Craniology – the practice of inferring intelligence differences from the measurement of human skulls – survived the dismissal of phrenology and remained a widely popular research program until the end of the nineteenth century. From the 1970s, historians and sociologists of science extensively focused on the explicit and implicit socio-cultural biases invalidating the evidence and claims that craniology produced. Building on this literature, I reassess the history of craniological practice from a different but complementary perspective that relies on recent developments (...) in the epistemology of measurement. More precisely, I identify two aspects of the measurement culture of nineteenth-century craniologists that are crucial to understand the lack of validity of craniological inference: their neglect of the problem of coordination for their presupposed quantification of intelligence and their narrow view of calibration. Based on my analysis, I claim that these methodological shortcomings amplified the impact of the socio-cultural biases of craniologists, which had a pervasive role in their evidential use of measurement. Finally, my argument shows how the epistemology of measurement perspective can offer useful tools in debates concerning the use of biological evidence to foster social discourse and for analyzing the relationship between theory, evidence, and measurement. (shrink)

Most histories of psychology weave a story around the rise of objective methods of investigation and the decline of subjective introspection. This paper sidesteps such disciplinary stories by describing self-scrutiny as a practice that moved through a variety of cultural, social and technological contexts in early twentieth-century America. Edmund Jacobson's technique of 'progressive relaxation' is offered as a case in point. Jacobson, a Chicago clinician, developed this cure for nervousness out of his earlier research under E. B. Titchener, an experimental (...) psychologist at Cornell University. Like Titchener's method of 'experimental introspection ', progressive relaxation was a laboratory-based activity designed to transform the practitioner's sensibilities through the fastidious repetition of simple tasks. But while experimental psychologists ultimately rejected introspection as the core of their disciplinary project, the American public embraced progressive relaxation as a practical technique for mastering the new conditions of modernity. (shrink)