The ArgumentIt is often assumed that all sciences travel the path of increasing precision and quantification. It is also assumed that such processes transcend the boundaries of rival scientific disciplines. The history of the personal equation has been cited as an example: the “personal equation” was the name given by astronomers after Bessel to the differences in measured transit times recorded by observers in the same situation. Later in the nineteenth century Wilhelm Wundt used this phenomenon as a type for (...) his experiments on reaction times. For historians of psychology, this has been taken to be an exemplary case where quantified laboratory science rescued astronomy by showing that this was really a psychological phenomenon measurable only in complication experiments. This paper challenges this story. Astronomers neither ignored, nor despaired of, the personality problem. Instead, the managers of the great observatories developed a new chronometric regime of vigilant surveillance of subordinate observers. The astronomers' solution was thus intimately connected with social and material changes in their way of life: a division of labor in the observatories, a network of observing sites, a mechanization of observation. The paper documents these changes and then presents a study of one case where managers, amateurs, and psychologists clashed for authority over the personality problem. Measurement is given its meaning when situated in specific contexts of styles of work and institutions. Disciplines give meanings to values, and often resist attempts by others to redefine these meanings or to gain authority over measurement. Quantification is not a self-evident nor inevitable process in science's history, but possesses a remarkable cultural history of its own. (shrink)

One of the central debates among British chemists during the 1830s concerned the use of symbols to represent elements and compounds. Chemists such as Edward Turner, who desired to use symbolic notation mainly for practical reasons, eventually succeeded in fending off metaphysical objections to their approach. These objections were voiced both by the philosopher William Whewell, who wished to subordinate the chemists' practical aims to the rigid standard of algebra, and by John Dalton, whose hidebound opposition to abbreviated notation symbolized (...) the suspicion with which older British chemists perceived continental innovations. It is argued that the success of chemists like Turner in this debate reflects their larger success in the 1830s in achieving disciplinary autonomy and in beginning to align themselves more closely with prevailing chemical practice across the Channel. (shrink)