016·Biological Psychiatry·Alejandro Ramirez, Melissa R Arbuckle
Jan 31, 2006·Journal of the History of the Neurosciences·Theodore L Sourkes
Jul 19, 2005·History of Psychology·Cornelius Borck
Oct 12, 2012·British Journal for the History of Science·Peter Galison
May 3, 2008·History of the Human Sciences·D Draaisma, S Rijcke

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