Description

We are asking you to engage in a critical analysis of a device, machine, technique, practice, or technological system.  That analysis can take a variety of forms and rely on a variety of media—from a paper, to an animation, to a live-action video, to a museum exhibit, to a podcast.  You should pick as your focus something that interests you and that will not have been discussed extensively in class (so not the telescope, the atomic bomb, the remote control, etc.).  It can be something that is well established or just emerging, something mundane or something cutting edge, something in the contemporary United States or something in another cultural or historical context.  We encourage you to think broadly and creatively, but you must review your choice with your TA in office hours.  The    This is not, strictly speaking, a research project.  That is, you are not expected to do the extensive research that would be required to answer all of the questions you might pose (though you may wish to consider what would we need to know in order to answer them).  The principal work we are asking you to do in this work is to argue for the importance and interest of your questions, individually and collectively.  In support of your argument, you should make explicit reference to claims made, and questions asked, in the texts and films from this course. You should also consult at least one other scholarly source.  This could be a book, a journal article, or a chapter in a published anthology; a TED talk, podcast, or documentary; or some other source you and your TA agree meets the criterion of being “scholarly.” All sources should be included in a bibliography and cited using consistent practices of citation (I suggest using the MLA guidelines). 1) In an introduction, explain why you think it is interesting, important—perhaps even urgent—to understand (or to understand better or differently) the thing you have chosen.  Part of your thesis or the argument you make should be that your undertaking is worthwhile, or that something specific is at stake. 2) Provide a brief summary or description of your object and its relevant features: its history, uses, costs, potentials, dangers, etc.  Here, too, we are interested in what you think it is important for your readers/audience to know about your object. 3) In the analysis that follows, ask and discuss the questions that, in your judgment and in the context of this course, would be particularly productive to ask about the thing you have chosen.  The questions should not be narrowly technical, scientific, practical, or aesthetic, but should each explore relations of technology, science, and society.  They can be about power, identity, risk, privacy, ethics, gender, choice, access, race, ecologies, etc.  They can highlight similarities with other things we have read about or discussed, or they can focus on differences.  4) For each question you ask, we want to hear from you what you think we might learn by trying to answer it.  What connections might your questions reveal?  What assumptions might they challenge?  What kinds of effects might they help us better to understand?  How might they help people to be better designers or more empowered consumers of technologies?   5) In a conclusion, assess the potential impact of asking and answering your questions taken together.  Have you made the case that we should be interested in the topic you have chosen?  That we have something important to learn?The and the A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology LANGDON WINNER THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS Chicago and London 1 TECHNOLOGIES AS FORMS OF LIFE FROM THE EARLY DAYS of manned space travel comes a story that exemplifies what is most fascinating about the human encounter with modern technology. Orbiting the earth aboard Friendship 7 in February 1962, astronaut John Glenn noticed something odd. His view of the planet was virtually unique in human experience; only Soviet pilots Yuri Gagarin and Gherman Titov had preceded him in orbital flight. Yet as he watched the continents and oceans moving beneath him, Glenn began to feel that he had seen it all before. Months ofsimulated space shots in sophisticated training machines and centifuges had affected his ability to respond. In the words of chronicler Tom Wolfe, “The world demanded awe, because this was a voyage through the stars. But he couldn’t feel it. The backdrop of the event, the stage, the environment, the true orbit … was not the vast reaches ofthe universe. It was the simulators. Who could possibly understand this?” 1 Synthetic conditions generated in the training center had begun to seem more “real” than the actual experience. It is reasonable to suppose that a society thoroughly committed to making artificial realities would have given a great deal of thought to the nature of that commitment. One might expect, for example, that the philosophy oftechnology would be a topic widely discussed by scholars and technical professionals, a lively field of inquiry often chosen by students at our universities and technical institutes. One might even think that the basic issues in this field would be well defined, its central controversies well worn. However, such is not the case. At this late date in the development of our industrial/technological civiliza3 A Philosophy oJ Technology tion the most accurate observation to be made about the philosophy oftechnology is that there really isn’t one. The basic task for a philosophy of technology is to examine critically the nature and significance of artificial aids to human activity. That is its appropriate domain ofinquiry, one that sets it apart from, say, the philosophy ofscience. Yet if one turns to the writings of twentieth-century philosophers, one finds astonishingly little attention given to questions of that kind. The six-volume Encyclopedia ofPhilosophy, a recent compendium of major themes in various traditions of philosophical discourse, contains no entry under the category “technology.” 2 Neither does that work contain enough material under possible alternative headings to enable anyone to piece together an idea of what a philosophy oftechnology might be. True, there are some writers who have taken up the topic. The standard bibliography in the philosophy oftechnology lists well over a thousand books and articles in several languages by nineteenth- and twentieth-century authors. 3 But reading through the material listed shows, in my view, little ofenduring substance. The best writing on this theme comes to us from a few powerful thinkers who have encountered the subject in the midst of much broader and ambitious investigations-for example, Karl Marx in the development of his theory of historical materialism or Martin Heidegger as an aspect of his theory of ontology. It may be, in fact, that the philosophy is best seen as a derivative of more fundamental questions. For despite the fact that nobody would deny its importance to an adequate understanding of the human condition, technology has never joined epistemology, metaphysics, esthetics, law, science, and politics as a fully respectable topic for philosophical inquiry. Engineers have shown little interest in filling this void. Except for airy pronouncements in yearly presidential addresses at various engineering societies, typically ones that celebrate the contributions of a particular technical vocation to the betterment of humankind, engineers appear unaware of any philosophical questions their work might entail. As a way ofstarting a conversation with my friends in engineering, I sometimes ask, “What are the founding principles of your discipline?” The question is always greeted with puzzlement. Even when I explain what I am after, namely, a coherent account of the nature and significance of the branch of engineering in which they are 4 TECHNOLOGIES AS FORMS OF LIFE involved, the question still means nothing to them. The scant few who raise important first questions about their technical professions are usually seen by their colleagues as dangerous cranks and radicals. IfSocrates’ suggestion that the “unexamined life is not worth living” still holds, it is news to most engineers. 4 Technological Somnambulism WHY IS IT that the philosophy of technology has never really gotten under way? Why has a culture so firmly based upon countless sophisticated instruments, techniques, and systems remained so steadfast in its reluctance to examine its own foundations? Much ofthe answer can be found in the astonishing hold the idea of “progress” has exercised on social thought during the industrial age. In the twentieth century it is usually taken for granted that the only reliable sources for improving the human condition stem from new machines, techniques, and chemicals. Even the recurring environmental and social ills that have accompanied technological advancement have rarely dented this faith. It is still a prerequisite that the person running for public office swear his or her unflinching confidence in a positive link between technical development and human well-being and affirm that the next wave ofinnovations will surely be our salvation. There is, however, another reason why the philosophy of technology has never gathered much steam. According to conventional views, the human relationship to technical things is too obvious to merit serious reflection. The deceptively reasonable notion that we have inherited from much earlier and less complicated times divides the range of possible concerns about technology into two basic categories: making and use. In the first of these our attention is drawn to the matter of “how things work” and of “making things work.” We tend to think that this is a fascination of certain people in certain occupations, but not for anyone else. “How things work” is the domain ofinventors, technicians, engineers, repairmen, and the like who prepare artificial aids to human activity and keep them in good working order. Those not directly involved in the various spheres of “making” are thought to have little interest in or need to know about the materials, principles, or procedures found in those spheres. What the others do care about, however, are tools and uses. 5 A Philosophy of Technology This is understood to be a straightforward matter. Once things have been made, we interact with them on occasion to achieve specific purposes. One picks up a tool, uses it, and puts it down. One picks up a telephone, talks on it, and then does not use it for a time. A person gets on an airplane, flies from point A to point B, and then gets off. The proper interpretation ofthe meaning oftechnology in the mode of use seems to be nothing more complicated than an occasional, limited, and nonproblematic interaction. The language of the notion of “use” also includes standard terms that enable us to interpret technologies in a range ofmoral contexts. Tools can be “used well or poorly” and for “good or bad purposes”; I can use my knife to slice a loaf of bread or to stab the next person that walks by. Because technological objects and processes have a promiscuous utility, they are taken to be fundamentally neutral as regards their moral standing. The conventional idea of what technology is and what it means, an idea powerfully reinforced by familiar terms used in everyday language, needs to be overcome ifa critical philosophy of technology is to move ahead. The crucial weakness of the conventional idea is that it disregards the many ways in which technologies provide structure for human activity. Since, according to accepted wisdom, patterns that take shape in the sphere of “making” are of interest to practitioners alone, and since the very essence of “use” is its occasional, innocuous, nonstructuring occurrence, any further questioning seems irrelevant. 5 Ifthe experience of modern society shows us anything, however, it is that technologies are not merely aids to human activity, but also powerful forces acting to reshape that activity and its meaning. The introduction of a robot to an industrial workplace not only increases productivity, but often radically changes the process of production, redefining what “work” means in that setting. When a sophisticated new technique or instrument is adopted in medical practice, it transforms not only what doctors do, but also the ways people think about health, sickness, and medical care. Widespread alterations of this kind in techniques of communication, transportation, manufacturing, agriculture, and the like are largely what distinguishes our times from early periods of human history. The kinds ofthings we are apt to see as “mere” technological entities become much more interesting and problematic if we begin to observe how broadly they are involved in conditions ofsocial and moral life. 6 TECHNOLOGIES AS FORMS OF LIFE It is true that recurring patterns of life’s activity (whatever their origins) tend to become unconscious processes taken for granted. Thus, we do not pause to reflect upon how we speak a language as we are doing so or the motions we go through in taking a shower. There is, however, one point at which we may become aware of a pattern taking shape-the very first time we encounter it. An opportunity ofthat sort occurred several years ago at the conclusion of a class I was teaching. A student came to my office on the day term papers were due and told me his essay would be late. “It crashed this morning,” he explained. I immediately interpreted this as a “crash” of the concept4al variety, a flimsy array of arguments and observations that eventually collapses under the weight ofits own ponderous absurdity. Indeed, some of my own papers have “crashed” in exactly that manner. But this was not the kind ofmishap that had befallen this particular fellow. He went on to explain that his paper had been composed on a computer terminal and that it had been stored in a time-sharing minicomputer. It sometimes happens that the machine “goes down” or “crashes,” making everything that happens in and around it stop until the computer can be “brought up,” that is, restored to full functioning. As I listened to the student’s explanation, I realized that he was telling me about the facts of a particular form of activity in modern life in which he and others similarly situated were already involved and that I had better get ready for. I remembered J. L. Austin’s little essay “A Plea for Excuses” and noticed that the student and I were negotiating one ofthe boundaries of contemporary moral life-where and how one gives and accepts an excuse in a particular technology-mediated situation. 6 He was, in effect, asking me to recognize a new world ofparts and pieces and to acknowledge appropriate practices and expectations that hold in that world. From then on, a knowledge ofthis situation would be included in my understanding ofnot only “how things work” in that generation of computers, but also how we do things as a consequence, including which rules to follow when the machines break down. Shortly thereafter I got used to computers crashing, disrupting hotel reservations, banking, and other everyday transactions; eventually, my own papers, began crashing in this new way. Some of the moral negotiations that technological change eventually become matters oflaw. In recent times, for example, a number of activities that employ computers as their 7 A Philosophy of Technology operating medium have been legally defined as “crimes.” Is unauthorized access to a computerized data base a criminal offense? Given the fact that electronic information is in the strictest sense intangible, under what conditions is it “property” subject to theft? The law has had to stretch and reorient its traditional categories to encompass such problems, creating whole new classes of offenses and offenders. The ways in which technical devices tend to engender distinctive worlds oftheir own can be seen in a more familiar case. Picture two men traveling in the same direction along a street on a peaceful, sunny day, one ofthem afoot and the other driving an automobile. The pedestrian has a certain flexibility of movement: he can pause to look in a shop window, speak to passersby, and reach out to pick a flower from a sidewalk garden. The driver, although he has the potential to move much faster, is constrained by the enclosed space ofthe automobile, the physical dimensions of the highway, and the rules of the road. His realm is spatially structured by his intended destination, by a pe-: riphery of more-or-Iess irrelevant objects (scenes for occasional side glances), and by more important objects of various kindsmoving and parked cars, bicycles, pedestrians, street signs, etc., that stand in his way. Since the first rule of good driving is to avoid hitting things, the immediate environment ofthe motorist becomes a field of obstacles. Imagine a situation in which the two persons are next-door neighbors. The man in the automobile observes his friend strolling along the street and wishes to say hello. He slows down, honks his horn, rolls down the window, sticks out his head, and shouts across the street. More likely than not the pedestrian will be startled or annoyed by the sound of the horn. He looks around to see what’s the matter and tries to recognize who can be yelling at him across the way. “Can you come to dinner Saturday night?” the driver calls out over the street noise. “What?” the pedestrian replies, straining to understand. At that moment another car to the rear begins honking to break up the temporary traffic jam. Unable to say anything more, the driver moves on. What we see here is an automobile collision ofsorts, although not one that causes bodily injury. It is a between the world of the driver and that of the pedestrian. The attempt to extend a greeting and invitation, ordinarily a simple gesture, is complicated by the presence of a technological device and its 8 TECHNOLOGIES AS FORMS OF LIFE standard operating conditions. The communication between the two men is shaped by an incompatibility ofthe form oflocomotion known as walking and a much newer one, automobile driving. In cities such as Los Angeles, where the physical landscape and prevailing social habits assume everyone drives a car, the simple act ofwalking can be cause for alarm. The U.S. Supreme Court decided one case involving a young man who enjoyed taking long walks late at night through the streets of San Diego and was repeatedly arrested by police as a suspicious character. The Court decided in favor ofthe pedestrian, noting that he had not been engaged in burglary or any other illegal act. Merely traveling by foot is not yet a crime. 7 Knowing how automobiles are made, how they operate, and how they are used and knowing about traffic laws and urban transportation policies does little to help us understand how automobiles affect the texture of modern life. In such cases a strictly instrumental/functional understanding fails us badly. What is needed is an interpretation of the ways, both obvious and subtle, in which everyday life is transformed by the mediating role oftechnical devices. In hindsight the situation is clear to everyone. Individual habits, perceptions, concepts ofself, ideas of space and time, social relationships, and moral and political boundaries have all been powerfully restructured in the course of modern technological development. What is fascinating about this process is that societies involved in it have quickly altered some ofthe fundamental terms ofhuman life without appearing to do so. Vast transformations in the structure of our common world have been undertaken with little attention to what those alterations mean. Judgments about technology have been made on narrow grounds, paying attention to such matters as whether a new device serves a particular need, performs more efficiently than its predecessor, makes a profit, or provides a convenient service. Only later does the broader significance of the choice become clear, typically as a series ofsurprising “side effects” or “secondary consequences.” But it seems characteristic of our culture’s involvement with technology that we are seldom inclined to examine, discuss, or judge pending innovations with broad, keen awareness ofwhat those changes mean. In the technical realm we repeatedly enter into a series ofsocial contracts, the terms of which are revealed orily after the signing. It may seem that the view I am suggesting is that of technological determinism: the idea that technological innovation is 9 A Philosophy of Technology the basic cause of changes in society and that human beings have little choice other than to sit back and watch this ineluctable process unfold. But the concept of determinism is much too strong, far too sweeping in its implications to provide an adequate theory. It does little justice to the genuine choices that arise, in both principle and practice, in the course of technical and social transformation. Being saddled with it is like attempting to describe all instances ofsexual intercourse based only on the concept ofrape. A more revealing notion, in my view, is that of technological somnambulism. For the interesting puzzle in our times is that we so willingly sleepwalk through the process ofreconstituting the conditions of human existence. Beyond Impacts and Side Effects SOCIA L SCI E N TIS TS have tried to awaken the sleeper by developing methods oftechnology assessment. The strength ofthese methods is that they shed light on phenomena that were previously overlooked. But an unfortunate shortcoming of technology assessment is that it tends to see technological change as a “cause” and everything that follows as an “effect” or “impact.” The role ofthe researcher is to identify, observe, and explain these effects. This approach assumes that the causes have already occurred or are bound to do so in the normal course of events. Social research boldly enters the scene to study the “consequences” of the change. After the bulldozer has rolled over us, we can pick ourselves up and carefully measure the treadmarks. Such is the impotent mission oftechnological “impact” assessment. A somewhat more farsighted version of technology assessment is sometimes used to predict which changes are likely to happen, the “social impacts of computerization” for example. With these forecasts at its disposal, society is, presumably, better able to chart its course. But, once again, the attitude in which the predictions are offered usually suggests that the “impacts” are going to happen in any case. Assertions of the sort “Computerization will bring about a revolution in the way we educate our children” carry the strong implication that those who will experience the change are obliged simply to endure it. Humans must adapt. That is their destiny. There is no tampering with the source of change, and only minor modifications are possible 10 TECHNOLOGIES AS FORMS OF LIFE at the point ofimpact (perhaps some slight changes in the fashion contour ofthis year’s treadmarks). But we have already begun to notice another view of technological development, one that transcends the empirical and moral shortcomings of cause-and-effect models. It begins with the recognition that as technologies are being built and put to use, significant alterations in patterns of human activity and human institutions are already taking place. New worlds are being made. There is nothing “secondary” about this phenomenon. It is, in fact, the most important accomplishment ofany new technology. The construction ofa technical system that involves human beings as operating parts brings a reconstruction of social roles and relationships. Often this is a result of a new system’s own operating requirements: it simply will not work unless human behavior changes to suit its form and process. Hence, the very act ofusing the kinds ofmachines, techniques, and systems available to us generates patterns of activities and expectations that soon become “second nature.” We do indeed “use” telephones, automobiles, electric lights, and computers in the conventional sense ofpicking them up and putting them down. But our world soon becomes one in which telephony, automobility, electric lighting, and computing are forms of life in the most powerful sense: life would scarcely be thinkable without them. My choice of the term “forms oflife” in this context derives from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s elaboration ofthat concept in Philosophical Investigations. In his later writing Wittgenstein sought to overcome an extremely narrow view of the structure of language then popular among philosophers, a view that held language to be primarily a matter of naming things and events. Pointing to the richness and multiplicity ofthe kinds of expression or “language games” that are a part of everyday speech, Wittgenstein argued that “the speaking oflanguage is a part of an activity, or of a form of life.” 8 He gave a variety of examples-the giving of orders, speculating about events, guessing riddles, making up stories, forming and testing hypotheses, and so forth-to indicate the wide range oflanguage games involved in various “forms oflife.” Whether he meant to suggest that these are patterns that occur naturally to all human beings or that they are primarily cultural conventions that can change with time and setting is a question open to dispute. 9 For the purposes here, what matters is not the ultimate philosophical status 11 A Philosophy of Technology ofWittgenstein’s concept but its suggestiveness in helping us to overcome another widespread and extremely narrow conception: our normal understanding ofthe meaning oftechnology in human life. As they become woven into the texture ofeveryday existence, the devices, techniques, and systems we adopt shed their toollike qualities to become part ofour very humanity. In an important sense we become the beings who work on assembly lines, who talk on telephones, who do our figuring on pocket calculators, who eat processed foods, who clean our homes with powerful chemicals. Of course, working, talking, figuring, eating, cleaning, and such things have been parts ofhuman activity for a very long time. But technological innovations can radically alter these common patterns and on occasion generate entirely new ones, often with surprising results. The role television plays in our society offers some poignant examples. None of those who worked to perfect the technology of television in its early years and few of those who brought television sets into their homes ever intended the device to be employed as the universal babysitter. That, however, has become one oftelevisions’ most common functions in the modern home. Similarly, if anyone in the 1930s had predicted people would eventually be watching seven hours oftelevision each day, the forecast would have been laughed away as absurd. But recent surveys indicate that we Americans do spend that much time, roughly one-third of our lives, staring at the tube. Those who wish to reassert freedom of choice in the matter sometimes observe, “You can always turn off your TV.” In a trivial sense that is true. At least for the time being the onloff button is still included as standard equipment on most sets (perhaps someday it will become optional). But given how central television has become to the content of everyday life, how it has become the accustomed topic of conversation in workplaces, schools, and other social gatherings, it is apparent that television is a phenomenon that, in the larger sense, cannot be “turned off” at all. Deeply insinuated into people’s perceptions, thoughts, and behavior, it has become an indelible part of modern culture. Most changes in the content of everyday life brought on by technology can be recognized as versions of earlier patterns. Parents have always had to entertain and instruct children and to find ways of keeping the little ones out of their hair. Having youngsters watch several hours oftelevision cartoons is, in one 12 TECHNOLOGIES AS FORMS OF LIFE way oflooking at the matter, merely a new method for handling this age-old task, although the “merely” is of no small significance. It is important to ask, Where, if at all, have modern technologies added fundamentally new activities to the range ofthings human beings do? Where and how have innovations in science and technology begun to alter the very conditions of life itself? Is computer programming only a powerful recombination of forms oflife known for ages-doing mathematics, listing, sorting, planning, organizing, etc.-or is it something unprecedented? Is industrialized agribusiness simply a renovation of older ways of farming, or does it amount to an entirely new phenomenon? Certainly, there are some accomplishments of modern technology, manned air flight, for example, that are clearly altogether novel. Flying in airplanes is not just another version of modes of travel previously known; it is something new. Although the hope of humans flying is as old as the myth of Daedalus and Icarus or the angels ofthe Old Testament, it took a certain kind of modern machinery to realize the dream in practice. Even beyond the numerous breakthroughs that have pushed the boundaries of human action, however, lie certain kinds of changes now on the horizon that would amount to a fundamental change in the conditions of human life itself. One such prospect is that of altering human biology through genetic engineering. Another is the founding of permanent settlements in outer space. Both ofthese possibilities call into question what it means to be human and what constitutes “the human condition.” 10 Speculation about such matters is now largely the work ofscience fiction, whose notorious perversity as a literary genre signals the troubles that lie in wait when we begin thinking about becoming creatures fundamentally different from any the earth has seen. A great many futuristic novels are blatantly technopornographic. But, on the whole, most ofthe transformations that occur in the wake of technological innovation are actually variations of very old patterns. Wittgenstein’s philosophically conservative maxim “What has to be accepted, the given, is-so one could say-forms of life” could well be the guiding rule of a phenomenology oftechnical practice. 11 For instance, asking a question and awaiting an answer, a form ofinteraction we all know well, is much the same activity whether it is a person we are confronting or a computer. There are, of course, significant differences between persons and computers (although it is fash13 A Philosophy of Technology ionable in some circles to ignore them). Forms of life that we mastered before the coming ofthe computer shape our expectations as we begin to use the instrument. One strategy of software design, therefore, tries to “humanize” the computers by having them say “Hello” when the user logs in or having them respond with witty remarks when a person makes an error. We carry with us highly structured anticipations about entities that appear to participate, if only minimally, in forms oflife and associated language games that are parts ofhuman culture. Those anticipations provide much of the persuasive power of those who prematurely claim great advances in “artificial intelligence” based on narrow but impressive demonstrations of computer performance. But then children have always fantasized that their dolls were alive and talking. The view oftechnologies as forms oflife I am proposing has its clearest beginnings in the writings of Karl Marx. In Part I of The German Ideology, Marx and Engels explain the relationship ofhuman individuality and material conditions ofproduction as follows: “The way in which men produce their means ofsubsistence depends first of all on the nature of the means of subsistence they actually find in existence and have to reproduce. This mode of production must not be considered simply as being the reproduction ofthe physical existence ofthe individuals. Rather it is a definite form of activity of these individuals, a definite form of expressing their life, a definite mode of life on their part. As individuals express their life, so they are.” 12 Marx’s concept of production here is a very broad and suggestive one. It reveals the total inadequacy of any interpretation that finds social change a mere “side effect” or “impact” oftechnological innovation. While he clearly points to means of production that sustain life in an immediate, physical sense, Marx’s view extends to a general understanding ofhuman development in a world of diverse natural resources, tools, machines, products, and social relations. The notion is clearly not one of occasional human interaction with devices and material conditions that leave individuals unaffected. By changing the shape of material things, Marx observes, we also change ourselves. In this process human beings do not stand at the mercy ofa great deterministic punch press that cranks out precisely tailored persons at a certain rate during a given historical period. Instead, the situation Marx describes is one in which individuals are actively involved in the daily creation and recreation, production and 14 TECHNOLOGIES AS FORMS OF LIFE reproduction ofthe world in which they live. Thus, as they employ tools and techniques, work in social labor arrangements, make and consume products, and adapt their behavior to the material conditions they encounter in their natural and artificial environment, individuals realize possibilities fO,r human existence that are inaccessible in more primitive modes of production. Marx expands upon this idea in “The Chapter on Capital” in the Grundrisse. The development offorces of production in history, he argues, holds the promise of the development of a many-sided individuality in all human beings. Capital’s unlimited pursuit ofwealth leads it to develop the productive powers oflabor to a state “where the possession and preservation of general wealth require a lesser labour time ofsociety as a whole, and where the labouring society relates scientifically to the process of its progressive reproduction, its reproduction in constantly greater abundance.” This movement toward a general form of wealth “creates the material elements for the development of the rich individuality which is all-sided in its production as in its consumption, and whose labour also therefore appears no longer as labour, but as the full development of activity itself. ” 13 If one has access to tools and materials of woodworking, a person can develop the human qualities found in the activities of carpentry. If one is able to employ the instruments and techniques ofmusic making, one can become (in that aspect of one’s life) a musician. Marx’s ideal here, a variety of materialist humanism, anticipates that in a properly structured society under modern conditions of production, people would engage in a very wide range of activities that enrich their individuality along many dimensions. It is that promise which, he argues, the institutions of capitalism thwart and cripple. 14 As applied to an understanding of technology, the philosophies ofMarx and Wittgenstein direct our attention to the fabric of everyday existence. Wittgenstein points to a vast multiplicity of cultural practices that comprise our common world. Asking us to notice “what we say when,” his approach can help us recognize the way language reflects the content of technical practice. It makes sense to ask, for example, how the adoption of digital computers might alter the way people think oftheir own faculties and activities. If Wittgenstein is correct, we would expect that changes of this kind would appear, sooner or later, in the language people use to talk about themselves. Indeed, it has 15 A Philosophy of Technology now become commonplace to hear people say “I need to access your data.” “I’m not programmed for that.” “We must improve our interface.” “The mind is the best computer we have.” Marx, on the other hand, recommends that we see the actions and interactions ofeveryday life within an enormous tapestry of historical developments. On occasion, as in the chapter on “Machinery and Large-Scale Industry” in Capital, his mode ofinterpretation also includes a place for a more microscopic treatment ofspecific technologies in human experience. 15 But on the whole his theory seeks to explain very large patterns, especially relationships between different social classes, that unfold at each stage in the history ofmaterial production. These developments set the stage for people’s ability to survive and express themselves, for their ways of being human. Return to Making To INVOKE Wittgenstein and Marx in this context, however, is not to suggest that either one or both provide a sufficient basis for a critical philosophy oftechnology. Proposing an attitude in which forms of life must be accepted as “the given,” Wittgenstein decides that philosophy “leaves everything as it is.” 16 Although some Wittgensteinians are eager to point out that this position does not necessarily commit the philosopher to conservatism in an economic or political sense, it does seem that as applied to the study of forms of life in the realm of technology, Wittgenstein leaves us with little more than a passive traditionalism. Ifone hopes to interpret technological phenomena in a way that suggests positive judgments and actions, Wittgensteinian philosophy leaves much to be desired. In a much different way Marx and Marxism contain the potential for an equally woeful passivity. This mode of understanding places its hope in historical tendencies that promise human emancipation at some point. As forces of production and. social relations of production develop and as the proletariat makes its way toward revolution, Marx and his orthodox followers are willing to allow capitalist technology, for example, the factory system, to develop to its farthest extent. Marx and Engels scoffed at the utopians, anarchists, and romantic critics ofindustrialism who thought it possible to make moral and politicaljudgments about the course a technological society ought to take and to influence that path through the application of 16 TECHNOLOGIES AS FORMS OF LIFE philosophical principles. Following this lead, most Marxists have believed that while capitalism is a target to be attacked, technological expansion is entirely good in itself, something to be encouraged without reservation. In its own way, then, Marxist theory upholds an attitude as nearly lethargic as the Wittgensteinian decision to “leave everything as it is.” The famous eleventh thesis on Feuerbach-“The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it”-conceals an important qualification: that judgment, action, and change are ultimately products ofhistory. In its view of technological development Marxism anticipates a history of rapidly evolving material productivity, an inevitable course of events in which attempts to propose moral and political limits have no place. When socialism replaces capitalism, so the promise goes, the machine will finally move into high gear, presumably releasing humankind from its age-old miseries. Whatever their shortcomings, however, the philosophies of Marx and Wittgenstein share a fruitful insight: the observation that social activity is an ongoing process of world-making. Throughout their lives people come together to renew the fabric of relationships, transactions, and meanings that sustain their common existence. Indeed, if they did not engage in this continuing activity of material and social production, the human world would literally fall apart. All social roles and frameworks-from the most rewarding to the most oppressivemust somehow be restored and reproduced with the rise of the sun each day. From this point of view, the important question about technology becomes, As we “make things work,” what kind of world are we making? This suggests that we pay attention not only to the making of physical instruments and processes, although that certainly remains important, but also to the production of psychological, social, and political conditions as a part of significant technical change. Are we going to design and build circumstances that enlarge possibilities for growth in human freedom, sociability, intelligence, creativity, and self-government? Or are we headed in an altogether different direction? It is trUe that not every technological innovation embodies choices of great significance. Some developments are more-orless innocuous; many create only trivial modifications in how we live. But in general, where there are substantial changes 17 A Philosophy of Technology being made in what people are doing and at a substantial investment of social resources, then it always pays to ask in advance about the qualities of the artifacts, institutions, and human experiences currently on the drawing board. Inquiries of this kind present an important challenge to all disciplines in the social sciences and humanities. Indeed, there are many historians, anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, and artists whose work sheds light on long-overlooked human dimensions of technology. Even engineers and other technical professionals have much to contribute here when they find courage to go beyond the narrow-gauge categories oftheir training. The study of politics offers its own characteristic route into this territory. As the political imagination confronts technologies as forms oflife, it should be able to say something about the choices (implicit or explicit) made in the course oftechnological innovation and the grounds for making those choices wisely. That is a task I take up in the next two chapters. Through technological creation and many other ways as well, we make a world for each other to live in. Much more than we have acknowledged in the past, we must admit our responsibility for what we are making. 18 2 DO ARTIFACTS HAVE POLITICS? N 0 IDE A IS more provocative in controversies about technology and society than the notion that technical things have political qualities. At issue is the claim that the machines, structures, and systems ofmodern material culture can be accurately judged not only for their contributions to efficiency and productivity and their positive and negative environmental side effects, but also for the ways in which they can embody specific forms of power and authority. Since ideas ofthis kind are a persistent and troubling presence in discussions about the meaning of technology, they deserve explicit attention. Writing in the early 1960s, Lewis Mumford gave classic statement to one version ofthe theme, arguing that “from late neolithic times in the Near East, right down to our own day, two technologies have recurrently existed side by side: one authoritarian, the other democratic, the first system-centered, immensely powerful, but inherently unstable, the other mancentered, relatively weak, but resourceful and durable.” 1 This thesis stands at the heart ofMumford’s studies ofthe city, architecture, and history oftechnics, and mirrors concerns voiced earlier in the works ofPeter Kropotkin, William Morris, and other nineteenth-century critics of industrialism. During the 1970s, antinuclear and pro-solar energy movements in Europe and the United States adopted a similar notion as the centerpiece oftheir arguments. According to environmentalist Denis Hayes, “The increased deployment of nuclear power facilities must lead society toward authoritarianism. Indeed, safe reliance upon nuclear power as the principal source of energy may be possible only in a totalitarian state.” Echoing the views of many propo19 A Philosophy of Technology nents of appropriate technology and the soft energy path, Hayes contends that “dispersed solar sources are more compatible than centralized technologies with social equity, freedom and cultural pluralism.” 2 An eagerness to interpret technical artifacts in political language is by no means the exclusive property of critics oflargescale, high-technology systems. A long lineage of boosters has insisted that the biggest and best that science and industry made available were the best guarantees of democracy, freedom, and social justice. The factory system, automobile, telephone, radio, television, space program, and of course nuclear power have all at one time or another been described as democratizing, liberating forces. David Lillienthal’s T. V.A.: Democracy on the March, for example, found this promise in the phosphate fertilizers and electricity that technical progress was bringing to rural Americans during the 1940s. 3 Three decades later Daniel Boorstin’s The Republic of Technology extolled television for “its power to disband armies, to cashier presidents, to create a whole new democratic world-democratic in ways never before imagined, even in America.” 4 Scarcely a new invention comes along that someone doesn’t proclaim it as the salvation ofa free society. It is no surprise to learn that technical systems of various kinds are deeply interwoven in the conditions of modern politics. The physical arrangements of industrial production, warfare, communications, and the like have fundamentally changed the exercise of power and the experience of citizenship. But to go beyond this obvious fact and to argue that certain technologies in themselves have political properties seems, at first glance, completely mistaken. We all know that people have politics; things do not. To discover either virtues or evils in aggregates of steel, plastic, transistors, integrated circuits, chemicals, and the like seems just plain wrong, a way of mystifying human artifice and of avoiding the true sources, the human sources offreedom and oppression, justice and injustice. Blaming the hardware appears even more foolish than blaming the victims when it comes to judging conditions of public life. Hence, the stern advice commonly given those who flirt with the notion that technical artifacts have political qualities: What matters is not technology itself, but the social or economic system in which it is embedded. This maxim, which in a number of variations is the central premise ofa theory that can be called the 20 Do ARTIFACTS HAVE POLITICS? social determination of technology, has an obvious wisdom. It serves as a needed corrective to those who focus uncritically upon such things as “the computer and its social impacts” but who fail to look behind technical devices to see the social circumstances of their development, deployment, and use. This view provides an antidote to naive technological determinismthe idea that technology develops as the sole result of an internal dynamic and then, unmediated by any other influence, molds society to fit its patterns. Those who have not recognized the ways in which technologies are shaped by social and economic forces have not gotten very far. But the corrective has its own shortcomings; taken literally, it suggests that technical things do not matter at all. Once one has done the detective work necessary to reveal the social originspower holders behind a particular instance of technological change-one will have explained everything of importance. This conclusion offers comfort to social scientists. It validates what they had always suspected, namely, that there is nothing distinctive about the study of technology in the first place. Hence, they can return to theirstandard models ofsocial powerthose of interest-group politics, bureaucratic politics, Marxist models ofclass struggle, and the like-and have everything they need. The social determination of technology is, in this view, essentially no different from the social determination of, say, welfare policy or taxation. There are, however, good reasons to believe that technology is politically significant in its own right, good reasons why the standard models of social science only go so far in accounting for what is most interesting and troublesome about the subject. Much ofmodern social and political thought contains recurring statements of what can be called a theory oftechnological politics, an odd mongrel of notions often crossbred with orthodox liberal, conservative, and socialist philosophies. 5 The theory of technological politics draws attention to the momentum of large-scale sociotechnical systems, to the response of modern societies to certain technological imperatives, and to the ways human ends are powerfully transformed as they are adapted to technical means. This perspective offers a novel framework of interpretation and explanation for some of the more puzzling patterns that have taken shape in and around the growth ofmodern material culture. Its starting point is a decision to take tech21 A Philosophy of Technology nical artifacts seriously. Rather than insist that we immediately reduce everything to the interplay ofsocial forces, the theory of technological politics suggests that we pay attention to the characteristics oftechnical objects and the meaning of those characteristics. A necessary complement to, rather than a replacement for, theories of the social determination of techndlogy, this approach identifies certain technologies as political phenomena in their own right. It points us back, to borrow Edmund Husserl’s philosophical injunction, to the things themselves. In what follows I will outline and illustrate two ways in which artifacts can contain political properties. First are instances in which the invention, design, or arrangement of a specific technical device or system becomes a way of settling an issue in the affairs of a particular community. Seen in the proper light, examples of this kind are fairly straightforward and easily understood. Second are cases ofwhat can be called “inherently political technologies,” man-made systems that appear to require or to be strongly compatible with particular kinds of political relationships. Arguments about cases of this kind are much more troublesome and closer to the heart of the matter. By the term “politics” I mean arrangements of power and authority in human associations as well as the activities that take place within those arrangements. For my purposes here, the term “technology” is understood to mean all of modern practical artifice, but to avoid confusion I prefer to speak of “technologies” plural, smaller or larger pieces orsystems ofhardware ofa specific kind. 6 My intention is not to settle any of the issues here once and for all, but to indicate their general dimensions and significance. Technical Arrangements and Social Order ANYONE WHO has traveled the highways of America and has gotten used to the normal height of overpasses may well find something a little odd about some ofthe bridges over the parkways on Long Island, New York. Many ofthe overpasses are extraordinarily low, having as little as nine feet of clearance at the curb. Even those who happened to notice this structural peculiarity would not be inclined to attach any special meaning to it. In our accustomed way of looking at things such as roads and bridges, we see the details of form as innocuous and seldom give them a second thought. 22 Do ARTIFACTS HAVE POLITICS? It turns out, however, that some two hundred or so lowhanging overpasses on Long Island are there for a reason. They were deliberately designed and built that way by someone who wanted to achieve a particular social effect. Robert Moses, the master builder ofroads, parks, bridges, and other public works of the 1920s to the 1970s in New York, built his overpasses according to specifications that would discourage the presence of buses on his parkways. According to evidence provided by Moses’ biographer, Robert A. Caro, the reasons reflect Moses’ social class bias and racial prejudice. Automobile-owning whites of “upper” and “comfortable middle” classes, as he called them, would be free to use the parkways for recreation and commuting. Poor people and blacks, who normally used public transit, were kept off the roads because the twelve-foot tall buses could not handle the overpasses. One consequence was to limit access of racial minorities and low-income groups to Jones Beach, Moses’ widely acclaimed public park. Moses made doubly sure ofthis result by vetoing a proposed extension ofthe Long Island Railroad to Jones Beach. Robert Moses’ life is a fascinating story in recent U. S. political history. His dealings with mayors, governors, and presidents; his careful manipulation oflegislatures, banks, labor unions, the press, and public opinion could be studied by political scientists for years. But the most important and enduring results of his work are his technologies, the vast engineering projects that give New York much ofits present form. For generations after Moses’ death and the alliances he forged have fallen apart, his public works, especially the highways and bridges he built to favor the use of the automobile over the development of mass transit, will continue to shape that city. Many of his monumental structures of concrete and steel embody a systematic social inequality, a way ofengineering relationships among people that, after a time, became just another part of the landscape. As New York planner Lee Koppleman told Caro about the low bridges on Wantagh Parkway, “The old son of a gun had made sure that buses would never be able to use his goddamned parkways. “7 Histories ofarchitecture, city planning, and public works contain many examples of physical arrangements with explicit or implicit political purposes. One can point to Baron Haussmann’s broad Parisian thoroughfares, engineered at Louis Napoleon’s 23 A Philosophy of Technology direction to prevent any recurrence ofstreet fighting ofthe kind that took place during the revolution of 1848. Or one can visit any number of grotesque concrete buildings and huge plazas constructed on university campuses in the United States during the late 1960s and early 1970s to defuse student demonstrations. Studies of industrial machines and instruments also turn up interesting political stories, including some that violate our normal expectations about why technological innovations are made in the first place. If we suppose that new technologies are introduced to achieve increased efficiency, the history of technology shows that we will sometimes be disappointed. Technological change expresses a panoply of human motives, not the least of which is the desire ofsome to have dominion over others even though it may require an occasional sacrifice of cost savings and some violation of the normal standard of trying to get more from less. One poignant illustration can be found in the history of nineteenth-century industrial mechanization. At Cyrus McCormick’s reaper manufacturing plant in Chicago in the middle 1880s, pneumatic molding machines, a new and largely untested innovation, were added to the foundry at an estimated cost of $500,000. The standard economic interpretation would lead us to expect that this step was taken to modernize the plant and achieve the kind of efficiencies that mechanization brings. But historian Robert Ozanne has put the development in a broader context. At the time, Cyrus McCormick II was engaged in a battle with the National Union of Iron Molders. He saw the addition of the new machines as a way to “weed out the bad element among the men,” namely, the skilled workers who had organized the union local in Chicago. 8 The new machines, manned by unskilled laborers, actually produced inferior castings at a higher cost than the earlier process. After three years of use the machines were, in fact, abandoned, but by that time they had served their purpose-the destruction of the union. Thus, the story of these technical developments at the McCormick factory cannot be adequately understood outside the record of workers’ attempts to organize, police repression of the labor movement in Chicago during that period, and the events surrounding the bombing at Haymarket Square. Technological history and U. S. political history were at that moment deeply intertwined. 24 Do ARTIFACTS HAVE POLITICS? In the examples of Moses’ low bridges and McCormick’s molding machines, one sees the importance of technical arrangements that precede the use of the things in question. It is obvious that technologies can be used in ways that enhance the power, authority, and privilege of some over others, for example, the use of television to sell a candidate. In our accustomed way ofthinking technologies are seen as neutral tools that can be used well or poorly, for good, evil, or something in between. But we usually do not stop to inquire whether a given device might have been designed and built in such a way that it produces a set of consequences logically and temporally prior to any ofits professed uses. Robert Moses’ bridges, after all, were used to carry automobiles from one point to another; McCormick’s machines were used to make metal castings; both technologies, however, encompassed purposes far beyond their immediate use. If our moral and political language for evaluating technology includes only categories having to do with tools and uses, if it does not include attention to the meaning of the designs and arrangements of our artifacts, then we will be blinded to much that is intellectually and practically crucial. . Because the point is most easily understood in the light of particular intentions embodied in physical form, I have so far offered illustrations that seem almost conspiratorial. But to recognize the political dimensions in the shapes of technology does not require that we look for conscious conspiracies or malicious intentions. The organized movement of handicapped people in the United States during the 1970s pointed out the countless ways in which machines, instruments, and structures of common use-buses, buildings, sidewalks, plumbing fixtures, and so forth-made it impossible for many handicapped persons to move freely about, a condition that systematically excluded them from public life. It is safe to say that designs unsuited for the handicapped arose more from long-standing neglect than from anyone’s active intention. But once the issue was brought to public attention, it became evident that justice required a remedy. A whole range ofartifacts have been redesigned and rebuilt to accommodate this minority. Indeed, many of the most important examples of technologies that have political consequences are those that transcend the simple categories “intended” and “unintended” altogether. These are instances in which the very process oftechnical devel25 A Philosophy of Technology opment is so thoroughly biased in a particular direction that it regularly produces results heralded as wonderful breakthroughs by some social interests and crushing setbacks by others. In such cases it is neither correct nor insightful to say, “Someone intended to do somebody else harm.” Rather one must say that the technological deck has been stacked in advance to favor certain social interests and that some people were bound to receive a better hand than others. The mechanical tomato harvester, a remarkable device perfected by researchers at the University of California from the late 1940s to the present offers an illustrative tale. The machine is able to harvest tomatoes in a single pass through a row, cutting the plants from the ground, shaking the fruit loose, and (in the newest models) sorting the tomatoes electronically into large plastic gondolas that hold up to twenty-five tons of produce headed for canning factories. To accommodate the rough motion ofthese harvesters in the field, agricultural researchers have bred new varieties oftomatoes that are hardier, sturdier, and less tasty than those previously grown. The harvesters replace the system of handpicking in which crews of farm workers would pass through the fields three or four times, putting ripe tomatoes in lug boxes and saving immature fruit for later harvest. 9 Studies in California indicate that the use of the machine reduces costs by approximately five to seven dollars per ton as compared to hand harvesting. 10 But the benefits are by no means equally divided in the agricultural economy. In fact, the machine in the garden has in this instance been the occasion for a thorough reshaping ofsocial relationships involved in tomato production in rural California. By virtue of their very size and cost of more than $50,000 each, the machines are compatible only with a highly concentrated form of tomato growing. With the introduction of this new method of harvesting, the number of tomato growers declined from approximately 4,000 in the early 1960s to about 600 in 1973, and yet there was a substantial increase in tons oftomatoes produced. By the late 1970s an estimated 32,000 jobs in the tomato industry had been eliminated as a direct consequence of mechanization. 11 Thus, a jump in productivity to the benefit of very large growers has occurred at the sacrifice ofother rural agricultural communities. The University of California’s research on and development of agricultural machines such as the tomato harvester eventually 26 Do ARTIFACTS HAVE POLITICS? became the subject of a lawsuit filed by attorneys for California Rural Legal Assistance, an organization representing a group of farm workers and other interested parties. The suit charged that university officials are spending tax monies on projects that benefit a handful of private interests to the detriment of farm workers, small farmers, consumers, and rural California generally and asks for a court injunction to stop the practice. The university denied these charges, arguing that to accept them “would require elimination of all research with any potential practical application.” 12 As far as I know, no one argued that the development of the tomato harvester was the result of a plot. Two students of the controversy, William Friedland and Amy Barton, specifically exonerate the original developers of the machine and the hard tomato from any desire to facilitate economic concentration in that industry.13 What we see here instead is an ongoing social process in which scientific knowledge, technological invention, and corporate profit reinforce each other in deeply entrenched patterns, patterns that bear the unmistakable stamp of political and economic power. Over many decades agricultural research and development in U.S. land-grant colleges and universities has tended to favor the interests oflarge agribusiness concerns. 14 It is in the face ofsuch subtly ingrained patterns that opponents of innovations such as the tomato harvester are made to seem “antitechnology” or “antiprogress.” For the harvester is not merely the symbol of a social order that rewards some while punishing others; it is in a true sense an embodiment of that order. Within a given category of technological change there are, roughly speaking, two kinds of choices that can affect the relative distribution of power, authority, and privilege in a community. Often the crucial decision is a simple “yes or no” choiceare we going to develop and adopt the thing or not? In recent years many local, national, and international disputes about technology have centered on “yes or no” judgments about such things as food additives, pesticides, the building of highways, nuclear reactors, dam projects, and proposed high-tech weapons. The fundamental choice about an antiballistic missile or supersonic transport is whether or not the thing is going to join society as a piece ofits operating equipment. Reasons given for and against are frequently as important as those concerning the adoption of an important new law. 27 A Philosophy of Technology A second range of choices, equally critical in many instances, has to do with specific features in the design or arrangement of a technical system after the decision to go ahead with it has already been made. Even after a utility company wins permission to build a large electric power line, important controversies can remain with respect to the placement of its route and the design of its towers; even after an organization has decided to institute a system of computers, controversies can still arise with regard to the kinds of components, programs, modes of access, and other specific features the system will include. Once the mechanical tomato harvester had been developed in its basic form, a design alteration of critical social significance-the addition of electronic sorters, for example-changed the character of the machine’s effects upon the balance of wealth and power in California agriculture. Some of the most interesting research on technology and politics at present focuses upon the attempt to demonstrate in a detailed, concrete fashion how seemingly innocuous design features in mass transit systems, water projects, industrial machinery, and other technologies actually mask social choices ofprofound significance. Historian David Noble has studied two kinds of automated machine tool systems that have different implications for the relative power ofmanagement and labor in the industries that might employ them. He has shown that although the basic electronic and mechanical components of the record/playback and numerical control systems are similar, the choice of one design over another has crucial consequences for social struggles on the shop floor. To see the matter solely in terms of cost cutting, efficiency, or the modernization of equipment is to miss a decisive element in the story. 15 From such examples I would offer some general conclusions. These correspond to the interpretation oftechnologies as “forms oflife” presented in the previous chapter, filling in the explicitly political dimensions ofthat point of view. The things we call “technologies” are ways of building order in our world. Many technical devices and systems important in everyday life contain possibilities for many different ways ofordering human activity. Consciously or unconsciously, deliberately or inadvertently, societies choose structures for technologies that influence how people are going to work, communicate, travel, consume, and so forth over a very long time. In the processes by which structuring decisions are made, different people are situated differently and possess unequal degrees of power as 28 Do ARTIFACTS HAVE POLITICS? well as unequal levels ofawareness. By far the greatest latitude of choice exists the very first time a particular instrument, system, or technique is introduced. Because choices tend to become strongly fixed in material equipment, economic investment, and social habit, the original flexibility vanishes for all practical purposes once the initial commitments are made. In that sense technological innovations are similar to legislative acts or political foundings that establish a framework for public order that will endure over many generations. For that reason the same careful attention one would give to the rules, roles, and relationships of politics must also be given to such things as the building of highways, the creation oftelevision networks, and the tailoring ofseemingly insignificant features on new machines. The issues that divide or unite people in society are settled not only in the institutions and practices of politics proper, but also, and less obviously, in tangible arrangements ofsteel and concrete, wires and semiconductors, nuts and bolts. Inherently Political Technologies NON E 0F the arguments and examples considered thus far addresses a stronger, more troubling claim often made in writings about technology and society-the belief that some technologies are by their very nature political in a specific way. According to this view, the adoption of a given technical system unavoidably brings with it conditions for human relationships that have a distinctive political cast-for example, centralized or decentralized, egalitarian or inegalitarian, repressive or liberating. This is ultimately what is at stake in assertions such as those of Lewis Mumford that two traditions oftechnology, one authoritarian, the other democratic, exist side by side in Western history. In all the cases cited above the technologies are relatively flexible in design and arrangement and variable in their effects. Although one can recognize a particular result produced in a particular setting, one can also easily imagine how a roughly similar device or system might have been built or situated with very much different political consequences. The idea we must now examine and evaluate is that certain kinds oftechnology do not allow such flexibility, and that to choose them is to choose unalterably a particular form of political life. A remarkably forceful statement of one version of this argument appears in Friedrich Engels’s little essay “On Authority” 29 A Philosophy of Technology written in 1872. Answering anarchists who believed that authority is an evil that ought to be abolished altogether, Engels launches into a panegyric for authoritarianism, maintaining, among other things, that strong authority is a necessary condition in modern industry. To advance his case in the strongest possible way, he asks his readers to imagine that the revolution has already occurred. “Supposing a social revolution dethroned the capitalists, who now exercise their authority over the production and circulation of wealth. Supposing, to adopt entirely the point ofview ofthe anti-authoritarians, that the land and the instruments oflabour had become the collective property ofthe workers who use them. Will authority have disappeared or will it have only changed its form?” 16 His answer draws upon lessons from three sociotechnical systems ofhis day, cotton-spinning mills, railways, and ships at sea. He observes that on its way to becoming finished thread, cotton moves through a number of different operations at different locations in the factory. The workers perform a wide variety of tasks, from running the steam engine to carrying the products from one room to another. Because these tasks must be coordinated and because the timing of the work is “fixed by the authority ofthe steam,” laborers must learn to accept a rigid discipline. They must, according to Engels, work at regular hours and agree to subordinate their individual wills to the persons in charge of factory operations. If they fail to do so, they risk the horrifying possibility that production will come to a grinding halt. Engels pulls no punches. “The automatic machinery of a big factory,” he writes, “is much more despotic than the small capitalists who employ workers ever have been.” 17 Similar lessons are adduced in Engels’s analysis of the necessary operating conditions for railways and ships at sea. Both require the subordination of workers to an “imperious authority” that sees to it that things run according to plan. Engels finds that far from being an idiosyncrasy of capitalist social organization, relationships of authority and subordination arise “independently of all social organization, [and] are imposed upon us together with the material conditions under which we produce and make products circulate.” Again, he intends this to be stern advice to the anarchists who, according to Engels, thought it possible simply to eradicate subordination and superordination at a single stroke. All such schemes are nonsense. The roots of unavoidable authoritarianism are, he argues, deeply implanted 30 Do ARTIFACTS HAVE POLITICS? in the human involvement with science and technology. “If man, by dint of his knowledge and inventive genius, has subdued the forces ofnature, the latter avenge themselves upon him by subjecting him, insofar as he employs them, to a veritable despotism independent of all social organization.” 18 Attempts to justify strong authority on the basis of supposedly necessary conditions of technical practice have an ancient history. A pivotal theme in the Republic is Plato’s quest to borrow the authority of techne and employ it by analogy to buttress his argument in favor of authority in the state. Among the illustrations he chooses, like Engels, is that of a ship on the high seas. Because large sailing vessels by their very nature need to be steered with a firm hand, sailors must yield to their captain’s commands; no reasonable person believes that ships can be run democratically. Plato goes on to suggest that governing a state is rather like being captain of a ship or like practicing medicine as a physician. Much the same conditions that require central rule and decisive action in organized technical activity also create this need in government. In Engels’s argument, and arguments like it, the justification for authority is no longer made by Plato’s classic analogy, but rather directly with reference to technology itself. If the basic case is as compelling as Engels believed it to be, one would expect that as a society adopted increasingly complicated technical systems as its material basis, the prospects for authoritarian ways of life would be greatly enhanced. Central control by knowledgeable people acting at the top of a rigid social hierarchy would seem increasingly prudent. In this respect his stand in “On Authority” appears to be at variance with Karl Marx’s position in Volume I of Capital. Marx tries to show that increasing mechanization will render obsolete the hierarchical division of labor and the relationships of subordination that, in his view, were necessary during the early stages of modern manufacturing. “Modern Industry,” he writes, “sweeps away by technical means the” manufacturing division of labor, under which each man is bound hand and foot for life to a single detail operation. At the same time, the capitalistic form of that industry reproduces this same division of labour in a still more monstrous shape; in the factory proper, by converting the workman into a living appendage of the machine.” 19 In Marx’s view the conditions that will eventually dissolve the capitalist division oflabor and facilitate proletarian revolution are conditions latent in in31 A Philosophy of Technology dustrial technology itself. The differences between Marx’s position in Capital and Engels’s in his essay raise an important question for socialism: What, after all, does modern technology make possible or necessary in political life? The theoretical tension we see here mirrors many troubles in the practice of freedom and authority that had muddied the tracks of socialist revolution. Arguments to the effect that technologies are in some sense inherently political have been advanced in a wide variety ofcontexts, far too many to summarize here. My reading ofsuch notions, however, reveals there are two basic ways of stating the case. One version claims that the adoption of a given technical system actually requires the creation and maintenance of a particular set of social conditions as the operating environment of that system. Engels’s position is of this kind. A similar view is offered by a contemporary writer who holds that “if you ac- ·cept nuclear power plants, you also accept a techno-scientificindustrial-military elite. Without these people in charge, you could not have nuclear power.” 20 In this con<;eption some kinds oftechnology require their social environments to be structured in a particular way in much the same sense that an automobile requires wheels in order to move. The thing could not exist as an effective operating entity unless certain social as well as material conditions were met. The meaning of “required” here is that ofpractical (rather than logical) necessity. Thus, Plato thought it a practical necessity that a ship at sea have one captain and an unquestionably obedient crew. A second, somewhat weaker, version of the argument holds that a given kind oftechnology is strongly compatible with, but does not strictly require, social and political relationships of a particular stripe. Many advocates of solar energy have argued that technologies of that variety are more compatible with a democratic, egalitarian society than energy systems based on coal, oil, and nuclear power; at the same time they do not maintain that anything about solar energy requires democracy. Their case is, briefly, that solar energy is decentralizing in both a technical and political sense: technically speaking, it is vastly more reasonable to build solar systems in a disaggregated, widely distributed manner than in large-scale centralized plants; politically speaking, solar energy accommodates the attempts ofindividuals and local communities to manage their affairs effectively because they are dealing with systems that are more accessible, 32 Do ARTIFACTS HAVE POLITICS? comprehellsible, and controllable than huge centralized sources. In this view solar energy is desirable not only for its economic and environmental benefits, but also for the salutary institutions it is likely to permit in other areas of public life. 21 Within both versions of the argument there is a further distinction to be made between conditions that are internal to the workings of a given technical system and those that are external to it. Engels’s thesis concerns internal social relations said to be required within cotton factories and railways, for example; what such relationships mean for the condition of society at large is, for him, a separate question. In contrast, the solar advocate’s belief that solar technologies are compatible with democracy pertains to the way they complement aspects of society removed from the organization ofthose technologies as such. There are, then, several different directions that arguments of this kind can follow. Are the social conditions predicated said to be required by, or strongly compatible with, the workings of a given technical system? Are those conditions internal to that system or external to it (or both)? Although writings that address such questions are often unclear about what is being asserted, arguments in this general category are an important part ofmodern political discourse. They enter into many attempts to explain how changes in social life take place in the wake oftechnological innovation. More important, they are often used to buttress attempts to justify or criticize proposed courses of action involving new technology. By offering distinctly political reasons for or against the adoption of a particular technology, arguments of this kind stand apart from more commonly employed, more easily quantifiable claims about economic costs and benefits, environmental impacts, and possible risks to public health and safety that technical systems may involve. The issue here does not concern how many jobs will be created, how much income generated, how many pollutants added, or how many cancers produced. Rather, the issue has to do with ways in which choices about technology have important consequences for the form and quality of human associations. If we examine social patterns that characterize the environments oftechnical systems, we find certain devices and systems almost invariably linked to specific ways of organizing power and authority. The important question is: Does this state of affairs derive from an unavoidable social response to intractable properties in the things themselves, or is it instead a pattern im33 A Philosophy of Technology posed independently by a governing body, ruling class, or some other social or cultural institution to further its own purposes? Taking the most obvious ,example, the atom bomb is an inherently political artifact. As long as it exists at all, its lethal properties demand that it be controlled by a centralized, rigidly hierarchical chain ofcommand closed to all influences that might make its workings unpredictable. The internal social system of the bomb must be authoritarian; there is no other way. The state of affairs stands as a practical necessity independent of any larger political system in which the bomb is embedded, independent ofthe type of regime or character ofits rulers. Indeed, democratic states must try to find ways to ensure that the social structures and mentality that characterize the management of nuclear weapons do not “spin off” or “spill over” into the polity as a whole. The bomb is, of course, a special case. The reasons very rigid relationships of authority are necessary in its immediate presence should be clear to anyone. If, however, we look for other instances in which particular varieties oftechnology are widely perceived to need the maintenance of a special pattern of power and authority, modern technical history contains a wealth of examples. Alfred D. Chandler in The Visible Hand, a monumental study of modern business enterprise, presents impressive documentation to defend the hypothesis that the construction and day-today operation of many systems of production, transportation, and communication in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries require the develo.pment of particular social form-a large-scale centralized, hierarchical organization administered by highly skilled managers. Typical ofChandler’s reasoning is his analysis ofthe growth ofthe railroads. 22 Technology made possible fast, all-weather transportation; but safe, regular, reliable movement of goods and passengers, as well as the continuing maintenance and repair oflocomotives, rolling stock, and track, roadbed, stations, roundhouses, and other equipment, required the creation of a sizable administrative organization. It meant the employment of a set of managers to supervise these functional activities over an extensive geographical area; and the appointment of an administrative command of middle and top executives to monitor, evaluate, and coordinate the work of managers responsible for the day-to-day operations. 34 Do ARTIFACTS HAVE POLITICS? Throughout his book Chandler points to ways in which technologies used in the production and distribution of electricity, chemicals, and a wide range ofindustrial goods”demanded” or “required” this form of human association. “Hence, the operational requirements of railroads demanded the creation of the first administrative hierarchies in American business.” 23 Were there other conceivable ways of organizing these aggregates ofpeople and apparatus? Chandler shows that a previously dominant social form, the small traditional family firm, simply could not handle the task in most cases. Although he does not speculate further, it is clear that he believes there is, to be realistic, very little latitude in the forms of power and authority appropriate within modern sociotechnical systems. The properties of many modern technologies-oil pipelines and refineries, for example-are such that overwhelmingly impressive economies ofscale and speed are possible. Ifsuch systems are to work effectively, efficiently, quickly, and safely, certain requirements ofinternal social organization have to be fulfilled; the material possibilities that modern technologies make available could not be exploited otherwise. Chandler acknowledges that as one compares sociotechnical institutions of different nations, one sees “ways in which cultural attitudes, values, ideologies, political systems, and social structure affect these imperatives.” 24 But the weight of argument and empirical evidence in The Visible Hand suggests that any significant departure from the basic pattern would be, at best, highly unlikely. It may be that other conceivable arrangements of power and authority, for example, those of decentralized, democratic worker self-management, could prove capable of administering factories, refineries, communications systems, and railroads as well as or better than the organizations Chandler describes. Evidence from automobile assembly teams in Sweden and workermanaged plants in Yugoslavia and other countries is often presented to salvage these possibilities. Unable to settle controversies over this matter here, I merely point to what I consider to be their bone of contention. The available evidence tends to show that many large, sophisticated technological systems are in fact highly compatible with centralized, hierarchical managerial control. The interesting question, however, has to do with whether or not this pattern is in any sense a requirement ofsuch systems, a question that is not solely empirical. The matter ultimately rests on ourjudgments about what steps, ifany, are prac35 A Philosophy of Technology tically necessary in the workings of particular kinds of technology and what, if anything, such measures require of the structure of human associations. Was Plato right in saying that a ship at sea needs steering by a decisive hand and that this could only be accomplished by a single captain and an obedient crew? Is Chandler correct in saying that the properties of large-scale systems require centralized, hierarchical managerial control? To answer such questions, we would have to examine in some detail the moral claims ofpractical necessity (including those advocated in the doctrines of economics) and weigh them against moral claims of other sorts, for example, the notion that it is good for sailors to participate in the command of a ship or that workers have a right to be involved in making and administering decisions in a factory. It is characteristic ofsocieties based on large, complex technological systems, however, that moral reasons other than those of practical necessity appear increasingly obsolete, “idealistic,” and irrelevant. Whatever claims one may wish to make on behalfofliberty, justice, or equality can be immediately neutralized when confronted with arguments to the effect, “Fine, but that’s no way to run a railroad” (or steel mill, or airline, or communication system, and so on). Here we encounter an important quality in modern political discourse and in the way people commonly think about what measures are justified in response to the possibilities technologies make available. In many instances, to say that some technologies are inherently political is to say that certain widely accepted reasons of practical necessity-especially the need to maintain crucial technological systems as smoothly working entities-have tended to eclipse other sorts of moral and political reasoning. One attempt to salvage the autonomy of politics from the bind of practical necessity involves the notion that conditions of human association found in the internal workings of technological systems can easily be kept separate from the polity as a whole. Americans have long rested content in the beliefthat arrangements of power and authority inside industrial corporations, public utilities, and the like have little bearing on public institutions, practices, and ideas at large. That “democracy stops at the factory gates” was taken as a fact of life that had nothing to do with the practice of political freedom. But can the internal politics of technology and the politics of the whole community be so easily separated? A recent study of business leaders in the United States, contemporary exemplars of 36 Do ARTIFACTS HAVE POLITICS? Chandler’s “visible hand ofmanagement,” found them remarkably impatient with such democratic scruples as “one man, one vote.” If democracy doesn’t work for the firm, the most critical institution in all of society, American executives ask, how well can it be expected to work for the government of a nation-particularly when that government attempts to interfere with the achievements ofthe firm? The authors ofthe report observe that patterns ofauthorjty that work effectively in the corporation become for businessmen “the desirable model against which to compare political and economic relationships in the rest of society. “25 While such findings are far from conclusive, they do reflect a sentiment increasingly common in the land: what dilemmas such as the energy crisis require is not a redistribution of wealth or broader public participation but, rather, stronger, centralized public and private management. An especially vivid case in which the operational requirements of a technical system might influence the quality ofpublic life is the debates about the risks ofnuclear power. As the supply of uranium for nuclear reactors runs out, a proposed alternative fuel is the plutonium generated as a by-product in reactor cores. Well-known objections to plutonium recycling focus on its unacceptable economic costs, its risks of environmental contamination, and its dangers in regard to the international proliferation of nuclear weapons. Beyond these concerns, however, stands another less widely appreciated set of hazards-those that involve the sacrifice of civil liberties. The widespread use of plutonium as a fuel increases the chance that this toxic substance might be stolen by terrorists, organized crime, or other persons. This raises the prospect, and not a trivial one, that extraordinary measures would have to be taken to safeguard plutonium from theft and to recover it should the substance be stolen. Workers in the nuclear industry as well as ordinary citizens outside could well become subject to background security checks, covert surveillance, wiretapping, informers, and even emergency measures under martial law-all justified by the need to safeguard plutonium. Russell W. Ayres’s study of the legal ramifications of plutonium recycling concludes: “With the passage of time and the increase in the quantity of plutonium in existence will come pressure to eliminate the traditional checks the courts and legislatures place on the activities of the executive and to develop a powerful central authority better able to enforce strict safe37 A Philosophy of Technology guards.” He avers that “once a quantity of plutonium had been stolen, the case for literally turning the country upside down to get it back would be overwhelming.” Ayres anticipates and worries about the kinds ofthinking that, I have argued, .characterize inherently political technologies. It is still true that in a world in which human beings make and maintain artificial systems nothing is “required” in an absolute sense. Nevertheless, once a course of action is under way, once artifacts such as nuclear power plants have been built and put in operation, the kinds of reasoning that justify the adaptation of social life to technical requirements pop up as spontaneously as flowers in the spring. In Ayres’s words, “Once recycling begins and the risks of plutonium theft become real rather than hypothetical, the case for governmental infringement of protected rights will seem compelling.” 26 After a certain point, those who cannot accept the hard requirements and imperatives will be dismissed as dreamers and fools. *** The two varieties of interpretation I have outlined indicate how artifacts can have political qualities. In the first instance we noticed ways in which specific features in the design or arrangement of a device or system could provide a convenient means of establishing patterns of power and authority in a given setting. Technologies ofthis kind have a range offlexibility in the dimensions oftheir material form. It is precisely because they are flexible that their consequences for society must be understood with reference to the social actors able to influence which designs and arrangements are chosen. In the second instance we examined ways in which the intractable properties of certain kinds oftechnology are strongly, perhaps unavoidably, linked to particular institutionalized patterns of power and authority. Here the initial choice about whether or not to adopt something is decisive in regard to its consequences. There are no alternative physical designs or arrangements that would make a significant difference; there are, furthermore, no genuine possibilities for creative intervention by different social systems-capitalist or socialist-that could change the intractability of the entity or significantly alter the quality ofits political effects. To know which variety of interpretation is applicable in a given case is often what is at stake in disputes, some of them passionate ones, about the meaning of technology for how we live. I have argued a “both/and” position here, for it seems to 38 Do ARTIFACTS HAVE POLITICS? me that both kinds of understanding are applicable in different circumstances. Indeed, it can happen that within a particular complex of technology-a system of communication or transportation, for example-some aspects may be flexible in their possibilities for society, while other aspects may be (for better or worse) completely intractable. The two varieties of interpretation I have examined here can overlap and intersect at many points. These are, of course, issues on which people can disagree. Thus, some proponents of energy from renewable resources now believe they have at last discovered a set of intrinsically democratic, egalitarian, communitarian technologies. In my best estimation, however, the social consequences of building renewable energy systems will surely depend on the specific configurations of both hardware and the social institutions created to bring that energy to us. It may be that we will find ways to turn this silk purse into a sow’s ear. By comparison, advocates ofthe further development ofnuclear power seem to believe that they are working on a rather flexible technology whose adverse social effects can be fixed by changing the design parameters of reactors and nuclear waste disposal systems. For reasons indicated above, I believe them to be dead wrong in that faith. Yes, we may be able to manage some of the “risks” to public health and safety that nuclear power brings. But as society adapts to the more dangerous and apparently indelible features of nuclear power, what will be the long-range toll in human freedom? My belief that we ought to attend more closely to technical objects themselves is not to say that we can ignore the contexts in which those objects are situated. A ship at sea may well require, as Plato and Engels insisted, a single captain and obedient crew. But a ship out ofservice, parked at the dock, needs only a caretaker. To understand which technologies and which contexts are important to us, and why, is an enterprise that must involve both the study of specific technical systems and their history as well as a thorough grasp of the concepts and controversies of political theory. In our times people are often willing to make drastic changes in the way they live to accommodate technological innovation while at the same time resisting similar kinds of changes justified on political grounds. If for no other reason than that, it is important for us to achieve a clearer view ofthese matters than has been our habit so far. 39 NOTES CHAPTER 1. Technologies as Forms ofLife 1. Tom Wolfe, The Right Stuff (New York: Bantam Books, 1980), 270. 2. The Encyclopedia ofPhilosophy, 8 vols., Paul Edwards (editor-in-chief) (New York: Macmillan: 1967). 3. Bibliography of the Philosophy of Technology, Carl Mitcham and Robert Mackey (eds.) (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1973). 4. There are, of course, exceptions to this general attitude. See Stephen H. Unger, Controlling Technology: Ethics and the Responsible Engineer (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1982). 5. An excellent corrective to the general thoughtlessness about “making” and “use” is to be found in Carl Mitcham, “Types ofTechnology, ” in Research in Philosophy and Technology, Paul Durbin (ed.) (Greenwich, Conn. JAI Press, 1978),229-294. 6. J. L. Austin, Philosophical Papers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), 123-152. 7. See William Kolender et al., “Petitioner v. Edward Lawson,” Supreme Court Reporter 103: 1855-1867, 1983. Edward Lawson had been arrested approximately fifteen times on his long walks and refused to provide identification when stopped by the police. Lawson cited his rights guaranteed by the Fourth and Fifth Amendments ofthe u.S. Constitution. The Court found the California vagrancy statute requiring “credible and reliable” identification to be unconstitutionally vague. See also Jim Mann, “State Vagrancy Law Voided as Overly Vague,” Los Angeles Times, May 3,1983,1,19. 8. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, ed. 3, translated by G. E. M. Anscombe, with English and German indexes (New York: Macmillan, 1958), 11e. 9. Hanna Pitkin, Wittgenstein andJustice: On the Significance ofLudwig Wittgenstein for Social and Political Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 293. 10. For a thorough discussion ofthis idea, see Hannah Arendt, The Human 179 Notes to Pages 13-26 Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958); and Hannah Arendt, Willing, vol II of The Life ofthe Mind (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978). 11. Philosophical Investigations, 226e. 12. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “The German Ideology,” in Collected Works, vol. 5 (New York: International Publishers, 1976), 31. 13. Karl Marx, Grundrisse, translated with a foreword by Martin Nicolaus (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1973),325. 14. An interesting discussion of Marx in this respect is Kostas Axelos’ Alienation, Praxis and Techne in the Thought ofKarl Marx, translated by Ronald Bruzina (Austin: University ofTexas Press, 1976). 15. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, translated by Ben Fowkes, with an introduction by Ernest Mandel (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1976), chap. 15. 16. Philosophical Investigations, 4ge. CHAPTER 2. Do Artifacts Have Politics? 1. Lewis Mumford, “Authoritarian and Democratic Technics,” Technology and Culture 5: 1-8, 1964. 2. Denis Hayes, Rays ofHope: The Transition to a Post-Petroleum World (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977),71,159. 3. David Lillienthal, T V.A.: Democracy on the March (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1944), 72-83. 4. Daniel J. Boorstin, The Republic of Technology (New York: Harper and Row, 1978),7. 5. Langdon Winner, Autonomous Technology: Technics-Out-ofControl as a Theme in Political Thought (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1977). 6. The meaning of “technology” I employ in this essay does not encompass some of the broader definitions of that concept found in contemporary literature, for example, the notion of “technique” in the writings ofJacques Ellul. My purposes here are more limited. For a discussion of the difficulties that arise in attempts to define “technology,” see Autonomous Technology, 8-12. 7. Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall ofNew York (New York: Random House, 1974),318,481,514,546,951-958,952. 8. Robert Ozanne, A Century ofLabor-Management Relations at McCormick and International Harvester (Madison: University ofWisconsin Press, 1967), 20. 9. The early history of the tomato harvester is told in Wayne D. Rasmussen, “Advances in American Agriculture: The Mechanical Tomato Harvester as a Case Study,” Technology and Culture 9: 531-543, 1968. 10. Andrew Schmitz and David Seckler, “Mechanized Agriculture and Social Welfare: The Case of the Tomato Harvester,” American Journal of Agricultural Economics 52: 569-577, 1970. 11. William H. Friedland and Amy Barton, “Tomato Technology,” Society 13: 6, September/October 1976. See also William H. Friedland, Social Sleep180 Notes to Pages 27-42 walkers: Scientific and Technological Research in California Agriculture, University of California, Davis, Department of Applied Behavioral Sciences, Research Monograph No. 13, 1974. 12. University ofCalifornia Clip Sheet 54: 36, May 1, 1979. 13. “TomatoTechnology.” 14. A history and critical analysis of agricultural research in the land-grant colleges is given in James Hightower, Hard Tomatoes, Hard Times (Cambridge: Schenkman, 1978). 15. David F. Noble, Forces ofProduction: A Social History of Machine Tool Automation (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984). 16. Friedrich Engels, “On Authority,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. 2, Robert Tucker (ed.) (NewYork:W. W. Norton, 1978),731. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid., 732, 731. 19. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, ed. 3, translated by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (New York: Modern Library, 1906), 530. 20. Jerry Mander, Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (New York: William Morrow, 1978),44. 21. See, for example, Robert Argue, Barbara Emanuel, and Stephen Graham, The Sun Builders: A People’s Guide to Solar, Wind and Wood Energy in Canada (Toronto: Renewable Energy in Canada, 1978). “We think decentralization is an implicit component of renewable energy; this implies the decentralization of energy systems, communities and of power. Renewable energy doesn’t require mammoth generation sources of disruptive transmission corridors. Our cities and towns, which have been dependent on centralized energy supplies, may be able to achieve some degree of autonomy, thereby controlling and administering their own energy needs.” (16) 22. Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge: Belknap, 1977), 244. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid., 500. 25. Leonard Silk and David Vogel, Ethics and Profits: The Crisis of Confidence in American Business (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1976), 191. 26. Russell W. Ayres, “Policing Plutonium: The Civil Liberties Fallout,” Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review 10 (1975): 443,413-414,374. C HAP TER 3. Techne and Politeia 1. Plato, Laws, 7.803b, translated by A. E. Taylor, in The Collected Dialogues ofPlato, Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (eds.) (Princeton, N.].: Princeton University Press, 1961), 1374. 2. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, translated and introduced by Maurice Cranston (New York: Penguin Books, 1968), 84. 3. Alexander Hamilton, “Federalist No.9,” in The Federalist Papers, with an introduction by Clinton Rossiter (New York: Mentor Books, 1961), 72-73. 181

INTERNATIONAL ENCYCLOPEDIA of UNIFIED SCIENCEThe Structure of ScientificRevolutionsSecond Edition, EnlargedThomas S. KuhnVOLUMES I AND II • FOUNDATIONS OF THE UNITY OF SCIENCEVOLUME II • NUMBER 2International Encyclopedia of Unified ScienceEditor-in-Chief Otto NeurathAssociate Editors Rudolf Carnap Charles MorrisFoundations of the Unity of Science(Volumes I—II of the Encyclopedia)Committee of OrganizationRUDOLF CARNAP CHARLES MORRISPHILIPP FRANK OTTO NEURATHJOERGEN JOERGENSEN LOUIS ROUGIERAdvisory CommitteeNIELS BOHR R. VON MISESEGON BRUNSWIK G. MANNOURYJ. CLAY ERNEST NAGELJOHN DEWEY ARNE NAESSFEDERIGO ENRIQUES HANS REICHENBACHHERBERT FEIGL ABEL REYCLARK L. HULL BERTRAND RUSSELLWALDEMAR KAEMPFFERT L. SUSAN STEBBINGVICTOR F. LENZEN ALFRED TARSKIJAN LUKASIEWICZ EDWARD C. TOLMANWILLIAM M. MALISOFF JOSEPH H. WOODGERTHE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS, CHICAGO 60637THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS, LTD., LONDON© 1962, 1970 by The University of Chicago.All rights reserved. Published 1962.Second Edition, enlarged, 1970Printed in the United States of America81 80 79 78 11 10 9 8ISBN: 0-226-45803-2 (clothbound); 0-226-45804-0 (paperbound)Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 79-107472International Encyclopedia of Uni!ed ScienceVolume 2 • Number 2The Structure of Scientific RevolutionsThomas S. KuhnContents:PREFACE ……………………………………………… vI. INTRODUCTION: A ROLE FOR HISTORY ………… 1II. THE ROUTE TO NORMAL SCIENCE ……………….. 10III. THE NATURE OF NORMAL SCIENCE …………….. 23IV. NORMAL SCIENCE AS PUZZLE-SOLVING ……….. 35V. THE PRIORITY OF PARADIGMS …………………….. 43VI. ANOMALY AND THE EMERGENCE OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERIES 52VII. CRISIS AND THE EMERGENCE OF SCIENTIFIC THEORIES 66VIII. THE RESPONSE TO CRISIS …………………………… 77IX. THE NATURE AND NECESSITY OF SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTIONS 92X. REVOLUTIONS AS CHANGES OF WORLD VIEW …… 111XI. THE INVISIBILITY OF REVOLUTIONS …………….. 136XII. THE RESOLUTION OF REVOLUTIONS ……………. 144XIII. PROGRESS THROUGH REVOLUTIONS ……………. 160Postscript-1969 ………………………………………… 174iiiI. Introduction: A Role for HistoryHistory, if viewed as a repository for more than anecdote orchronology, could produce a decisive transformation in the image ofscience by which we are now possessed. That image has previously beendrawn, even by scientists themselves, mainly from the study of !nishedscienti!c achievements as these are recorded in the classics and, morerecently, in the textbooks from which each new scienti!c generationlearns to practice its trade. Inevitably, however, the aim of such books ispersuasive and pedagogic; a concept of science drawn from them is nomore likely to !t the enterprise that produced them than an image of anational culture drawn from a tourist brochure or a language text. Thisessay attempts to show that we have been misled by them infundamental ways. Its aim is a sketch of the quite different concept ofscience that can emerge from the historical record of the researchactivity itself.Even from history, however, that new concept will not be forthcomingif historical data continue to be sought and scrutinized mainly to answerquestions posed by the unhistorical stereotype drawn from science texts.Those texts have, for example, often seemed to imply that the content ofscience is uniquely exempli!ed by the observations, laws, and theoriesdescribed in their pages. Almost as regularly, the same books have beenread as saying that scienti!c methods are simply the ones illustrated bythe manipulative techniques used in gathering textbook data, togetherwith the logical operations employed when relating those data to thetextbook’s theoretical generalizations. The result has been a concept ofscience with profound implications about its nature and development.If science is the constellation of facts, theories, and methods collectedin current texts, then scientists are the men who, successfully or not,have striven to contribute one or another element to that particularconstellation. Scienti!c development becomes the piecemeal process bywhich these items have beenVol. II, No. 21The Structure of Scientific Revolutionsadded, singly and in combination, to the ever growing stockpile thatconstitutes scienti!c technique and knowledge. And history of sciencebecomes the discipline that chronicles both these successive incrementsand the obstacles that have inhibited their accumulation. Concernedwith scienti!c development, the historian then appears to have twomain tasks. On the one hand, he must determine by what man and atwhat point in time each contemporary scienti!c fact, law, and theorywas discovered or invented. On the other, he must describe and explainthe congeries of error, myth and superstition that have inhibited themore rapid accumulation of the constituents of the modern science text.Much research has been directed to these ends, and some still is.In recent years, however, a few historians of science have been !ndingit more and more dif!cult to ful!l the functions that the concept ofdevelopment-by-accumulation assigns to them. As chroniclers of anincremental process, they discover that additional research makes itharder, not easier, to answer questions like: When was oxygendiscovered? Who !rst conceived of energy conservation? Increasingly, afew of them suspect that these are simply the wrong sorts of questionsto ask. Perhaps science does not develop by the accumulation ofindividual discoveries and inventions. Simultaneously, these samehistorians confront growing dif!culties in distinguishing the “scienti!c”component of past observation and belief from what their predecessorshad readily labeled “error” and “superstition.” The more carefully theystudy, say, Aristotelian dynamics, phlogistic chemistry, or caloricthermodynamics, the more certain they feel that those once currentviews of nature were, as a whole, neither less scienti!c nor more theproduct of human idiosyncrasy than those current today. If these out-ofdate beliefs are to be called myths, then myths can be produced by thesame sorts of methods and held for the same sorts of reasons that nowlead to scienti!c knowledge. If, on the other hand, they are to be calledscience, then science has included bodies of belief quite incompatiblewith the ones we hold today. Given these alternatives, the historian mustchoose the latter. Out-ofVol. II, No. 22Introduction: A Role for Historydate theories are not in principle unscienti!c because they have beendiscarded. That choice, however, makes it dif!cult to see scienti!cdevelopment as a process of accretion. The same historical research thatdisplays the dif!culties in isolating individual inventions and discoveriesgives ground for profound doubts about the cumulative process throughwhich these individual contributions to science were thought to havebeen compounded.The result of all these doubts and dif!culties is a historiographicrevolution in the study of science, though one that is still in its earlystages. Gradually, and often without entirely realizing they are doing so,historians of science have begun to ask new sorts of questions and totrace different, and often less than cumulative, developmental lines forthe sciences. Rather than seeking the permanent contributions of anolder science to our present vantage, they attempt to display thehistorical integrity of that science in its own time. They ask, for example,not about the relation of Galileo’s views to those of modern science, butrather about the relationship between his views and those of his group,i.e., his teachers, contemporaries, and immediate successors in thesciences. Furthermore, they insist upon studying the opinions of thatgroup and other similar ones from the viewpoint—usually very differentfrom that of modern science—that gives those opinions the maximuminternal coherence and the closest possible !t to nature. Seen throughthe works that result, works perhaps best exempli!ed in the writings ofAlexandre Koyré, science does not seem altogether the same enterpriseas the one discussed by writers in the older historiographic tradition. Byimplication, at least, these historical studies suggest the possibility of anew image of science. This essay aims to delineate that image by makingexplicit some of the new historiography’s implications.What aspects of science will emerge to prominence in the course ofthis effort? First, at least in order of presentation, is the insuf!ciency ofmethodological directives, by themselves, to dictate a uniquesubstantive conclusion to many sorts of scienti!c questions. Instructedto examine electrical or chemical pheVol. II, No. 23The Structure of Scientific Revolutionsnomena, the man who is ignorant of these !elds but who knows what itis to be scienti!c may legitimately reach any one of a number ofincompatible conclusions. Among those legitimate possibilities, theparticular conclusions he does arrive at are probably determined by hisprior experience in other !elds, by the accidents of his investigation, andby his own individual makeup. What beliefs about the stars, forexample, does he bring to the study of chemistry or electricity? Which ofthe many conceivable experiments relevant to the new !eld does heelect to perform !rst? And what aspects of the complex phenomenonthat then results strike him as particularly relevant to an elucidation ofthe nature of chemical change or of electrical af!nity? For theindividual, at least, and sometimes for the scienti!c community as well,answers to questions like these are often essential determinants ofscienti!c development. We shall note, for example, in Section II that theearly developmental stages of most sciences have been characterized bycontinual competition between a number of distinct views of nature,each partially derived from, and all roughly compatible with, thedictates of scienti!c observation and method. What differentiated thesevarious schools was not one or another failure of method— they were all“scienti!c”—but what we shall come to call their incommensurable waysof seeing the world and of practicing science in it. Observation andexperience can and must drastically restrict the range of admissiblescienti!c belief, else there would be no science. But they cannot alonedetermine a particular body of such belief. An apparently arbitraryelement, compounded of personal and historical accident, is always aformative ingredient of the beliefs espoused by a given scienti!ccommunity at a given time.That element of arbitrariness does not, however, indicate that anyscienti!c group could practice its trade without some set of receivedbeliefs. Nor does it make less consequential the particular constellationto which the group, at a given time, is in fact committed. Effectiveresearch scarcely begins before a scienti!c community thinks it hasacquired !rm answers to questions like the following: What are thefundamental entitiesVol. II, No. 24Introduction: A Role for Historyof which the universe is composed? How do these interact with eachother and with the senses? What questions may legitimately be askedabout such entities and what techniques employed in seeking solutions?At least in the mature sciences, answers (or full substitutes for answers)to questions like these are !rmly embedded in the educational initiationthat prepares and licenses the student for professional practice. Becausethat education is both rigorous and rigid, these answers come to exert adeep hold on the scienti!c mind. That they can do so does much toaccount both for the peculiar ef!ciency of the normal research activityand for the direction in which it proceeds at any given time. Whenexamining normal science in Sections III, IV, and V, we shall want !nallyto describe that research as a strenuous and devoted attempt to forcenature into the conceptual boxes supplied by professional education.Simultaneously, we shall wonder whether research could proceedwithout such boxes, whatever the element of arbitrariness in theirhistoric origins and, occasionally, in their subsequent development.Yet that element of arbitrariness is present, and it too has animportant effect on scienti!c development, one which will be examinedin detail in Sections VI, VII, and VIII. Normal science, the activity inwhich most scientists inevitably spend almost all their time, ispredicated on the assumption that the scienti!c community knows whatthe world is like. Much of the success of the enterprise derives from thecommunity’s willingness to defend that assumption, if necessary atconsiderable cost. Normal science, for example, often suppressesfundamental novelties because they are necessarily subversive of itsbasic commitments. Nevertheless, so long as those commitments retainan element of the arbitrary, the very nature of normal research ensuresthat novelty shall not be suppressed for very long. Sometimes a normalproblem, one that ought to be solvable by known rules and procedures,resists the reiterated onslaught of the ablest members of the groupwithin whose competence it falls. On other occasions a piece ofequipment designed and constructed for the purpose of normalresearch failsVol. II, No. 25The Structure of Scientific Revolutionsto perform in the anticipated manner, revealing an anomaly that cannot,despite repeated effort, be aligned with professional expectation. Inthese and other ways besides, normal science repeatedly goes astray.And when it does—when, that is, the profession can no longer evadeanomalies that subvert the existing tradition of scienti!c practice—thenbegin the extraordinary investigations that lead the profession at last toa new set of commitments, a new basis for the practice of science. Theextraordinary episodes in which that shift of professional commitmentsoccurs are the ones known in this essay as scienti!c revolutions. Theyare the tradition-shattering complements to the tradition-bound activityof normal science.The most obvious examples of scienti!c revolutions are those famousepisodes in scienti!c development that have often been labeledrevolutions before. Therefore, in Sections IX and X, where the nature ofscienti!c revolutions is !rst directly scrutinized, we shall deal repeatedlywith the major turning points in scienti!c development associated withthe names of Copernicus, Newton, Lavoisier, and Einstein. More clearlythan most other episodes in the history of at least the physical sciences,these display what all scienti!c revolutions are about. Each of themnecessitated the community’s rejection of one time-honored scienti!ctheory in favor of another incompatible with it. Each produced aconsequent shift in the problems available for scienti!c scrutiny and inthe standards by which the profession determined what should count asan admissible problem or as a legitimate problem-solution. And eachtransformed the scienti!c imagination in ways that we shall ultimatelyneed to describe as a transformation of the world within which scienti!cwork was done. Such changes, together with the controversies thatalmost always accompany them, are the de!ning characteristics ofscienti!c revolutions.These characteristics emerge with particular clarity from a study of,say, the Newtonian or the chemical revolution. It is, however, afundamental thesis of this essay that they can also be retrieved from thestudy of many other episodes that were not so obviously revolutionary.For the far smaller professionalVol. II, No. 26Introduction: A Role for Historygroup affected by them, Maxwell’s equations were as revolutionary asEinstein’s, and they were resisted accordingly. The invention of othernew theories regularly, and appropriately, evokes the same responsefrom some of the specialists on whose area of special competence theyimpinge. For these men the new theory implies a change in the rulesgoverning the prior practice of normal science. Inevitably, therefore, itre”ects upon much scienti!c work they have already successfullycompleted. That is why a new theory, however special its range ofapplication, is seldom or never just an increment to what is alreadyknown. Its assimilation requires the reconstruction of prior theory andthe re-evaluation of prior fact, an intrinsically revolutionary process thatis seldom completed by a single man and never overnight. No wonderhistorians have had dif!culty in dating precisely this extended processthat their vocabulary impels them to view as an isolated event.Nor are new inventions of theory the only scienti!c events that haverevolutionary impact upon the specialists in whose domain they occur.The commitments that govern normal science specify not only whatsorts of entities the universe does contain, but also, by implication, thosethat it does not. It follows, though the point will require extendeddiscussion, that a discovery like that of oxygen or X-rays does not simplyadd one more item to the population of the scientist’s world. Ultimatelyit has that effect, but not until the professional community has reevaluated traditional experimental procedures, altered its conception ofentities with which it has long been familiar, and, in the process, shiftedthe network of theory through which it deals with the world. Scienti!cfact and theory are not categorically separable, except perhaps within asingle tradition of normal-scienti!c practice. That is why the unexpecteddiscovery is not simply factual in its import and why the scientist’s worldis qualitatively transformed as well as quantitatively enriched byfundamental novelties of either fact or theory.This extended conception of the nature of scienti!c revolutions is theone delineated in the pages that follow. Admittedly the extension strainscustomary usage. Nevertheless, I shall conVol. II, No. 27The Structure of Scientific Revolutionstinue to speak even of discoveries as revolutionary, because it is just thepossibility of relating their structure to that of, say, the Copernicanrevolution that makes the extended conception seem to me soimportant. The preceding discussion indicates how the complementarynotions of normal science and of scienti!c revolutions will be developedin the nine sections immediately to follow. The rest of the essay attemptsto dispose of three remaining central questions. Section XI, bydiscussing the textbook tradition, considers why scienti!c revolutionshave previously been so dif!cult to see. Section XII describes therevolutionary competition between the proponents of the old normalscienti!c tradition and the adherents of the new one. It thus considersthe process that should somehow, in a theory of scienti!c inquiry,replace the con!rmation or falsi!cation procedures made familiar byour usual image of science. Competition between segments of thescienti!c community is the only historical process that ever actuallyresults in the rejection of one previously accepted theory or in theadoption of another. Finally, Section XIII will ask how developmentthrough revolutions can be compatible with the apparently uniquecharacter of scienti!c progress. For that question, however, this essaywill provide no more than the main outlines of an answer, one whichdepends upon characteristics of the scienti!c community that requiremuch additional exploration and study.Undoubtedly, some readers will already have wondered whetherhistorical study can possibly effect the sort of conceptual transformationaimed at here. An entire arsenal of dichotomies is available to suggestthat it cannot properly do so. History, we too often say, is a purelydescriptive discipline. The theses suggested above are, however, ofteninterpretive and sometimes normative. Again, many of mygeneralizations are about the sociology or social psychology of scientists;yet at least a few of my conclusions belong traditionally to logic orepistemology. In the preceding paragraph I may even seem to haveviolated the very in”uential contemporary distinction between “thecontext of discovery” and “the context of justi!caVol. II, No. 28Introduction: A Role for Historytion.” Can anything more than profound confusion be indicated by thisadmixture of diverse !elds and concerns?Having been weaned intellectually on these distinctions and otherslike them, I could scarcely be more aware of their import and force. Formany years I took them to be about the nature of knowledge, and I stillsuppose that, appropriately recast, they have something important totell us. Yet my attempts to apply them, even grosso modo, to the actualsituations in which knowledge is gained, accepted, and assimilated havemade them seem extraordinarily problematic. Rather than beingelementary logical or methodological distinctions, which would thus beprior to the analysis of scienti!c knowledge, they now seem integralparts of a traditional set of substantive answers to the very questionsupon which they have been deployed. That circularity does not at allinvalidate them. But it does make them parts of a theory and, by doingso, subjects them to the same scrutiny regularly applied to theories inother !elds. If they are to have more than pure abstraction as theircontent, then that content must be discovered by observing them inapplication to the data they are meant to elucidate. How could historyof science fail to be a source of phenomena to which theories aboutknowledge may legitimately be asked to apply?Vol. II, No. 29II. The Route to Normal ScienceIn this essay, ‘normal science’ means research !rmly based upon oneor more past scienti!c achievements, achievements that some particularscienti!c community acknowledges for a time as supplying thefoundation for its further practice. Today such achievements arerecounted, though seldom in their original form, by science textbooks,elementary and advanced. These textbooks expound the body ofaccepted theory, illustrate many or all of its successful applications, andcompare these applications with exemplary observations andexperiments. Before such books became popular early in the nineteenthcentury (and until even more recently in the newly matured sciences),many of the famous classics of science ful!lled a similar function.Aristotle’s Physica, Ptolemy’s Almagest, Newton’s Principia and Opticks,Franklin’s Electricity, Lavoisier’s Chemistry, and Lyell’s Geology—these andmany other works served for a time implicitly to de!ne the legitimateproblems and methods of a research !eld for succeeding generations ofpractitioners. They were able to do so because they shared two essentialcharacteristics. Their achievement was suf!ciently unprecedented toattract an enduring group of adherents away from competing modes ofscienti!c activity. Simultaneously, it was suf!ciently open-ended to leaveall sorts of problems for the rede!ned group of practitioners to resolve.Achievements that share these two characteristics I shall henceforthrefer to as ‘paradigms,’ a term that relates closely to ‘normal science.’ Bychoosing it, I mean to suggest that some accepted examples of actualscienti!c practice—examples which include law, theory, application, andinstrumentation together— provide models from which spring particularcoherent traditions of scienti!c research. These are the traditions whichthe historian describes under such rubrics as ‘Ptolemaic astronomy’ (or‘Copernican’), ‘Aristotelian dynamics’ (or ‘Newtonian’), ‘corpuscularoptics’ (or ‘wave optics’), and so on. The study ofVol. II, No. 210The Route to Normal Scienceparadigms, including many that are far more specialized than thosenamed illustratively above, is what mainly prepares the student formembership in the particular scienti!c community with which he willlater practice. Because he there joins men who learned the bases of their!eld from the same concrete models, his subsequent practice willseldom evoke overt disagreement over fundamentals. Men whoseresearch is based on shared paradigms are committed to the same rulesand standards for scienti!c practice. That commitment and theapparent consensus it produces are prerequisites for normal science,i.e., for the genesis and continuation of a particular research tradition.Because in this essay the concept of a paradigm will often substitutefor a variety of familiar notions, more will need to be said about thereasons for its introduction. Why is the concrete scienti!c achievement,as a locus of professional commitment, prior to the various concepts,laws, theories, and points of view that may be abstracted from it? Inwhat sense is the shared paradigm a fundamental unit for the student ofscienti!c development, a unit that cannot be fully reduced to logicallyatomic components which might function in its stead? When weencounter them in Section V, answers to these questions and to otherslike them will prove basic to an understanding both of normal scienceand of the associated concept of paradigms. That more abstractdiscussion will depend, however, upon a previous exposure to examplesof normal science or of paradigms in operation. In particular, both theserelated concepts will be clari!ed by noting that there can be a sort ofscienti!c research without paradigms, or at least without any sounequivocal and so binding as the ones named above. Acquisition of aparadigm and of the more esoteric type of research it permits is a sign ofmaturity in the development of any given scienti!c !eld.If the historian traces the scienti!c knowledge of any selected groupof related phenomena backward in time, he is likely to encounter someminor variant of a pattern here illustrated from the history of physicaloptics. Today’s physics textbooks tell theVol. II, No. 211The Structure of Scientific Revolutionsstudent that light is photons, i.e., quantum-mechanical entities thatexhibit some characteristics of waves and some of particles. Researchproceeds accordingly, or rather according to the more elaborate andmathematical characterization from which this usual verbalization isderived. That characterization of light is, however, scarcely half acentury old. Before it was developed by Planck, Einstein, and othersearly in this century, physics texts taught that light was transverse wavemotion, a conception rooted in a paradigm that derived ultimately fromthe optical writings of Young and Fresnel in the early nineteenthcentury. Nor was the wave theory the !rst to be embraced by almost allpractitioners of optical science. During the eighteenth century theparadigm for this !eld was provided by Newton’s Opticks, which taughtthat light was material corpuscles. At that time physicists soughtevidence, as the early wave theorists had not, of the pressure exerted bylight particles impinging on solid bodies.1These transformations of the paradigms of physical optics arescienti!c revolutions, and the successive transition from one paradigmto another via revolution is the usual developmental pattern of maturescience. It is not, however, the pattern characteristic of the period beforeNewton’s work, and that is the contrast that concerns us here. No periodbetween remote antiquity and the end of the seventeenth centuryexhibited a single generally accepted view about the nature of light.Instead there were a number of competing schools and sub-schools,most of them espousing one variant or another of Epicurean,Aristotelian, or Platonic theory. One group took light to be particlesemanating from material bodies; for another it was a modi!cation of themedium that intervened between tie body and the eye; still anotherexplained light in terms of an interaction of the medium with anemanation from the eye; and there were other combinations andmodi!cations besides. Each of the corresponding schools derivedstrength from its relation to some particular metaphysic, and eachemphasized, as para1Joseph Priestley, The History and Present State of Discoveries Relating to Vision, Light, andColours (London, 1772), pp. 385-90.Vol. II, No. 212The Route to Normal Sciencedigmatic observations, the particular cluster of optical phenomena thatits own theory could do most to explain. Other observations were dealtwith by ad hoc elaborations, or they remained as outstanding problemsfor further research.2At various times all these schools made signi!cant contributions tothe body of concepts, phenomena, and techniques from which Newtondrew the !rst nearly uniformly accepted paradigm for physical optics.Any de!nition of the scientist that excludes at least the more creativemembers of these various schools will exclude their modern successorsas well. Those men were scientists. Yet anyone examining a survey ofphysical optics before Newton may well conclude that, though the !eld’spractitioners were scientists, the net result of their activity wassomething less than science. Being able to take no common body ofbelief for granted, each writer on physical optics felt forced to build his!eld anew from its foundations. In doing so, his choice of supportingobservation and experiment was relatively free, for there was nostandard set of methods or of phenomena that every optical writer feltforced to employ and explain. Under these circumstances, the dialogueof the resulting books was often directed as much to the members ofother schools as it was to nature. That pattern is not unfamiliar in anumber of creative !elds today, nor is it incompatible with signi!cantdiscovery and invention. It is not, however, the pattern of developmentthat physical optics acquired after Newton and that other naturalsciences make familiar today.The history of electrical research in the !rst half of the eighteenthcentury provides a more concrete and better known example of the waya science develops before it acquires its !rst universally receivedparadigm. During that period there were almost as many views aboutthe nature of electricity as there were important electricalexperimenters, men like Hauksbee, Gray, Desaguliers, Du Fay, Nollett,Watson, Franklin, and others. All their numerous concepts of electricityhad something in common—they were partially derived from one or an2 Vasco Ronchi, Histoire de la lumière, trans. Jean Taton (Paris, 1956), chaps. i-iv.Vol. II, No. 213The Structure of Scientific Revolutionsother version of the mechanico-corpuscular philosophy that guided allscienti!c research of the day. In addition, all were components of realscienti!c theories, of theories that had been drawn in part fromexperiment and observation and that partially determined the choiceand interpretation of additional problems undertaken in research. Yetthough all the experiments were electrical and though most of theexperimenters read each other’s works, their theories had no more thana family resemblance.3One early group of theories, following seventeenth-century practice,regarded attraction and factional generation as the fundamentalelectrical phenomena. This group tended to treat repulsion as asecondary effect due to some sort of mechanical rebounding and also topostpone for as long as possible both discussion and systematic researchon Gray’s newly discovered effect, electrical conduction. Other“electricians” (the term is their own) took attraction and repulsion to beequally elementary manifestations of electricity and modi!ed theirtheories and research accordingly. (Actually, this group is remarkablysmall—even Franklin’s theory never quite accounted for the mutualrepulsion of two negatively charged bodies.) But they had as muchdif!culty as the !rst group in accounting simultaneously for any but thesimplest conduction effects. Those effects, however, provided thestarting point for still a third group, one which tended to speak ofelectricity as a “”uid” that could run through conductors rather than asan “ef”uvium” that emanated from non-conductors. This group, in itsturn, had dif!culty reconciling its theory with a number of attractiveand3 Duane Roller and Duane H. D. Roller, The Development of the Concept of Electric Charge:Electricity from the Greeks to Coulomb (“Harvard Case Histories in Experimental Science,”Case 8; Cambridge, Mass., 1954); and I. B. Cohen, Franklin and Newton: An Inquiry intoSpeculative Newtonian Experimental Science and Franklin’s Work in Electricity as anExample Thereof (Philadelphia, 1956), chaps, vii-xii. For some of the analytic detail in theparagraph that follows in the text, I am indebted to a still unpublished paper by mystudent John L. Heilbron. Pending its publication, a somewhat more extended and moreprecise account of the emergence of Franklin’s paradigm is included in T. S. Kuhn, “TheFunction of Dogma in Scientific Research,” in A. C. Crombie (ed.), “Symposium on theHistory of Science, University of Oxford, July 9-15, 1961,” to be published by HeinemannEducational Books, Ltd.Vol. II, No. 214The Route to Normal Sciencerepulsive effects. Only through the work of Franklin and his immediatesuccessors did a theory arise that could account with something likeequal facility for very nearly all these effects and that therefore couldand did provide a subsequent generation of “electricians” with acommon paradigm for its research.Excluding those !elds, like mathematics and astronomy, in which the!rst !rm paradigms date from prehistory and also those, likebiochemistry, that arose by division and recombination of specialtiesalready matured, the situations outlined above are historically typical.Though it involves my continuing to employ the unfortunatesimpli!cation that tags an extended historical episode with a single andsomewhat arbitrarily chosen name (e.g., Newton or Franklin), I suggestthat similar fundamental disagreements characterized, for example, thestudy of motion before Aristotle and of statics before Archimedes, thestudy of heat before Black, of chemistry before Boyle and Boerhaave,and of historical geology before Hutton. In parts of biology—the study ofheredity, for example—the !rst universally received paradigms are stillmore recent; and it remains an open question what parts of socialscience have yet acquired such paradigms at all. History suggests thatthe road to a !rm research consensus is extraordinarily arduous.History also suggests, however, some reasons for the dif!cultiesencountered on that road. In the absence of a paradigm or somecandidate for paradigm, all of the facts that could possibly pertain to thedevelopment of a given science are likely to seem equally relevant. As aresult, early fact-gathering is a far more nearly random activity than theone that subsequent scienti!c development makes familiar.Furthermore, in the absence of a reason for seeking some particularform of more recondite information, early fact-gathering is usuallyrestricted to the wealth of data that lie ready to hand. The resulting poolof facts contains those accessible to casual observation and experimenttogether with some of the more esoteric data retrievable fromestablished crafts like medicine, calendar making, and metallurgy.Because the crafts are one readily accessible source of facts that couldnot have been casually discovered, technologyVol. II, No. 215The Structure of Scientific Revolutionshas often played a vital role in the emergence of new sciences.But though this sort of fact-collecting has been essential to the originof many signi!cant sciences, anyone who examines, for example, Pliny’sencyclopedic writings or the Baconian natural histories of theseventeenth century will discover that it produces a morass. Onesomehow hesitates to call the literature that results scienti!c. TheBaconian “histories” of heat, color, wind, mining, and so on, are !lledwith information, some of it recondite. But they juxtapose facts that willlater prove revealing (e.g., heating by mixture) with others (e.g., thewarmth of dung heaps) that will for some time remain too complex tobe integrated with theory at all.4In addition, since any description mustbe partial, the typical natural history often omits from its immenselycircumstantial accounts just those details that later scientists will !ndsources of important illumination. Almost none of the early “histories”of electricity, for example, mention that chaff, attracted to a rubbedglass rod, bounces off again. That effect seemed mechanical, notelectrical.5Moreover, since the casual fact-gatherer seldom possesses thetime or the tools to be critical, the natural histories often juxtaposedescriptions like the above with others, say, heating by antiperistasis (orby cooling), that we are now quite unable to con!rm.8Only veryoccasionally, as in the cases of ancient statics, dynamics, and geometricaloptics, do facts collected with so little guidance from pre-establishedtheory speak with suf!cient clarity to permit the emergence of a !rstparadigm.This is the situation that creates the schools characteristic of the earlystages of a science’s development. No natural history can be interpretedin the absence of at least some implicit body4 Compare the sketch for a natural history of heat in Bacon’s Novum Organum, Vol. VIIIof The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. J. Spedding, R. L. Ellis, and D. D. Heath (New York,1869), pp. 179-203.5 Roller and Roller, op. cit., pp. 14, 22, 28, 43. Only after the work recorded in the last ofthese citations do repulsive effects gain general recognition as unequivocally electrical.6 Bacon, op. cit., pp. 235, 337, says, “Water slightly warm is more easily frozen than quitecold.” For a partial account of the earlier history of this strange observation, see MarshallClagett, Giovanni Marliani and Late Medieval Physics (New York, 1941), chap. iv.Vol. II, No. 216The Route to Normal Scienceof intertwined theoretical and methodological belief that permitsselection, evaluation, and criticism. If that body of belief is not alreadyimplicit in the collection of facts—in which case more than “mere facts”are at hand—it must be externally supplied, perhaps by a currentmetaphysic, by another science, or by personal and historical accident.No wonder, then, that in the early stages of the development of anyscience different men confronting the same range of phenomena, butnot usually all the same particular phenomena, describe and interpretthem in different ways. What is surprising, and perhaps also unique inits degree to the !elds we call science, is that such initial divergencesshould ever largely disappear.For they do disappear to a very considerable extent and thenapparently once and for all. Furthermore, their disappearance is usuallycaused by the triumph of one of the pre-paradigm schools, which,because of its own characteristic beliefs and preconceptions, emphasizedonly some special part of the too sizable and inchoate pool ofinformation. Those electricians who thought electricity a “uid andtherefore gave particular emphasis to conduction provide an excellentcase in point. Led by this belief, which could scarcely cope with theknown multiplicity of attractive and repulsive effects, several of themconceived the idea of bottling the electrical “uid. The immediate fruit oftheir efforts was the Leyden jar, a device which might never have beendiscovered by a man exploring nature casually or at random, but whichwas in fact independently developed by at least two investigators in theearly 1740’s.7Almost from the start of his electrical researches, Franklinwas particularly concerned to explain that strange and, in the event,particularly revealing piece of special apparatus. His success in doing soprovided the most effective of the arguments that made his theory aparadigm, though one that was still unable to account for quite all theknown cases of electrical repulsion.8To be accepted as a paradigm, atheory must seem better than its competitors, but7Roller and Roller, op. cit., pp. 51-54.8The troublesome case was the mutual repulsion of negatively charged bodies, forwhich see Cohen, op. cit., pp. 491-94, 531-43.Vol. II, No. 217The Structure of Scientific Revolutionsit need not, and in fact never does, explain all the facts with which it canbe confronted.What the “uid theory of electricity did for the subgroup that held it,the Franklinian paradigm later did for the entire group of electricians. Itsuggested which experiments would be worth performing and which,because directed to secondary or to overly complex manifestations ofelectricity, would not. Only the paradigm did the job far moreeffectively, partly because the end of interschool debate ended theconstant reiteration of fundamentals and partly because the con!dencethat they were on the right track encouraged scientists to undertakemore precise, esoteric, and consuming sorts of work.9Freed from theconcern with any and all electrical phenomena, the united group ofelectricians could pursue selected phenomena in far more detail,designing much special equipment for the task and employing it morestubbornly and systematically than electricians had ever done before.Both fact collection and theory articulation became highly directedactivities. The effectiveness and ef!ciency of electrical researchincreased accordingly, providing evidence for a societal version ofFrancis Bacon’s acute methodological dictum: “Truth emerges morereadily from error than from confusion.”10We shall be examining the nature of this highly directed or paradigmbased research in the next section, but must !rst note brie”y how theemergence of a paradigm affects the structure of the group thatpractices the !eld. When, in the development of a natural science, anindividual or group !rst produces a synthesis able to attract most of thenext generation’s practitioners, the older schools gradually disappear. Inpart their disappear9It should be noted that the acceptance of Franklin’s theory did not end quite all debate.In 1759 Robert Symmer proposed a two-fluid version of that theory, and for many yearsthereafter electricians were divided about whether electricity was a single fluid or two.But the debates on this subject only confirm what has been said above about the mannerin which a universally recognized achievement unites the profession. Electricians,though they continued divided on this point, rapidly concluded that no experimentaltests could distinguish the two versions of the theory and that they were thereforeequivalent. After that, both schools could and did exploit all the benefits that theFranklinian theory provided (ibid., pp. 543-46,548-54).10 Bacon, op. cit., p. 210.Vol. II, No. 218The Route to Normal Scienceance is caused by their members’ conversion to the new paradigm. Butthere are always some men who cling to one or another of the olderviews, and they are simply read out of the profession, which thereafterignores their work. The new paradigm implies a new and more rigidde!nition of the !eld. Those unwilling or unable to accommodate theirwork to it must proceed in isolation or attach themselves to some othergroup.11 Historically, they have often simply stayed in the departmentsof philosophy from which so many of the special sciences have beenspawned. As these indications hint, it is sometimes just its reception of aparadigm that transforms a group previously interested merely in thestudy of nature into a profession or, at least, a discipline. In the sciences(though not in !elds like medicine, technology, and law, of which theprincipal raison d’être is an external social need), the formation ofspecialized journals, the foundation of specialists’ societies, and theclaim for a special place in the curriculum have usually been associatedwith a group’s !rst reception of a single paradigm. At least this was thecase between the time, a century and a half ago, when the institutionalpattern of scienti!c specialization !rst developed and the very recenttime when the paraphernalia of specialization acquired a prestige oftheir own.The more rigid de!nition of the scienti!c group has otherconsequences. When the individual scientist can take a paradigm forgranted, he need no longer, in his major works, attempt to build his !eldanew, starting from !rst principles and justify11 The history of electricity provides an excellent example which could be duplicatedfrom the careers of Priestley, Kelvin, and others. Franklin reports that Nollet, who at midcentury was the most influential of the Continental electricians, “lived to see himself thelast of his Sect, except Mr. B.—his Élève and immediate Disciple” (Max Farrand [ed.],Benjamin Franklin’s Memoirs [Berkeley, Calif., 1949], pp. 384-86). More interesting,however, is the endurance of whole schools in increasing isolation from professionalscience. Consider, for example, the case of astrology, which was once an integral part ofastronomy. Or consider the continuation in the late eighteenth and early nineteenthcenturies of a previously respected tradition of “romantic” chemistry. This is thetradition discussed by Charles C. Gillispie in “The Encyclopédie and the JacobinPhilosophy of Science: A Study in Ideas and Consequences,” Critical Problems in theHistory of Science, ed. Marshall Clagett (Madison, Wis., 1959), pp. 255-89; and “TheFormation of Lamarck’s Evolutionary Theory,” Archives internationales d’histoire dessciences, XXXVII (1956), 323-38.Vol. II, No. 219The Structure of Scientific Revolutionsing the use of each concept introduced. That can be left to the writer oftextbooks. Given a textbook, however, the creative scientist can begin hisresearch where it leaves off and thus concentrate exclusively upon thesubtlest and most esoteric aspects of the natural phenomena thatconcern his group. And as he does this, his research communiqués willbegin to change in ways whose evolution has been too little studied butwhose modern end products are obvious to all and oppressive to many.No longer will his researches usually be embodied in books addressed,like Franklin’s Experiments . . . on Electricity or Darwin’s Origin of Species,to anyone who might be interested in the subject matter of the !eld.Instead they will usually appear as brief articles addressed only toprofessional colleagues, the men whose knowledge of a shared paradigmcan be assumed and who prove to be the only ones able to read thepapers addressed to them.Today in the sciences, books are usually either texts or retrospectivere”ections upon one aspect or another of the scienti!c life. The scientistwho writes one is more likely to !nd his professional reputationimpaired than enhanced. Only in the earlier, pre-paradigm, stages of thedevelopment of the various sciences did the book ordinarily possess thesame relation to professional achievement that it still retains in othercreative !elds. And only in those !elds that still retain the book, with orwithout the article, as a vehicle for research communication are thelines of professionalization still so loosely drawn that the layman mayhope to follow progress by reading the practitioners’ original reports.Both in mathematics and astronomy, research reports had ceasedalready in antiquity to be intelligible to a generally educated audience.In dynamics, research became similarly esoteric in the later MiddleAges, and it recaptured general intelligibility only brie”y during theearly seventeenth century when a new paradigm replaced the one thathad guided medieval research. Electrical research began to requiretranslation for the layman before the end of the eighteenth century, andmost other !elds of physical science ceased to be generally accessible inthe nineteenth. During the same two cenVol. II, No. 220The Route to Normal Scienceturies similar transitions can be isolated in the various parts of thebiological sciences. In parts of the social sciences they may well beoccurring today. Although it has become customary, and is surelyproper, to deplore the widening gulf that separates the professionalscientist from his colleagues in other !elds, too little attention is paid tothe essential relationship between that gulf and the mechanismsintrinsic to scienti!c advance.Ever since prehistoric antiquity one !eld of study after another hascrossed the divide between what the historian might call its prehistoryas a science and its history proper. These transitions to maturity haveseldom been so sudden or so unequivocal as my necessarily schematicdiscussion may have implied. But neither have they been historicallygradual, coextensive, that is to say, with the entire development of the!elds within which they occurred. Writers on electricity during the !rstfour decades of the eighteenth century possessed far more informationabout electrical phenomena than had their sixteenth-centurypredecessors. During the half-century after 1740, few new sorts ofelectrical phenomena were added to their lists. Nevertheless, inimportant respects, the electrical writings of Cavendish, Coulomb, andVolta in the last third of the eighteenth century seem further removedfrom those of Gray, Du Fay, and even Franklin than are the writings ofthese early eighteenth-century electrical discoverers from those of thesixteenth century.12 Sometime between 1740 and 1780, electricians werefor the !rst time enabled to take the foundations of their !eld forgranted. From that point they pushed on to more concrete andrecondite problems, and increasingly they then reported their results inarticles addressed to other electricians rather than in books addressed tothe learned world at large. As a group they achieved what had beengained by astronomers in antiquity12 The post-Franklinian developments include an immense increase in the sensitivity ofcharge detectors, the first reliable and generally diffused techniques for measuringcharge, the evolution of the concept of capacity and its relation to a newly refined notionof electric tension, and the quantification of electrostatic force. On all of these see Rollerand Roller, op. cit., pp. 66-81; W. C. Walker, “The Detection and Estimation of ElectricCharges in the Eighteenth Century,” Annals of Science, I (1936), 66-100; and EdmundHoppe, Geschichte der Elektrizität (Leipzig, 1884), Part I, chaps, iii-iv.Vol. II, No. 221The Structure of Scientific Revolutionsand by students of motion in the Middle Ages, of physical optics in thelate seventeenth century, and of historical geology in the earlynineteenth. They had, that is, achieved a paradigm that proved able toguide the whole group’s research. Except with the advantage ofhindsight, it is hard to !nd another criterion that so clearly proclaims a!eld a science.Vol. II, No. 222III. The Nature of Normal ScienceWhat then is the nature of the more professional and esotericresearch that a group’s reception of a single paradigm permits? If theparadigm represents work that has been done once and for all, whatfurther problems does it leave the united group to resolve? Thosequestions will seem even more urgent if we now note one respect inwhich the terms used so far may be misleading. In its established usage,a paradigm is an accepted model or pattern, and that aspect of itsmeaning has enabled me, lacking a better word, to appropriate‘paradigm’ here. But it will shortly be clear that the sense of ‘model’ and‘pattern’ that permits the appropriation is not quite the one usual inde!ning ‘paradigm.’ In grammar, for example, ‘amo, amas, amat’ is aparadigm because it displays the pattern to be used in conjugating alarge number of other Latin verbs, e.g., in producing ‘laudo, laudas,laudat.’ In this standard application, the paradigm functions bypermitting the replication of examples any one of which could inprinciple serve to replace it. In a science, on the other hand, a paradigmis rarely an object for replication. Instead, like an accepted judicialdecision in the common law, it is an object for further articulation andspeci!cation under new or more stringent conditions.To see how this can be so, we must recognize how very limited in bothscope and precision a paradigm can be at the time of its !rstappearance. Paradigms gain their status because they are moresuccessful than their competitors in solving a few problems that thegroup of practitioners has come to recognize as acute. To be moresuccessful is not, however, to be either completely successful with asingle problem or notably successful with any large number. The successof a paradigm—whether Aristotle’s analysis of motion, Ptolemy’scomputations of planetary position, Lavoisier’s application of thebalance, or Maxwell’s mathematization of the electromagnetic !eld—isat the start largely a promise of success discoverable in selected andVol. II, No. 223The Structure of Scientific Revolutionsstill incomplete examples. Normal science consists in the actualizationof that promise, an actualization achieved by extending the knowledgeof those facts that the paradigm displays as particularly revealing, byincreasing the extent of the match between those facts and theparadigm’s predictions, and by further articulation of the paradigmitself.Few people who are not actually practitioners of a mature sciencerealize how much mop-up work of this sort a paradigm leaves to be doneor quite how fascinating such work can prove in the execution. Andthese points need to be understood. Mop-ping-up operations are whatengage most scientists throughout their careers. They constitute what Iam here calling normal science. Closely examined, whether historicallyor in the contemporary laboratory, that enterprise seems an attempt toforce nature into the preformed and relatively in”exible box that theparadigm supplies. No part of the aim of normal science is to call forthnew sorts of phenomena; indeed those that will not !t the box are oftennot seen at all. Nor do scientists normally aim to invent new theories,and they are often intolerant of those invented by others.1Instead,normal-scienti!c research is directed to the articulation of thosephenomena and theories that the paradigm already supplies.Perhaps these are defects. The areas investigated by normal scienceare, of course, minuscule; the enterprise now under discussion hasdrastically restricted vision. But those restrictions, born from con!dencein a paradigm, turn out to be essential to the development of science. Byfocusing attention upon a small range of relatively esoteric problems,the paradigm forces scientists to investigate some part of nature in adetail and depth that would otherwise be unimaginable. And normalscience possesses a built-in mechanism that ensures the relaxation ofthe restrictions that bound research whenever the paradigm from whichthey derive ceases to function effectively. At that point scientists beginto behave differently, and the nature of their research problemschanges. In the interim, however, during the1Bernard Barber, “Resistance by Scientists to Scientific Discovery,” Science, CXXXIV(1961), 596-602.Vol. II, No. 224The Nature of Normal Scienceperiod when the paradigm is successful, the profession will have solvedproblems that its members could scarcely have imagined and wouldnever have undertaken without commitment to the paradigm. And atleast part of that achievement always proves to be permanent.To display more clearly what is meant by normal or paradigm-basedresearch, let me now attempt to classify and illustrate the problems ofwhich normal science principally consists. For convenience I postponetheoretical activity and begin with fact-gathering, that is, with theexperiments and observations described in the technical journalsthrough which scientists inform their professional colleagues of theresults of their continuing research. On what aspects of nature doscientists ordinarily report? What determines their choice? And, sincemost scienti!c observation consumes much time, equipment, andmoney, what motivates the scientist to pursue that choice to aconclusion?There are, I think, only three normal foci for factual scienti!cinvestigation, and they are neither always nor permanently distinct.First is that class of facts that the paradigm has shown to be particularlyrevealing of the nature of things. By employing them in solvingproblems, the paradigm has made them worth determining both withmore precision and in a larger variety of situations. At one time oranother, these signi!cant factual determinations have included: inastronomy—stellar position and magnitude, the periods of eclipsingbinaries and of planets; in physics—the speci!c gravities andcompressibilities of materials, wave lengths and spectral intensities,electrical conductivities and contact potentials; and in chemistry—composition and combining weights, boiling points and acidity ofsolutions, structural formulas and optical activities. Attempts to increasethe accuracy and scope with which facts like these are known occupy asigni!cant fraction of the literature of experimental and observationalscience. Again and again complex special apparatus has been designedfor such purposes, and the invention, construction, and deployment ofthat apparatus have demanded !rst-rate talent, much time, andconsiderable !nancialVol. II, No. 225The Structure of Scientific Revolutionsbacking. Synchrotrons and radiotelescopes are only the most recentexamples of the lengths to which research workers will go if a paradigmassures them that the facts they seek are important. From Tycho Braheto E. O. Lawrence, some scientists have acquired great reputations, notfrom any novelty of their discoveries, but from the precision, reliability,and scope of the methods they developed for the redetermination of apreviously known sort of fact.A second usual but smaller class of factual determinations is directedto those facts that, though often without much intrinsic interest, can becompared directly with predictions from the paradigm theory. As weshall see shortly, when I turn from the experimental to the theoreticalproblems of normal science, there are seldom many areas in which ascienti!c theory, particularly if it is cast in a predominantlymathematical form, can be directly compared with nature. No morethan three such areas are even yet accessible to Einstein’s general theoryof relativity.2Furthermore, even in those areas where application ispossible, it often demands theoretical and instrumental approximationsthat severely limit the agreement to be expected. Improving thatagreement or !nding new areas in which agreement can bedemonstrated at all presents a constant challenge to the skill andimagination of the experimentalist and observer. Special telescopes todemonstrate the Copernican prediction of annual parallax; Atwood’smachine, !rst invented almost a century after the Principia, to give the!rst unequivocal demonstration of Newton’s second law; Foucault’sapparatus to show that the speed of light is greater in air than in water;or the gigantic scintillation counter designed to demonstrate theexistence of2The only long-standing check point still generally recognized is the precession ofMercury’s perihelion. The red shift in the spectrum of light from distant stars can bederived from considerations more elementary than general relativity, and the same maybe possible for the bending of light around the sun, a point now in some dispute. In anycase, measurements of the latter phenomenon remain equivocal. One additional checkpoint may have been established very recently: the gravitational shift of Mossbauerradiation. Perhaps there will soon be others in this now active but long dormant field.For an up-to-date capsule account of the problem, see L. I. Schiff, “A Report on the NASAConference on Experimental Tests of Theories of Relativity,” Physics Today, XIV (1961),42-48.Vol. II, No. 226The Nature of Normal Sciencethe neutrino—these pieces of special apparatus and many others likethem illustrate the immense effort and ingenuity that have beenrequired to bring nature and theory into closer and closer agreement.3That attempt to demonstrate agreement is a second type of normalexperimental work, and it is even more obviously dependent than the!rst upon a paradigm. The existence of the paradigm sets the problemto be solved; often the paradigm theory is implicated directly in thedesign of apparatus able to solve the problem. Without the Principia, forexample, measurements made with the Atwood machine would havemeant nothing at all.A third class of experiments and observations exhausts, I think, thefact-gathering activities of normal science. It consists of empirical workundertaken to articulate the paradigm theory, resolving some of itsresidual ambiguities and permitting the solution of problems to which ithad previously only drawn attention. This class proves to be the mostimportant of all, and its description demands its subdivision. In themore mathematical sciences, some of the experiments aimed atarticulation are directed to the determination of physical constants.Newton’s work, for example, indicated that the force between two unitmasses at unit distance would be the same for all types of matter at allpositions in the universe. But his own problems could be solved withouteven estimating the size of this attraction, the universal gravitationalconstant; and no one else devised apparatus able to determine it for acentury after the Principia appeared. Nor was Cavendish’s famousdetermination in the 1790’s the last. Because of its central position inphysical theory, improved values of the gravitational constant have beenthe object of repeated efforts ever since by a number of outstanding3For two of the parallax telescopes, see Abraham Wolf, A History of Science, Technology,and Philosophy in the Eighteenth Century (2d ed.; London, 1952), pp. 103-5. For theAtwood machine, see N. R. Hanson, Patterns of Discovery (Cambridge, 1958), pp. 100-102,207-8. For the last two pieces of special apparatus, see M. L. Foucault, “Méthode généralepour mesurer la vitesse de la lumière dans l’air et les milieux transparants. Vitessesrelatives de la lumière dans l’air et dans l’eau . . . ,” Comptes rendus . . . de l’Académie dessciences, XXX (1850), 551-60; and C. L. Cowan, Jr., et al., “Detection of the Free Neutrino:A Confirmation,” Science, CXXIV (1956), 103-4.Vol. II, No. 227The Structure of Scientific Revolutionsexperimentalists.4Other examples of the same sort of continuing workwould include determinations of the astronomical unit, Avogadro’snumber, Joule’s coef!cient, the electronic charge, and so on. Few ofthese elaborate efforts would have been conceived and none would havebeen carried out without a paradigm theory to de!ne the problem andto guarantee the existence of a stable solution.Efforts to articulate a paradigm are not, however, restricted to thedetermination of universal constants. They may, for example, also aimat quantitative laws: Boyle’s Law relating gas pressure to volume,Coulomb’s Law of electrical attraction, and Joule’s formula relating heatgenerated to electrical resistance and current are all in this category.Perhaps it is not apparent that a paradigm is prerequisite to thediscovery of laws like these. We often hear that they are found byexamining measurements undertaken for their own sake and withouttheoretical commitment. But history offers no support for so excessivelyBaconian a method. Boyle’s experiments were not conceivable (and ifconceived would have received another interpretation or none at all)until air was recognized as an elastic “uid to which all the elaborateconcepts of hydrostatics could be applied.5Coulomb’s success dependedupon his constructing special apparatus to measure the force betweenpoint charges, (Those who had previously measured electrical forcesusing ordinary pan balances, etc., had found no consistent or simpleregularity at all.) But that design, in turn, depended upon the previousrecognition that every particle of electric “uid acts upon every other at adistance. It was for the force between such particles—the only forcewhich might safely be assumed4J. H. P[oynting] reviews some two dozen measurements of the gravitational constantbetween 1741 and 1901 in “Gravitation Constant and Mean Density of the Earth,”Encyclopaedia Britannica (11th ed.; Cambridge, 1910-11), XII, 385-89.5For the full transplantation of hydrostatic concepts into pneumatics, see The PhysicalTreatises of Pascal, trans. I. H. B. Spiers and A. G. H. Spiers, with an introduction andnotes by F. Barry (New York, 1937). Torricelli’s original introduction of the parallelism(“We live submerged at the bottom of an ocean of the element air”) occurs on p. 164. Itsrapid development is displayed by the two main treatises.Vol. II, No. 228The Nature of Normal Sciencea simple function of distance—that Coulomb was looking.6 Joule’sexperiments could also be used to illustrate how quantitative lawsemerge through paradigm articulation. In fact, so general and close isthe relation between qualitative paradigm and quantitative law that,since Galileo, such laws have often been correctly guessed with the aidof a paradigm years before apparatus could be designed for theirexperimental determination.7Finally, there is a third sort of experiment which aims to articulate aparadigm. More than the others this one can resemble exploration, andit is particularly prevalent in those periods and sciences that deal morewith the qualitative than with the quantitative aspects of nature’sregularity. Often a paradigm developed for one set of phenomena isambiguous in its application to other closely related ones. Thenexperiments are necessary to choose among the alternative ways ofapplying the paradigm to the new area of interest. For example, theparadigm applications of the caloric theory were to heating and coolingby mixtures and by change of state. But heat could be released orabsorbed in many other ways—e.g., by chemical combination, byfriction, and by compression or absorption of a gas—and to each of theseother phenomena the theory could be applied in several ways. If thevacuum had a heat capacity, for example, heating by compression couldbe explained as the result of mixing gas with void. Or it might be due toa change in the speci!c heat of gases with changing pressure. And therewere several other explanations besides. Many experiments wereundertaken to elaborate these various possibilities and to distinguishbetween them; all these experiments arose from the caloric theory asparadigm, and all exploited it in the design of experiments and in theinterpretation of results.8Once the phe6Duane Roller and Duane H. D. Roller, The Development of the Concept of ElectricCharge: Electricity from the Greeks to Coulomb (“Harvard Case Histories in ExperimentalScience,” Case 8; Cambridge, Mass., 1954), pp. 66-80.7For examples, see T. S. Kuhn, “The Function of Measurement in Modern PhysicalScience,” Isis, LII (1961), 161-93.8T. S. Kuhn, “The Caloric Theory of Adiabatic Compression,” Isis, XLIX (1958), 132-40.Vol. II, No. 229The Structure of Scientific Revolutionsnomenon of heating by compression had been established, all furtherexperiments in the area were paradigm-dependent in this way. Giventhe phenomenon, how else could an experiment to elucidate it havebeen chosen?Turn now to the theoretical problems of normal science, which fallinto very nearly the same classes as the experimental and observational.A part of normal theoretical work, though only a small part, consistssimply in the use of existing theory to predict factual information ofintrinsic value. The manufacture of astronomical ephemerides, thecomputation of lens characteristics, and the production of radiopropagation curves are examples of problems of this sort. Scientists,however, generally regard them as hack work to be relegated toengineers or technicians. At no time do very many of them appear insigni!cant scienti!c journals. But these journals do contain a greatmany theoretical discussions of problems that, to the non-scientist, mustseem almost identical. These are the manipulations of theoryundertaken, not because the predictions in which they result areintrinsically valuable, but because they can be confronted directly withexperiment. Their purpose is to display a new application of theparadigm or to increase the precision of an application that has alreadybeen made.The need for work of this sort arises from the immense dif!cultiesoften encountered in developing points of contact between a theory andnature. These dif!culties can be brie”y illustrated by an examination ofthe history of dynamics after Newton. By the early eighteenth centurythose scientists who found a paradigm in the Principia took thegenerality of its conclusions for granted, and they had every reason todo so. No other work known to the history of science has simultaneouslypermitted so large an increase in both the scope and precision ofresearch. For the heavens Newton had derived Kepler’s Laws ofplanetary motion and also explained certain of the observed respects inwhich the moon failed to obey them. For the earth he had derived theresults of some scattered observations on pendulums and the tides. Withthe aid of additional but ad hoc assumptions, he had also been able toderive Boyle’s LawVol. II, No. 230The Nature of Normal Scienceand an important formula for the speed of sound in air. Given the stateof science at the time, the success of the demonstrations was extremelyimpressive. Yet given the presumptive generality of Newton’s Laws, thenumber of these applications was not great, and Newton developedalmost no others. Furthermore, compared with what any graduatestudent of physics can achieve with those same laws today, Newton’s fewapplications were not even developed with precision. Finally, thePrincipia had been designed for application chie”y to problems ofcelestial mechanics. How to adapt it for terrestrial applications,particularly for those of motion under constraint, was by no meansclear. Terrestrial problems were, in any case, already being attacked withgreat success by a quite different set of techniques developed originallyby Galileo and Huyghens and extended on the Continent during theeighteenth century by the Bernoullis, d’Alembert, and many others.Presumably their techniques and those of the Principia could be shownto be special cases of a more general formulation, but for some time noone saw quite how.9Restrict attention for the moment to the problem of precision. Wehave already illustrated its empirical aspect. Special equipment—likeCavendish’s apparatus, the Atwood machine, or improved telescopes—was required in order to provide the special data that the concreteapplications of Newton’s paradigm demanded. Similar dif!culties inobtaining agreement existed on the side of theory. In applying his lawsto pendulums, for example, Newton was forced to treat the bob as amass point in order to provide a unique de!nition of pendulum length.Most of his theorems, the few exceptions being hypothetical andpreliminary, also ignored the effect of air resistance. These were soundphysical approximations. Nevertheless, as approximations theyrestricted the agreement to be expected9C. Truesdell, “A Program toward Rediscovering the Rational Mechanics of the Age ofReason,” Archive for History of the Exact Sciences, I (1960), 3-36, and “Reactions of LateBaroque Mechanics to Success, Conjecture, Error, and Failure in Newton’s Principia,”Texas Quarterly, X (1967), 281-97. T. L. Hankins, “The Reception of Newton’s Second Lawof Motion in the Eighteenth Century.” Archives internationales d’histoire des sciences, XX(1967), 42-65.Vol. II, No. 231The Structure of Scientific Revolutionsbetween Newton’s predictions and actual experiments. The samedif!culties appear even more clearly in the application of Newton’stheory to the heavens. Simple quantitative telescopic observationsindicate that the planets do not quite obey Kepler’s Laws, and Newton’stheory indicates that they should not. To derive those laws, Newton hadbeen forced to neglect all gravitational attraction except that betweenindividual planets and the sun. Since the planets also attract each other,only approximate agreement between the applied theory and telescopicobservation could be expected.10The agreement obtained was, of course, more than satisfactory tothose who obtained it. Excepting for some terrestrial problems, no othertheory could do nearly so well. None of those who questioned thevalidity of Newton’s work did so because of its limited agreement withexperiment and observation. Nevertheless, these limitations ofagreement left many fascinating theoretical problems for Newton’ssuccessors. Theoretical techniques were, for example, required fortreating the motions of more than two simultaneously attracting bodiesand for investigating the stability of perturbed orbits. Problems likethese occupied many of Europe’s best mathematicians during theeighteenth and early nineteenth century. Euler, Lagrange, Laplace, andGauss all did some of their most brilliant work on problems aimed toimprove the match between Newton’s paradigm and observation of theheavens. Many of these !gures worked simultaneously to develop themathematics required for applications that neither Newton nor thecontemporary Continental school of mechanics had even attempted.They produced, for example, an immense literature and some verypowerful mathematical techniques for hydrodynamics and for theproblem of vibrating strings. These problems of application account forwhat is probably the most brilliant and consuming scienti!c work of theeighteenth century. Other examples could be discovered by anexamination of the post-paradigm period in the development ofthermodynamics, the wave theory of light, electromagnetic the10 Wolf, op. cit., pp. 75-81, 96-101; and William Whewell, History of the Inductive Sciences(rev. ed.; London, 1847), II, 213-71.Vol. II, No. 232The Nature of Normal Scienceory, or any other branch of science whose fundamental laws are fullyquantitative. At least in the more mathematical sciences, mosttheoretical work is of this sort.But it is not all of this sort. Even in the mathematical sciences thereare also theoretical problems of paradigm articulation; and duringperiods when scienti!c development is predominantly qualitative, theseproblems dominate. Some of the problems, in both the morequantitative and more qualitative sciences, aim simply at clari!cation byreformulation. The Principia, for example, did not always prove an easywork to apply, partly because it retained some of the clumsinessinevitable in a !rst venture and partly because so much of its meaningwas only implicit in its applications. For many terrestrial applications, inany case, an apparently unrelated set of Continental techniques seemedvastly more powerful. Therefore, from Euler and Lagrange in theeighteenth century to Hamilton, Jacobi, and Hertz in the nineteenth,many of Europe’s most brilliant mathematical physicists repeatedlyendeavored to reformulate mechanical theory in an equivalent butlogically and aesthetically more satisfying form. They wished, that is, toexhibit the explicit and implicit lessons of the Principia and ofContinental mechanics in a logically more coherent version, one thatwould be at once more uniform and less equivocal in its application tothe newly elaborated problems of mechanics.11Similar reformulations of a paradigm have occurred repeatedly in allof the sciences, but most of them have produced more substantialchanges in the paradigm than the reformulations of the Principia citedabove. Such changes result from the empirical work previouslydescribed as aimed at paradigm articulation. Indeed, to classify that sortof work as empirical was arbitrary. More than any other sort of normalresearch, the problems of paradigm articulation are simultaneouslytheoretical and experimental; the examples given previously will serveequally well here. Before he could construct his equipment and makemeasurements with it, Coulomb had to employ electrical theory todetermine how his equipment should be built. The11 René Dugas, Histoire de la mécanique (Neuchatel, 1950), Books IV-V.Vol. II, No. 233The Structure of Scientific Revolutionsconsequence of his measurements was a re!nement in that theory. Oragain, the men who designed the experiments that were to distinguishbetween the various theories of heating by compression were generallythe same men who had made up the versions being compared. Theywere working both with fact and with theory, and their work producednot simply new information but a more precise paradigm, obtained bythe elimination of ambiguities that the original from which they workedhad retained. In many sciences, most normal work is of this sort. Thesethree classes of problems—determination of signi!cant fact, matching offacts with theory, and articulation of theory-exhaust, I think, theliterature of normal science, both empirical and theoretical. They donot, of course, quite exhaust the entire literature of science. There arealso extraordinary problems, and it may well be their resolution thatmakes the scienti!c enterprise as a whole so particularly worthwhile.But extraordinary problems are not to be had for the asking. Theyemerge only on special occasions prepared by the advance of normalresearch. Inevitably, therefore, the overwhelming majority of theproblems undertaken by even the very best scientists usually fall intoone of the three categories outlined above. Work under the paradigmcan be conducted in no other way, and to desert the paradigm is to ceasepracticing the science it de!nes. We shall shortly discover that suchdesertions do occur. They are the pivots about which scienti!crevolutions turn. But before beginning the study of such revolutions, werequire a more panoramic view of the normal-scienti!c pursuits thatprepare the way.Vol. II, No. 234VI. Anomaly and the Emergence of Scientific DiscoveriesNormal science, the puzzle-solving activity we have just examined, isa highly cumulative enterprise, eminently successful in its aim, thesteady extension of the scope and precision of scienti!c knowledge. Inall these respects it !ts with great precision the most usual image ofscienti!c work. Yet one standard product of the scienti!c enterprise ismissing. Normal science does not aim at novelties of fact or theory and,when successful, !nds none. New and unsuspected phenomena are,however, repeatedly uncovered by scienti!c research, and radical newtheories have again and again been invented by scientists. History evensuggests that the scienti!c enterprise has developed a uniquely powerfultechnique for producing surprises of this sort. If this characteristic ofscience is to be reconciled with what has already been said, thenresearch under a paradigm must be a particularly effective way ofinducing paradigm change. That is what fundamental novelties of factand theory do. Produced inadvertently by a game played under one setof rules, their assimilation requires the elaboration of another set. Afterthey have become parts of science, the enterprise, at least of thosespecialists in whose particular !eld the novelties lie, is never quite thesame again.We must now ask how changes of this sort can come about, considering!rst discoveries, or novelties of fact, and then inventions, or novelties oftheory. That distinction between discovery and invention or betweenfact and theory will, however, immediately prove to be exceedinglyarti!cial. Its arti!ciality is an important clue to several of this essay’smain theses. Examining selected discoveries in the rest of this section,we shall quickly !nd that they are not isolated events but extendedepisodes with a regularly recurrent structure. Discovery commenceswith the awareness of anomaly, i.e., with the recognition that nature hassomehow violated the paradigm-inducedVol. II, No. 252Anomaly and the Emergence of Scientific Discoveriesexpectations that govern normal science. It then continues with a moreor less extended exploration of the area of anomaly. And it closes onlywhen the paradigm theory has been adjusted so that the anomalous hasbecome the expected. Assimilating a new sort of fact demands a morethan additive adjustment of theory, and until that adjustment iscompleted—until the scientist has learned to see nature in a differentway—the new fact is not quite a scienti!c fact at all.To see how closely factual and theoretical novelty are intertwined inscienti!c discovery examine a particularly famous example, thediscovery of oxygen. At least three different men have a legitimate claimto it, and several other chemists must, in the early 1770’s, have hadenriched air in a laboratory vessel without knowing it.1The progress ofnormal science, in this case of pneumatic chemistry, prepared the wayto a breakthrough quite thoroughly. The earliest of the claimants toprepare a relatively pure sample of the gas was the Swedish apothecary,C. W. Scheele. We may, however, ignore his work since it was notpublished until oxygen’s discovery had repeatedly been announcedelsewhere and thus had no effect upon the historical pattern that mostconcerns us here.2The second in time to establish a claim was theBritish scientist and divine, Joseph Priestley, who collected the gasreleased by heated red oxide of mercury as one item in a prolongednormal investigation of the “airs” evolved by a large number of solidsubstances. In 1774 he identi!ed the gas thus produced as nitrous oxideand in 1775, led by further tests, as common air with less than its usualquantity of phlogiston. The third claimant, Lavoisier, started the workthat led him to oxygen after Priestley’s experiments of 1774 and possiblyas the result of a hint from Priestley. Early in1For the still classic discussion of oxygen’s discovery, see A. N. Meldrum, TheEighteenth-Century Revolution in Science—the First Phase (Calcutta, 1930), chap. v.An indispensable recent review, including an account of the priority controversy,is Maurice Daumas, Lavoisier, théoricien et expérimentateur (Paris, 1955), chaps, iiiii. For a fuller account and bibliography, see also T. S. Kuhn, “The HistoricalStructure of Scientific Discovery,” Science, CXXXVI (June 1, 1962), 760-64.2See, however, Uno Bocklund, “A Lost Letter from Scheele to Lavoisier,”Lychnos, 1957-58, pp. 39-62, for a different evaluation of Scheele’s role.Vol. II, No. 253The Structure of Scientific Revolutions1775 Lavoisier reported that the gas obtained by heating the red oxide ofmercury was “air itself entire without alteration [except that] . . . itcomes out more pure, more respirable.”3By 1777, probably with theassistance of a second hint from Priestley, Lavoisier had concluded thatthe gas was a distinct species, one of the two main constituents of theatmosphere, a conclusion that Priestley was never able to accept.This pattern of discovery raises a question that can be asked aboutevery novel phenomenon that has ever entered the consciousness ofscientists. Was it Priestley or Lavoisier, if either, who !rst discoveredoxygen? In any case, when was oxygen discovered? In that form thequestion could be asked even if only one claimant had existed. As aruling about priority and date, an answer does not at all concern us.Nevertheless, an attempt to produce one will illuminate the nature ofdiscovery, because there is no answer of the kind that is sought.Discovery is not the sort of process about which the question isappropriately asked. The fact that it is asked—the priority for oxygen hasrepeatedly been contested since the 1780’s—is a symptom of somethingaskew in the image of science that gives discovery so fundamental a role.Look once more at our example. Priestley’s claim to the discovery ofoxygen is based upon his priority in isolating a gas that was laterrecognized as a distinct species. But Priestley’s sample was not pure,and, if holding impure oxygen in one’s hands is to discover it, that hadbeen done by everyone who ever bottled atmospheric air. Besides, ifPriestley was the discoverer, when was the discovery made? In 1774 hethought he had obtained nitrous oxide, a species he already knew; in1775 he saw the gas as dephlogisticated air, which is still not oxygen oreven, for phlogistic chemists, a quite unexpected sort of gas. Lavoisier’sclaim may be stronger, but it presents the same problems. If we refusethe palm to Priestley, we cannot award it to Lavoisier for the work of1775 which led3J. B. Conant, The Overthrow of the Phlogiston Theory: The Chemical Revolution of1775-1789 (“Harvard Case Histories in Experimental Science,” Case 2; Cambridge,Mass., 1950), p. 23. This very useful pamphlet reprints many of the relevantdocuments.Vol. II, No. 254Anomaly and the Emergence of Scientific Discoverieshim to identify the gas as the “air itself entire.” Presumably we wait forthe work of 1776 and 1777 which led Lavoisier to see not merely the gasbut what the gas was. Yet even this award could be questioned, for in1777 and to the end of his life Lavoisier insisted that oxygen was anatomic “principle of acidity” and that oxygen gas was formed only whenthat “principle” united with caloric, the matter of heat.4Shall wetherefore say that oxygen had not yet been discovered in 1777? Somemay be tempted to do so. But the principle of acidity was not banishedfrom chemistry until after 1810, and caloric lingered until the 1860’s.Oxygen had become a standard chemical substance before either ofthose dates.Clearly we need a new vocabulary and concepts for analyzing eventslike the discovery of oxygen. Though undoubtedly correct, the sentence,“Oxygen was discovered,” misleads by suggesting that discoveringsomething is a single simple act assimilable to our usual (and alsoquestionable) concept of seeing. That is why we so readily assume thatdiscovering, like seeing or touching, should be unequivocallyattributable to an individual and to a moment in time. But the latterattribution is always impossible, and the former often is as well.Ignoring Scheele, we can safely say that oxygen had not been discoveredbefore 1774, and we would probably also say that it had been discoveredby 1777 or shortly thereafter. But within those limits or others likethem, any attempt to date the discovery must inevitably be arbitrarybecause discovering a new sort of phenomenon is necessarily a complexevent, one which involves recognizing both that something is and what itis. Note, for example, that if oxygen were dephlogisticated air for us, weshould insist without hesitation that Priestley had discovered it, thoughwe would still not know quite when. But if both observation andconceptualization, fact and assimilation to theory, are inseparably linkedin discovery, then discovery is a process and must take time. Only whenall the relevant conceptual categories are prepared in advance, in whichcase the phenomenon would not4H. Metzger, La philosophie de la matière chez Lavoisier (Paris, 1935); and Daumas,op. cit., chap. vii.Vol. II, No. 255The Structure of Scientific Revolutionsbe of a new sort, can discovering that and discovering what occureffortlessly, together, and in an instant.Grant now that discovery involves an extended, though notnecessarily long, process of conceptual assimilation. Can we also say thatit involves a change in paradigm? To that question, no general answercan yet be given, but in this case at least, the answer must be yes. WhatLavoisier announced in his papers from 1777 on was not so much thediscovery of oxygen as the oxygen theory of combustion. That theorywas the keystone for a reformulation of chemistry so vast that it isusually called the chemical revolution. Indeed, if the discovery ofoxygen had not been an intimate part of the emergence of a newparadigm for chemistry, the question of priority from which we beganwould never have seemed so important. In this case as in others, thevalue placed upon a new phenomenon and thus upon its discoverervaries with our estimate of the extent to which the phenomenonviolated paradigm-induced anticipations. Notice, however, since it willbe important later, that the discovery of oxygen was not by itself thecause of the change in chemical theory. Long before he played any partin the discovery of the new gas, Lavoisier was convinced both thatsomething was wrong with the phlogiston theory and that burningbodies absorbed some part of the atmosphere. That much he hadrecorded in a sealed note deposited with the Secretary of the FrenchAcademy in 1772.5What the work on oxygen did was to give muchadditional form and structure to Lavoisier’s earlier sense that somethingwas amiss. It told him a thing he was already prepared to discover—thenature of the substance that combustion removes from the atmosphere.That advance awareness of dif!culties must be a signi!cant part of whatenabled Lavoisier to see in experiments like Priestley’s a gas thatPriestley had been unable to see there himself. Conversely, the fact thata major paradigm revision was needed to see what Lavoisier saw must bethe principal reason why Priestley was, to the end of his long life, unableto see it.5The most authoritative account of the origin of Lavoisier’s discontent is HenryGuerlac, Lavoisier—the Crucial Year: The Background and Origin of His FirstExperiments on Combustion in 1772 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1961).Vol. II, No. 256Anomaly and the Emergence of Scientific DiscoveriesTwo other and far briefer examples will reinforce much that has justbeen said and simultaneously carry us from an elucidation of the natureof discoveries toward an understanding of the circumstances underwhich they emerge in science. In an effort to represent the main ways inwhich discoveries can come about, these examples are chosen to bedifferent both from each other and from the discovery of oxygen. The!rst, X-rays, is a classic case of discovery through accident, a type thatoccurs more frequently than the impersonal standards of scienti!creporting allow us easily to realize. Its story opens on the day that thephysicist Roentgen interrupted a normal investigation of cathode raysbecause he had noticed that a barium platino-cyanide screen at somedistance from his shielded apparatus glowed when the discharge was inprocess. Further investigations—they required seven hectic weeksduring which Roentgen rarely left the laboratory—indicated that thecause of the glow came in straight lines from the cathode ray tube, thatthe radiation cast shadows, could not be de”ected by a magnet, andmuch else besides. Before announcing his discovery, Roentgen hadconvinced himself that his effect was not due to cathode rays but to anagent with at least some similarity to light.6Even so brief an epitome reveals striking resemblances to thediscovery of oxygen: before experimenting with red oxide of mercury,Lavoisier had performed experiments that did not produce the resultsanticipated under the phlogiston paradigm; Roentgen’s discoverycommenced with the recognition that his screen glowed when it shouldnot. In both cases the perception of anomaly—of a phenomenon, that is,for which his paradigm had not readied the investigator—played anessential role in preparing the way for perception of novelty. But, againin both cases, the perception that something had gone wrong was onlythe prelude to discovery. Neither oxygen nor X-rays emerged without afurther process of experimentation and assimilation. At what point inRoentgen’s investigation, for example, ought we say that X-rays hadactually been discovered? Not, in any6L. W. Taylor, Physics, the Pioneer Science (Boston, 1941), pp. 790-94; and T. W.Chalmers, Historic Researches (London, 1949), pp. 218-19.Vol. II, No. 257The Structure of Scientific Revolutionscase, at the !rst instant, when all that had been noted was a glowingscreen. At least one other investigator had seen that glow and, to hissubsequent chagrin, discovered nothing at all.7 Nor, it is almost as clear,can the moment of discovery be pushed forward to a point during thelast week of investigation, by which time Roentgen was exploring theproperties of the new radiation he had already discovered. We can onlysay that X-rays emerged in Würzburg between November 8 andDecember 28, 1895.In a third area, however, the existence of signi!cant parallels betweenthe discoveries of oxygen and of X-rays is far less apparent. Unlike thediscovery of oxygen, that of X-rays was not, at least for a decade after theevent, implicated in any obvious upheaval in scienti!c theory. In whatsense, then, can the assimilation of that discovery be said to havenecessitated paradigm change? The case for denying such a change isvery strong. To be sure, the paradigms subscribed to by Roentgen andhis contemporaries could not have been used to predict X-rays.(Maxwell’s electromagnetic theory had not yet been acceptedeverywhere, and the particulate theory of cathode rays was only one ofseveral current speculations.) But neither did those paradigms, at leastin any obvious sense, prohibit the existence of X-rays as the phlogistontheory had prohibited Lavoisier’s interpretation of Priestley’s gas. On thecontrary, in 1895 accepted scienti!c theory and practice admitted anumber of forms of radiation—visible, infrared, and ultraviolet. Whycould not X-rays have been accepted as just one more form of a wellknown class of natural phenomena? Why were they not, for example,received in the same way as the discovery of an additional chemicalelement? New elements to !ll empty places in the periodic table werestill being sought and found in Roentgen’s day. Their pursuit was astandard project for normal science, and success was an occasion onlyfor congratulations, not for surprise.7 E. T. Whittaker, A History of the Theories of Aether and Electricity, I (2d ed.;London, 1951), 358, n. 1. Sir George Thomson has informed me of a second nearmiss. Alerted by unaccountably fogged photographic plates, Sir William Crookeswas also on the track of the discovery.Vol. II, No. 258Anomaly and the Emergence of Scientific DiscoveriesX-rays, however, were greeted not only with surprise but with shock.Lord Kelvin at !rst pronounced them an elaborate hoax.8Others,though they could not doubt the evidence, were clearly staggered by it.Though X-rays were not prohibited by established theory, they violateddeeply entrenched expectations. Those expectations, I suggest, wereimplicit in the design and interpretation of established laboratoryprocedures. By the 1890’s cathode ray equipment was widely deployedin numerous European laboratories. If Roentgen’s apparatus hadproduced X-rays, then a number of other experimentalists must forsome time have been producing those rays without knowing it. Perhapsthose rays, which might well have other unacknowledged sources too,were implicated in behavior previously explained without reference tothem. At the very least, several sorts of long familiar apparatus would inthe future have to be shielded with lead. Previously completed work onnormal projects would now have to be done again because earlierscientists had failed to recognize and control a relevant variable. X-rays,to be sure, opened up a new !eld and thus added to the potentialdomain of normal science. But they also, and this is now the moreimportant point, changed !elds that had already existed. In the processthey denied previously paradigmatic types of instrumentation theirright to that title.In short, consciously or not, the decision to employ a particular pieceof apparatus and to use it in a particular way carries an assumption thatonly certain sorts of circumstances will arise. There are instrumental aswell as theoretical expectations, and they have often played a decisiverole in scienti!c development. One such expectation is, for example,part of the story of oxygen’s belated discovery. Using a standard test for“the goodness of air,” both Priestley and Lavoisier mixed two volumes oftheir gas with one volume of nitric oxide, shook the mixture over water,and measured the volume of the gaseous residue. The previousexperience from which this standard procedure had evolved assuredthem that with atmospheric air the residue8 Silvanus P. Thompson, The Life of Sir William Thomson Baron Kelvin of Largs(London, 1910), II, 1125.Vol. II, No. 259The Structure of Scientific Revolutionswould be one volume and that for any other gas (or for polluted air) itwould be greater. In the oxygen experiments both found a residue closeto one volume and identi!ed the gas accordingly. Only much later andin part through an accident did Priestley renounce the standardprocedure and try mixing nitric oxide with his gas in other proportions.He then found that with quadruple the volume of nitric oxide there wasalmost no residue at all. His commitment to the original test procedure—a procedure sanctioned by much previous experience—had beensimultaneously a commitment to the non-existence of gases that couldbehave as oxygen did.9Illustrations of this sort could be multiplied by reference, forexample, to the belated identi!cation of uranium !ssion. One reasonwhy that nuclear reaction proved especially dif!cult to recognize wasthat men who knew what to expect when bombarding uranium chosechemical tests aimed mainly at elements from the upper end of theperiodic table.10 Ought we conclude from the frequency with whichsuch instrumental commitments prove misleading that science shouldabandon standard tests and standard instruments? That would result inan inconceivable method of research. Paradigm procedures andapplications are as necessary to science as paradigm laws and theories,and they have the same effects. Inevitably they restrict the phenomenological !eld accessible for scienti!c investigation at any9Conant, op. cit., pp. 18-20.10 K. K. Darrow, “Nuclear Fission,” Bell System Technical Journal, XIX (1940),267-89. Krypton, one of the two main fission products, seems not to have beenidentified by chemical means until after the reaction was well understood.Barium, the other product, was almost identified chemically at a late stage of theinvestigation because, as it happened, that element had to be added to theradioactive solution to precipitate the heavy element for which nuclear chemistswere looking. Failure to separate that added barium from the radioactive productfinally led, after the reaction had been repeatedly investigated for almost fiveyears, to the following report: “As chemists we should be led by this research . . .to change all the names in the preceding [reaction] schema and thus write Ba, La,Ce instead of Ra, Ac, Th. But as ‘nuclear chemists,’ with close affiliations tophysics, we cannot bring ourselves to this leap which would contradict all previous experience of nuclear physics. It may be that a series of strange accidentsrenders our results deceptive” (Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassman, “Uber den Nachweis und das Verhalten der bei der Bestrahlung des Urans mittels Neutronenentstehended Erdalkalimetalle,” Die Naturwissenschaften, XXVII [1939], 15).Vol. II, No. 260Anomaly and the Emergence of Scientific Discoveriesgiven time. Recognizing that much, we may simultaneously see anessential sense in which a discovery like X-rays necessitates paradigmchange—and therefore change in both procedures and expectations—fora special segment of the scienti!c community. As a result, we may alsounderstand how the discovery of X-rays could seem to open a strangenew world to many scientists and could thus participate so effectively inthe crisis that led to twentieth-century physics.Our !nal example of scienti!c discovery, that of the Leyden jar,belongs to a class that may be described as theory-induced. Initially, theterm may seem paradoxical. Much that has been said so far suggests thatdiscoveries predicted by theory in advance are parts of normal scienceand result in no new sort of fact. I have, for example, previously referredto the discoveries of new chemical elements during the second half ofthe nineteenth century as proceeding from normal science in that way.But not all theories are paradigm theories. Both during pre-paradigmperiods and during the crises that lead to large-scale changes ofparadigm, scientists usually develop many speculative and unarticulatedtheories that can themselves point the way to discovery. Often, however,that discovery is not quite the one anticipated by the speculative andtentative hypothesis. Only as experiment and tentative theory aretogether articulated to a match does the discovery emerge and thetheory become a paradigm.The discovery of the Leyden jar displays all these features as well asthe others we have observed before. When it began, there was no singleparadigm for electrical research. Instead, a number of theories, allderived from relatively accessible phenomena, were in competition.None of them succeeded in ordering the whole variety of electricalphenomena very well. That failure is the source of several of theanomalies that provide background for the discovery of the Leyden jar.One of the competing schools of electricians took electricity to be a “uid,and that conception led a number of men to attempt bottling the “uidby holding a water-!lled glass vial in their hands and touching the waterto a conductor suspended from an activeVol. II, No. 261The Structure of Scientific Revolutionselectrostatic generator. On removing the jar from the machine andtouching the water (or a conductor connected to it) with his free hand,each of these investigators experienced a severe shock. Those !rstexperiments did not, however, provide electricians with the Leyden jar.That device emerged more slowly, and it is again impossible to say justwhen its discovery was completed. The initial attempts to store electrical“uid worked only because investigators held the vial in their handswhile standing upon the ground. Electricians had still to learn that thejar required an outer as well as an inner conducting coating and that the“uid is not really stored in the jar at all. Somewhere in the course of theinvestigations that showed them this, and which introduced them toseveral other anomalous effects, the device that we call the Leyden jaremerged. Furthermore, the experiments that led to its emergence, manyof them performed by Franklin, were also the ones that necessitated thedrastic revision of the “uid theory and thus provided the !rst fullparadigm for electricity.11To a greater or lesser extent (corresponding to the continuum fromthe shocking to the anticipated result), the characteristics common tothe three examples above are characteristic of all discoveries from whichnew sorts of phenomena emerge. Those characteristics include: theprevious awareness of anomaly, the gradual and simultaneousemergence of both observational and conceptual recognition, and theconsequent change of paradigm categories and procedures oftenaccompanied by resistance. There is even evidence that these samecharacteristics are built into the nature of the perceptual process itself.In a psychological experiment that deserves to be far better knownoutside the trade, Bruner and Postman asked experimental subjects toidentify on short and controlled exposure a series of playing cards.Many of the cards were normal, but some were made anoma11 For various stages in the Leydun jar’s evolution, see I. B. Cohen, Franklin andNewton: An Inquiry into Speculative Newtonian Experimental Science and Franklin’sWork in Electricity as an Example Thereof (Philadelphia, 1956), pp. 385-86, 400-406, 452-67, 509-7. The last stage is described by Whittaker, op. cit., pp. 50-52.Vol. II, No. 262Anomaly and the Emergence of Scientific Discoverieslous, e.g., a red six of spades and a black four of hearts. Eachexperimental run was constituted by the display of a single card to asingle subject in a series of gradually increased exposures. After eachexposure the subject was asked what he had seen, and the run wasterminated by two successive correct identi!cations.12Even on the shortest exposures many subjects identi!ed most of thecards, and after a small increase all the subjects identi!ed them all. Forthe normal cards these identi!cations were usually correct, but theanomalous cards were almost always identi!ed, without apparenthesitation or puzzlement, as normal. The black four of hearts might, forexample, be identi!ed as the four of either spades or hearts. Withoutany awareness of trouble, it was immediately !tted to one of theconceptual categories prepared by prior experience. One would not evenlike to say that the subjects had seen something different from whatthey identi!ed. With a further increase of exposure to the anomalouscards, subjects did begin to hesitate and to display awareness ofanomaly. Exposed, for example, to the red six of spades, some would say:That’s the six of spades, but there’s something wrong with it—the blackhas a red border. Further increase of exposure resulted in still morehesitation and confusion until !nally, and sometimes quite suddenly,most subjects would produce the correct identi!cation withouthesitation. Moreover, after doing this with two or three of theanomalous cards, they would have little further dif!culty with theothers. A few subjects, however, were never able to make the requisiteadjustment of their categories. Even at forty times the average exposurerequired to recognize normal cards for what they were, more than 10per cent of the anomalous cards were not correctly identi!ed. And thesubjects who then failed often experienced acute personal distress. Oneof them exclaimed: “I can’t make the suit out, whatever it is. It didn’teven look like a card that time. I don’t know what color it is now orwhether it’s a spade or a heart. I’m12 J. S. Bruner and Leo Postman, “On the Perception of Incongruity: A Paradigm,”Journal of Personality, XVIII (1949), 206-23.Vol. II, No. 263The Structure of Scientific Revolutionsnot even sure now what a spade looks like. My God!”13 In the nextsection we shall occasionally see scientists behaving this way too.Either as a metaphor or because it re”ects the nature of the mind,that psychological experiment provides a wonderfully simple and cogentschema for the process of scienti!c discovery. In science, as in theplaying card experiment, novelty emerges only with dif!culty,manifested by resistance, against a background provided by expectation.Initially, only the anticipated and usual are experienced even undercircumstances where anomaly is later to be observed. Furtheracquaintance, however, does result in awareness of something wrong ordoes relate the effect to something that has gone wrong before. Thatawareness of anomaly opens a period in which conceptual categories areadjusted until the initially anomalous has become the anticipated. Atthis point the discovery has been completed. I have already urged thatthat process or one very much like it is involved in the emergence of allfundamental scienti!c novelties. Let me now point out that, recognizingthe process, we can at last begin to see why normal science, a pursuit notdirected to novelties and tending at !rst to suppress them, shouldnevertheless be so effective in causing them to arise.In the development of any science, the !rst received paradigm isusually felt to account quite successfully for most of the observationsand experiments easily accessible to that science’s practitioners. Furtherdevelopment, therefore, ordinarily calls for the construction of elaborateequipment, the development of an esoteric vocabulary and skills, and are!nement of concepts that increasingly lessens their resemblance totheir usual common-sense prototypes. That professionalization leads, onthe one hand, to an immense restriction of the scientist’s vision and to aconsiderable resistance to paradigm change. The science has becomeincreasingly rigid. On the other hand, within those areas to which theparadigm directs the attention of the13 Ibid., p. 218. My colleague Postman tells me that, though knowing all about theapparatus and display in advance, he nevertheless found looking at theincongruous cards acutely uncomfortable.Vol. II, No. 264Anomaly and the Emergence of Scientific Discoveriesgroup, normal science leads to a detail of information and to a precisionof the observation-theory match that could be achieved in no other way.Furthermore, that detail and precision-of-match have a value thattranscends their not always very high intrinsic interest. Without thespecial apparatus that is constructed mainly for anticipated functions,the results that lead ultimately to novelty could not occur. And evenwhen the apparatus exists, novelty ordinarily emerges only for the manwho, knowing with precision what he should expect, is able to recognizethat something has gone wrong. Anomaly appears only against thebackground provided by the paradigm. The more precise and farreaching that paradigm is, the more sensitive an indicator it provides ofanomaly and hence of an occasion for paradigm change. In the normalmode of discovery, even resistance to change has a use that will beexplored more fully in the next section. By ensuring that the paradigmwill not be too easily surrendered, resistance guarantees that scientistswill not be lightly distracted and that the anomalies that lead toparadigm change will penetrate existing knowledge to the core. The veryfact that a signi!cant scienti!c novelty so often emerges simultaneouslyfrom several laboratories is an index both to the strongly traditionalnature of normal science and to the completeness with which thattraditional pursuit prepares the way for its own change.Vol. II, No. 265X. Revolutions as Changes of World ViewExamining the record of past research from the vantage ofcontemporary historiography, the historian of science may be temptedto exclaim that when paradigms change, the world itself changes withthem. Led by a new paradigm, scientists adopt new instruments andlook in new places. Even more important, during revolutions scientistssee new and different things when looking with familiar instruments inplaces they have looked before. It is rather as if the professionalcommunity had been suddenly transported to another planet wherefamiliar objects are seen in a different light and are joined by unfamiliarones as well. Of course, nothing of quite that sort does occur: there is nogeographical transplantation; outside the laboratory everyday affairsusually continue as before. Nevertheless, paradigm changes do causescientists to see the world of their research-engagement differently. In sofar as their only recourse to that world is through what they see and do,we may want to say that after a revolution scientists are responding to adifferent world.It is as elementary prototypes for these transformations of thescientist’s world that the familiar demonstrations of a switch in visualgestalt prove so suggestive. What were ducks in the scientist’s worldbefore the revolution are rabbits afterwards. The man who !rst saw theexterior of the box from above later sees its interior from below.Transformations like these, though usually more gradual and almostalways irreversible, are common concomitants of scienti!c training.Looking at a contour map, the student sees lines on paper, thecartographer a picture of a terrain. Looking at a bubble-chamberphotograph, the student sees confused and broken lines, the physicist arecord of familiar subnuclear events. Only after a number of suchtransformations of vision does the student become an inhabitant of thescientist’s world, seeing what the scientist sees and responding as thescientist does. The world that the student then entersVol. II, No. 2111The Structure of Scientific Revolutionsis not, however, !xed once and for all by the nature of the environment,on the one hand, and of science, on the other. Rather, it is determinedjointly by the environment and the particular normal-scienti!c traditionthat the student has been trained to pursue. Therefore, at times ofrevolution, when the normal-scienti!c tradition changes, the scientist’sperception of his environment must be re-educated—in some familiarsituations he must learn to see a new gestalt. After he has done so theworld of his research will seem, here and there, incommensurable withthe one he had inhabited before. That is another reason why schoolsguided by different paradigms are always slightly at cross-purposes.In their most usual form, of course, gestalt experiments illustrate onlythe nature of perceptual transformations. They tell us nothing about therole of paradigms or of previously assimilated experience in the processof perception. But on that point there is a rich body of psychologicalliterature, much of it stemming from the pioneering work of theHanover Institute. An experimental subject who puts on goggles !ttedwith inverting lenses initially sees the entire world upside down. At thestart his perceptual apparatus functions as it had been trained tofunction in the absence of the goggles, and the result is extremedisorientation, an acute personal crisis. But after the subject has begunto learn to deal with his new world, his entire visual !eld “ips over,usually after an intervening period in which vision is simply confused.Thereafter, objects are again seen as they had been before the goggleswere put on. The assimilation of a previously anomalous visual !eld hasreacted upon and changed the !eld itself.1Literally as well asmetaphorically, the man accustomed to inverting lenses has undergonea revolutionary transformation of vision.The subjects of the anomalous playing-card experiment discussed inSection VI experienced a quite similar transformation. Until taught byprolonged exposure that the universe contained1The original experiments were by George M. Stratton, “Vision without Inversionof the Retinal Image,” Psychological Review, IV (1897), 341-60, 463-81. A more upto-date review is provided by Harvey A. Carr, An Introduction to Space Perception(New York, 1935), pp. 18-57.Vol. II, No. 2112Revolutions as Changes of World Viewanomalous cards, they saw only the types of cards for which previousexperience had equipped them. Yet once experience had provided therequisite additional categories, they were able to see all anomalous cardson the !rst inspection long enough to permit any identi!cation at all.Still other experiments demonstrate that the perceived size, color, andso on, of experimentally displayed objects also varies with the subject’sprevious training and experience.2Surveying the rich experimentalliterature from which these examples are drawn makes one suspect thatsomething like a paradigm is prerequisite to perception itself. What aman sees depends both upon what he looks at and also upon what hisprevious visual-conceptual experience has taught him to see. In theabsence of such training there can only be, in William James’s phrase, “abloomin’ buzzin’ confusion.”In recent years several of those concerned with the history of sciencehave found the sorts of experiments described above immenselysuggestive. N. R. Hanson, in particular, has used gestalt demonstrationsto elaborate some of the same consequences of scienti!c belief thatconcern me here.3Other colleagues have repeatedly noted that historyof science would make better and more coherent sense if one couldsuppose that scientists occasionally experienced shifts of perception likethose described above. Yet, though psychological experiments aresuggestive, they cannot, in the nature of the case, be more than that.They do display characteristics of perception that could be central toscienti!c development, but they do not demonstrate that the carefuland controlled observation exercised by the research scientist at allpartakes of those characteristics. Furthermore, the very nature of theseexperiments makes any direct demonstration of that point impossible. Ifhistorical example is to make these psychological experiments seemrele2For examples, see Albert H. Hastorf, “The Influence of Suggestion on theRelationship between Stimulus Size and Perceived Distance,” Journal ofPsychology, XXIX (1950), 195-217; and Jerome S. Bruner, Leo Postman, and JohnRodrigues, “Expectations and the Perception of Color,” American Journal ofPsychology, LXIV (1951), 216-27.3N. R. Hanson, Patterns of Discovery (Cambridge, 1958), chap. i.Vol. II, No. 2113The Structure of Scientific Revolutionsvant, we must !rst notice the sorts of evidence that we may and may notexpect history to provide.The subject of a gestalt demonstration knows that his perception hasshifted because he can make it shift back and forth repeatedly while heholds the same book or piece of paper in his hands. Aware that nothingin his environment has changed, he directs his attention increasinglynot to the !gure (duck or rabbit) but to the lines on the paper he islooking at. Ultimately he may even learn to see those lines withoutseeing either of the !gures, and he may then say (what he could notlegitimately have said earlier) that it is these lines that he really sees butthat he sees them alternately as a duck and as a rabbit. By the sametoken, the subject of the anomalous card experiment knows (or, moreaccurately, can be persuaded) that his perception must have shiftedbecause an external authority, the experimenter, assures him thatregardless of what he saw, he was looking at a black !ve of hearts all thetime. In both these cases, as in all similar psychological experiments, theeffectiveness of the demonstration depends upon its being analyzable inthis way. Unless there were an external standard with respect to which aswitch of vision could be demonstrated, no conclusion about alternateperceptual possibilities could be drawn.With scienti!c observation, however, the situation is exactly reversed.The scientist can have no recourse above or beyond what he sees withhis eyes and instruments. If there were some higher authority byrecourse to which his vision might be shown to have shifted, then thatauthority would itself become the source of his data, and the behavior ofhis vision would become a source of problems (as that of theexperimental subject is for the psychologist). The same sorts ofproblems would arise if the scientist could switch back and forth like thesubject of the gestalt experiments. The period during which light was“sometimes a wave and sometimes a particle” was a period of crisis— aperiod when something was wrong—and it ended only with thedevelopment of wave mechanics and the realization that light was a selfconsistent entity different from both waves and particles. In thesciences, therefore, if perceptual switches acVol. II, No. 2114Revolutions as Changes of World Viewcompany paradigm changes, we may not expect scientists to attest tothese changes directly. Looking at the moon, the convert toCopernicanism does not say, “I used to see a planet, but now I see asatellite.” That locution would imply a sense in which the Ptolemaicsystem had once been correct. Instead, a convert to the new astronomysays, “I once took the moon to be (or saw the moon as) a planet, but Iwas mistaken.” That sort of statement does recur in the aftermath ofscienti!c revolutions. If it ordinarily disguises a shift of scienti!c visionor some other mental transformation with the same effect, we may notexpect direct testimony about that shift. Rather we must look forindirect and behavioral evidence that the scientist with a new paradigmsees differently from the way he had seen before.Let us then return to the data and ask what sorts of transformationsin the scientist’s world the historian who believes in such changes candiscover. Sir William Herschel’s discovery of Uranus provides a !rstexample and one that closely parallels the anomalous card experiment.On at least seventeen different occasions between 1690 and 1781, anumber of astronomers, including several of Europe’s most eminentobservers, had seen a star in positions that we now suppose must havebeen occupied at the time by Uranus. One of the best observers in thisgroup had actually seen the star on four successive nights in 1769without noting the motion that could have suggested anotheridenti!cation. Herschel, when he !rst observed the same object twelveyears later, did so with a much improved telescope of his ownmanufacture. As a result, he was able to notice an apparent disk-sizethat was at least unusual for stars. Something was awry, and he thereforepostponed identi!cation pending further scrutiny. That scrutinydisclosed Uranus’ motion among the stars, and Herschel thereforeannounced that he had seen a new comet! Only several months later,after fruitless attempts to !t the observed motion to a cometary orbit,did Lexell suggest that the orbit was probably planetary.4When thatsuggestion was accepted, there were several fewer stars and one moreplanet in the world of the professional astronomer. A celestial body that4Peter Doig, A Concise History of Astronomy (London, 1950), pp. 115-16.Vol. II, No. 2115The Structure of Scientific Revolutionshad been observed off and on for almost a century was seen differentlyafter 1781 because, like an anomalous playing card, it could no longer be!tted to the perceptual categories (star or comet) provided by theparadigm that had previously prevailed.The shift of vision that enabled astronomers to see Uranus, theplanet, does not, however, seem to have affected only the perception ofthat previously observed object. Its consequences were more farreaching. Probably, though the evidence is equivocal, the minorparadigm change forced by Herschel helped to prepare astronomers forthe rapid discovery, after 1801, of the numerous minor planets orasteroids. Because of their small size, these did not display theanomalous magni!cation that had alerted Herschel. Nevertheless,astronomers prepared to !nd additional planets were able, withstandard instruments, to identify twenty of them in the !rst !fty yearsof the nineteenth century.5The history of astronomy provides manyother examples of paradigm-induced changes in scienti!c perception,some of them even less equivocal. Can it conceivably be an accident, forexample, that Western astronomers !rst saw change in the previouslyimmutable heavens during the half-century after Copernicus’ newparadigm was !rst proposed? The Chinese, whose cosmological beliefsdid not preclude celestial change, had recorded the appearance of manynew stars in the heavens at a much earlier date. Also, even without theaid of a telescope, the Chinese had systematically recorded theappearance of sunspots centuries before these were seen by Galileo andhis contemporaries.6Nor were sunspots and a new star the onlyexamples of celestial change to emerge in the heavens of Westernastronomy immediately after Copernicus. Using traditional instruments,some as simple as a piece of thread, late sixteenth-century astronomersrepeatedly discovered that comets wandered at will through the spacepreviously reserved for the5Rudolph Wolf, Geschichte der Astronomie (Munich, 1877), pp. 513-15, 683-93.Notice particularly how difficult Wolf’s account makes it to explain thesediscoveries as a consequence of Bode’s Law.6Joseph Needham, Science and Civilization in China, III (Cambridge, 1959), 423-29, 434-36.Vol. II, No. 2116Revolutions as Changes of World Viewimmutable planets and stars.7The very ease and rapidity with whichastronomers saw new things when looking at old objects with oldinstruments may make us wish to say that, after Copernicus,astronomers lived in a different world. In any case, their researchresponded as though that were the case.The preceding examples are selected from astronomy because reportsof celestial observation are frequently delivered in a vocabularyconsisting of relatively pure observation terms. Only in such reports canwe hope to !nd anything like a full parallelism between the observationsof scientists and those of the psychologist’s experimental subjects. Butwe need not insist on so full a parallelism, and we have much to gain byrelaxing our standard. If we can be content with the everyday use of theverb ‘to see,’ we may quickly recognize that we have alreadyencountered many other examples of the shifts in scienti!c perceptionthat accompany paradigm change. The extended use of ‘perception’ andof ‘seeing’ will shortly require explicit defense, but let me !rst illustrateits application in practice.Look again for a moment at two of our previous examples from thehistory of electricity. During the seventeenth century, when theirresearch was guided by one or another ef”uvium theory, electriciansrepeatedly saw chaff particles rebound from, or fall off, the electri!edbodies that had attracted them. At least that is what seventeenthcentury observers said they saw, and we have no more reason to doubttheir reports of perception than our own. Placed before the sameapparatus, a modern observer would see electrostatic repulsion (ratherthan mechanical or gravitational rebounding), but historically, with oneuniversally ignored exception, electrostatic repulsion was not seen assuch until Hauksbee’s large-scale apparatus had greatly magni!ed itseffects. Repulsion after contact electri!cation was, however, only one ofmany new repulsive effects that Hauksbee saw. Through his researches,rather as in a gestalt switch, repulsion suddenly became thefundamental manifestation of electri!cation, and it was then attractionthat needed to be ex7 T. S. Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1957), pp. 206-9.Vol. II, No. 2117The Structure of Scientific Revolutionsplained.8The electrical phenomena visible in the early eighteenthcentury were both subtler and more varied than those seen by observersin the seventeenth century. Or again, after the assimilation of Franklin’sparadigm, the electrician looking at a Leyden jar saw somethingdifferent from what he had seen before. The device had become acondenser, for which neither the jar shape nor glass was required.Instead, the two conducting coatings—one of which had been no part ofthe original device-emerged to prominence. As both written discussionsand pictorial representations gradually attest, two metal plates with anon-conductor between them had become the prototype for the class.9Simultaneously, other inductive effects received new descriptions, andstill others were noted for the !rst time.Shifts of this sort are not restricted to astronomy and electricity. Wehave already remarked some of the similar transformations of visionthat can be drawn from the history of chemistry. Lavoisier, we said, sawoxygen where Priestley had seen de-phlogisticated air and where othershad seen nothing at all. In learning to see oxygen, however, Lavoisieralso had to change his view of many other more familiar substances. Hehad, for example, to see a compound ore where Priestley and hiscontemporaries had seen an elementary earth, and there were othersuch changes besides. At the very least, as a result of discovering oxygen,Lavoisier saw nature differently. And in the absence of some recourse tothat hypothetical !xed nature that he “saw differently,” the principle ofeconomy will urge us to say that after discovering oxygen Lavoisierworked in a different world.I shall inquire in a moment about the possibility of avoiding thisstrange locution, but !rst we require an additional example of its use,this one deriving from one of the best known parts of the work ofGalileo. Since remote antiquity most people have seen one or anotherheavy body swinging back and forth on a string or chain until it !nallycomes to rest. To the Aristotelians,8Duane Roller and Duane H. D. Roller, The Development of the Concept ofElectric Charge (Cambridge, Mass., 1954), pp. 21-29.9See the discussion in Section VII and the literature to which the referencethere cited in note 9 will lead.Vol. II, No. 2118Revolutions as Changes of World Viewwho believed that a heavy body is moved by its own nature from ahigher position to a state of natural rest at a lower one, the swingingbody was simply falling with dif!culty. Constrained by the chain, itcould achieve rest at its low point only after a tortuous motion and aconsiderable time. Galileo, on the other hand, looking at the swingingbody, saw a pendulum, a body that almost succeeded in repeating thesame motion over and over again ad in!nitum. And having seen thatmuch, Galileo observed other properties of the pendulum as well andconstructed many of the most signi!cant and original parts of his newdynamics around them. From the properties of the pendulum, forexample, Galileo derived his only full and sound arguments for theindependence of weight and rate of fall, as well as for the relationshipbetween vertical height and terminal velocity of motions down inclinedplanes.10 All these natural phenomena he saw differently from the waythey had been seen before.Why did that shift of vision occur? Through Galileo’s individualgenius, of course. But note that genius does not here manifest itself inmore accurate or objective observation of the swinging body.Descriptively, the Aristotelian perception is just as accurate. WhenGalileo reported that the pendulum’s period was independent ofamplitude for amplitudes as great as 90°, his view of the pendulum ledhim to see far more regularity than we can now discover there.11 Rather,what seems to have been involved was the exploitation by genius ofperceptual possibilities made available by a medieval paradigm shift.Galileo was not raised completely as an Aristotelian. On the contrary, hewas trained to analyze motions in terms of the impetus theory, a latemedieval paradigm which held that the continuing motion of a heavybody is due to an internal power implanted in it by the projector thatinitiated its motion. Jean Buridan and Nicole Oresme, the fourteenthcentury scholastics who brought the impetus theory to its most perfectformulations, are the !rst men10 Galileo Galilei, Dialogues concerning Two New Sciences, trans. H. Crew and A. deSalvio (Evanston, Ill., 1946), pp. 80-81, 162-66.11 Ibid., pp. 91-94, 244.Vol. II, No. 2119The Structure of Scientific Revolutionsknown to have seen in oscillatory motions any part of what Galileo sawthere. Buridan describes the motion of a vibrating string as one in whichimpetus is !rst implanted when the string is struck; the impetus is nextconsumed in displacing the string against the resistance of its tension;tension then carries the string back, implanting increasing impetus untilthe mid-point of motion is reached; after that the impetus displaces thestring in the opposite direction, again against the string’s tension, and soon in a symmetric process that may continue inde!nitely. Later in thecentury Oresme sketched a similar analysis of the swinging stone inwhat now appears as the !rst discussion of a pendulum.12 His view isclearly very close to the one with which Galileo !rst approached thependulum. At least in Oresme’s case, and almost certainly in Galileo’s aswell, it was a view made possible by the transition from the originalAristotelian to the scholastic impetus paradigm for motion. Until thatscholastic paradigm was invented, there were no pendulums, but onlyswinging stones, for the scientist to see. Pendulums were brought intoexistence by something very like a paradigm-induced gestalt switch.Do we, however, really need to describe what separates Galileo fromAristotle, or Lavoisier from Priestley, as a transformation of vision? Didthese men really see different things when looking at the same sorts ofobjects? Is there any legitimate sense in which we can say that theypursued their research in different worlds? Those questions can nolonger be postponed, for there is obviously another and far more usualway to describe all of the historical examples outlined above. Manyreaders will surely want to say that what changes with a paradigm isonly the scientist’s interpretation of observations that themselves are!xed once and for all by the nature of the environment and of theperceptual apparatus. On this view, Priestley and Lavoisier both sawoxygen, but they interpreted their observations differently; Aristotle andGalileo both saw pendu12 M. Clagett, The Science of Mechanics in the Middle Ages (Madison, Wis., 1959),pp. 537-38,570.Vol. II, No. 2120Revolutions as Changes of World Viewlums, but they differed in their interpretations of what they both hadseen.Let me say at once that this very usual view of what occurs whenscientists change their minds about fundamental matters can be neitherall wrong nor a mere mistake. Rather it is an essential part of aphilosophical paradigm initiated by Descartes and developed at thesame time as Newtonian dynamics. That paradigm has served bothscience and philosophy well. Its exploitation, like that of dynamics itself,has been fruitful of a fundamental understanding that perhaps couldnot have been achieved in another way. But as the example ofNewtonian dynamics also indicates, even the most striking past successprovides no guarantee that crisis can be inde!nitely postponed. Todayresearch in parts of philosophy, psychology, linguistics, and even arthistory, all converge to suggest that the traditional paradigm is somehowaskew. That failure to !t is also made increasingly apparent by thehistorical study of science to which most of our attention is necessarilydirected here.None of these crisis-promoting subjects has yet produced a viablealternate to the traditional epistemological paradigm, but they do beginto suggest what some of that paradigm’s characteristics will be. I am, forexample, acutely aware of the dif!culties created by saying that whenAristotle and Galileo looked at swinging stones, the !rst saw constrainedfall, the second a pendulum. The same dif!culties are presented in aneven more fundamental form by the opening sentences of this section:though the world does not change with a change of paradigm, thescientist afterward works in a different world. Nevertheless, I amconvinced that we must learn to make sense of statements that at leastresemble these. What occurs during a scienti!c revolution is not fullyreducible to a reinterpretation of individual and stable data. In the !rstplace, the data are not unequivocally stable. A pendulum is not a fallingstone, nor is oxygen dephlogisticated air. Consequently, the data thatscientists collect from these diverse objects are, as we shall shortly see,themselves different. More important, the process by whichVol. II, No. 2121The Structure of Scientific Revolutionseither the individual or the community makes the transition fromconstrained fall to the pendulum or from dephlogisticated air to oxygenis not one that resembles interpretation. How could it do so in theabsence of !xed data for the scientist to interpret? Rather than being aninterpreter, the scientist who embraces a new paradigm is like the manwearing inverting lenses. Confronting the same constellation of objectsas before and knowing that he does so, he nevertheless !nds themtransformed through and through in many of their details.None of these remarks is intended to indicate that scientists do notcharacteristically interpret observations and data. On the contrary,Galileo interpreted observations on the pendulum, Aristotleobservations on falling stones, Musschenbroek observations on a charge-!lled bottle, and Franklin observations on a condenser. But each of theseinterpretations presupposed a paradigm. They were parts of normalscience, an enterprise that, as we have already seen, aims to re!ne,extend, and articulate a paradigm that is already in existence. Section IIIprovided many examples in which interpretation played a central role.Those examples typify the overwhelming majority of research. In eachof them the scientist, by virtue of an accepted paradigm, knew what adatum was, what instruments might be used to retrieve it, and whatconcepts were relevant to its interpretation. Given a paradigm,interpretation of data is central to the enterprise that explores it.But that interpretive enterprise—and this was the burden of theparagraph before last—can only articulate a paradigm, not correct it.Paradigms are not corrigible by normal science at all. Instead, as wehave already seen, normal science ultimately leads only to therecognition of anomalies and to crises. And these are terminated, not bydeliberation and interpretation, but by a relatively sudden andunstructured event like the gestalt switch. Scientists then often speak ofthe “scales falling from the eyes” or of the “lightning “ash” that“inundates” a previously obscure puzzle, enabling its components to beseen in a new way that for the !rst time permits its solution. On otherVol. II, No. 2122Revolutions as Changes of World Viewoccasions the relevant illumination comes in sleep.13 No ordinary senseof the term ‘interpretation’ !ts these “ashes of intuition through which anew paradigm is born. Though such intuitions depend upon theexperience, both anomalous and congruent, gained with the oldparadigm, they are not logically or piecemeal linked to particular itemsof that experience as an interpretation would be. Instead, they gather uplarge portions of that experience and transform them to the ratherdifferent bundle of experience that will thereafter be linked piecemealto the new paradigm but not to the old.To learn more about what these differences in experience can be,return for a moment to Aristotle, Galileo, and the pendulum. What datadid the interaction of their different paradigms and their commonenvironment make accessible to each of them? Seeing constrained fall,the Aristotelian would measure (or at least discuss—the Aristotelianseldom measured) the weight of the stone, the vertical height to which ithad been raised, and the time required for it to achieve rest. Togetherwith the resistance of the medium, these were the conceptual categoriesdeployed by Aristotelian science when dealing with a falling body.14Normal research guided by them could not have produced the laws thatGalileo discovered. It could only—and by another route it did—lead tothe series of crises from which Galileo’s view of the swinging stoneemerged. As a result of those crises and of other intellectual changesbesides, Galileo saw the swinging stone quite differently. Archimedes’work on “oating bodies made the medium non-essential; the impetustheory rendered the motion symmetrical and enduring; andNeoplatonism directed Galileo’s attention to the motion’s circu13 [Jacques] Hadamard, Subconscient intuition, et logique dans la recherchescientifique (Conférence faite au Palais de la Découverte le 8 Décembre 1945[Alençon, n.d.]), pp. 7-8. A much fuller account, though one exclusively restrictedto mathematical innovations, is the same author’s The Psychology of Invention inthe Mathematical Field (Princeton, 1949).14 T. S. Kuhn, “A Function for Thought Experiments,” in Mélanges AlexandreKoyré, ed. R. Taton and I. B. Cohen, to be published by Hermann (Paris) in 1963.Vol. II, No. 2123The Structure of Scientific Revolutionslar form.15 He therefore measured only weight, radius, angulardisplacement, and time per swing, which were precisely the data thatcould be interpreted to yield Galileo’s laws for the pendulum. In theevent, interpretation proved almost unnecessary. Given Galileo’sparadigms, pendulum-like regularities were very nearly accessible toinspection. How else are we to account for Galileo’s discovery that thebob’s period is entirely independent of amplitude, a discovery that thenormal science stemming from Galileo had to eradicate and that we arequite unable to document today. Regularities that could not have existedfor an Aristotelian (and that are, in fact, nowhere precisely exempli!edby nature) were consequences of immediate experience for the manwho saw the swinging stone as Galileo did.Perhaps that example is too fanciful since the Aristotelians recordedno discussions of swinging stones. On their paradigm it was anextraordinarily complex phenomenon. But the Aristotelians did discussthe simpler case, stones falling without uncommon constraints, and thesame differences of vision are apparent there. Contemplating a fallingstone, Aristotle saw a change of state rather than a process. For him therelevant measures of a motion were therefore total distance covered andtotal time elapsed, parameters which yield what we should now call notspeed but average speed.16 Similarly, because the stone was impelled byits nature to reach its !nal resting point, Aristotle saw the relevantdistance parameter at any instant during the motion as the distance tothe !nal end point rather than as that from the origin of motion.17 Thoseconceptual parameters underlie and give sense to most of his wellknown “laws of motion.” Partly through the impetus paradigm, however,and partly through a doctrine known as the latitude of forms, scholasticcriticism changed this way of viewing motion. A stone moved byimpetus gained more and more of it while receding from its15 A. Koyré, Études Galiléennes (Paris, 1939), I, 46-51; and “Galileo and Plato,”Journal of the History of Ideas, IV (1943), 400-428.16 Kuhn, “A Function for Thought Experiments,” in Mélanges Alexandre Koyré (seen. 14 for full citation).17 Koyré, Études . . . , II, 7-11.Vol. II, No. 2124Revolutions as Changes of World Viewstarting point; distance from rather than distance to therefore becamethe revelant parameter. In addition, Aristotle’s notion of speed wasbifurcated by the scholastics into concepts that soon after Galileobecame our average speed and instantaneous speed. But when seenthrough the paradigm of which these conceptions were a part, thefalling stone, like the pendulum, exhibited its governing laws almost oninspection. Galileo was not one of the !rst men to suggest that stonesfall with a uniformly accelerated motion.18 Furthermore, he haddeveloped his theorem on this subject together with many of itsconsequences before he experimented with an inclined plane. Thattheorem was another one of the network of new regularities accessibleto genius in the world determined jointly by nature and by theparadigms upon which Galileo and his contemporaries had been raised.Living in that world, Galileo could still, when he chose, explain whyAristotle had seen what he did. Nevertheless, the immediate content ofGalileo’s experience with falling stones was not what Aristotle’s hadbeen.It is, of course, by no means clear that we need be so concerned with“immediate experience”—that is, with the perceptual features that aparadigm so highlights that they surrender their regularities almostupon inspection. Those features must obviously change with thescientist’s commitments to paradigms, but they are far from what weordinarily have in mind when we speak of the raw data or the bruteexperience from which scienti!c research is reputed to proceed. Perhapsimmediate experience should be set aside as “uid, and we shoulddiscuss instead the concrete operations and measurements that thescientist performs in his laboratory. Or perhaps the analysis should becarried further still from the immediately given. It might, for example,be conducted in terms of some neutral observation-language, perhapsone designed to conform to the retinal imprints that mediate what thescientist sees. Only in one of these ways can we hope to retrieve a realmin which experience is again stable once and for all—in which thependulum and constrained fall are not different perceptions but rather18 Clagett, op. cit., chaps, iv, vi, and ix.Vol. II, No. 2125The Structure of Scientific Revolutionsdifferent interpretations of the unequivocal data provided byobservation of a swinging stone.But is sensory experience !xed and neutral? Are theories simply manmade interpretations of given data? The epistemological viewpoint thathas most often guided Western philosophy for three centuries dictatesan immediate and unequivocal, Yes! In the absence of a developedalternative, I !nd it impossible to relinquish entirely that viewpoint. Yetit no longer functions effectively, and the attempts to make it do sothrough the introduction of a neutral language of observations nowseem to me hopeless.The operations and measurements that a scientist undertakes in thelaboratory are not “the given” of experience but rather “the collectedwith dif!culty.” They are not what the scientist sees—at least not beforehis research is well advanced and his attention focused. Rather, they areconcrete indices to the content of more elementary perceptions, and assuch they are selected for the close scrutiny of normal research onlybecause they promise opportunity for the fruitful elaboration of anaccepted paradigm. Far more clearly than the immediate experiencefrom which they in part derive, operations and measurements areparadigm-determined. Science does not deal in all possible laboratorymanipulations. Instead, it selects those relevant to the juxtaposition of aparadigm with the immediate experience that that paradigm haspartially determined. As a result, scientists with different paradigmsengage in different concrete laboratory manipulations. Themeasurements to be performed on a pendulum are not the onesrelevant to a case of constrained fall. Nor are the operations relevant forthe elucidation of oxygen’s properties uniformly the same as thoserequired when investigating the characteristics of dephlogisticated air.As for a pure observation-language, perhaps one will yet be devised.But three centuries after Descartes our hope for such an eventuality stilldepends exclusively upon a theory of perception and of the mind. Andmodern psychological experimentation is rapidly proliferatingphenomena with which that theory can scarcely deal. The duck-rabbitshows that two menVol. II, No. 2126Revolutions as Changes of World Viewwith the same retinal impressions can see different things; the invertinglenses show that two men with different retinal impressions can see thesame thing. Psychology supplies a great deal of other evidence to thesame effect, and the doubts that derive from it are readily reinforced bythe history of attempts to exhibit an actual language of observation. Nocurrent attempt to achieve that end has yet come close to a generallyapplicable language of pure percepts. And those attempts that comeclosest share one characteristic that strongly reinforces several of thisessay’s main theses. From the start they presuppose a paradigm, takeneither from a current scienti!c theory or from some fraction of everydaydiscourse, and they then try to eliminate from it all non-logical and nonperceptual terms. In a few realms of discourse this effort has beencarried very far and with fascinating results. There can be no questionthat efforts of this sort are worth pursuing. But their result is a languagethat—like those employed in the sciences—embodies a host ofexpectations about nature and fails to function the moment theseexpectations are violated. Nelson Goodman makes exactly this point indescribing the aims of his Structure of Appearance: “It is fortunate thatnothing more [than phenomena known to exist] is in question; for thenotion of ‘possible’ cases, of cases that do not exist but might haveexisted, is far from clear.”19 No language thus restricted to reporting aworld fully known in advance can produce mere neutral and objectivereports on “the given.” Philosophical investigation has not yet providedeven a hint of what a language able to do that would be like.Under these circumstances we may at least suspect that scientists areright in principle as well as in practice when they treat19 N. Goodman, The Structure of Appearance (Cambridge, Mass., 1951), pp. 4-5.The passage is worth quoting more extensively: “If all and only those residents ofWilmington in 1947 that weigh between 175 and 180 pounds have red hair, then‘red-haired 1947 resident of Wilmington’ and ‘1947 resident of Wilmingtonweighing between 175 and 180 pounds’ may be joined in a constructionaldefinition. . . . The question whether there ‘might have been’ someone to whomone but not the other of these predicates would apply has no bearing . . . once wehave determined that there is no such person. . . . It is fortunate that nothingmore is in question; for the notion of ‘possible’ cases, of cases that do not exist butmight have existed, is far from clear.”Vol. II, No. 2127The Structure of Scientific Revolutionsoxygen and pendulums (and perhaps also atoms and electrons) as thefundamental ingredients of their immediate experience. As a result ofthe paradigm-embodied experience of the race, the culture, and, !nally,the profession, the world of the scientist has come to be populated withplanets and pendulums, condensers and compound ores, and other suchbodies besides. Compared with these objects of perception, both meterstick readings and retinal imprints are elaborate constructs to whichexperience has direct access only when the scientist, for the specialpurposes of his research, arranges that one or the other should do so.This is not to suggest that pendulums, for example, are the only things ascientist could possibly see when looking at a swinging stone. (We havealready noted that members of another scienti!c community could seeconstrained fall.) But it is to suggest that the scientist who looks at aswinging stone can have no experience that is in principle moreelementary than seeing a pendulum. The alternative is not somehypothetical “!xed” vision, but vision through another paradigm, onewhich makes the swinging stone something else.All of this may seem more reasonable if we again remember thatneither scientists nor laymen learn to see the world piecemeal or itemby item. Except when all the conceptual and manipulative categories areprepared in advance—e.g., for the discovery of an additional transuranicelement or for catching sight of a new house—both scientists and laymensort out whole areas together from the “ux of experience. The child whotransfers the word ‘mama’ from all humans to all females and then to hismother is not just learning what ‘mama’ means or who his mother is.Simultaneously he is learning some of the differences between malesand females as well as something about the ways in which all but onefemale will behave toward him. His reactions, expectations, and beliefs—indeed, much of his perceived world—change accordingly. By the sametoken, the Copernicans who denied its traditional title ‘planet’ to the sunwere not only learning what ‘planet’ meant or what the sun was. Instead,they were changing the meaning of ‘planet’ so that it could continue tomake useful distinctions in a world where all celestial bodies,Vol. II, No. 2128Revolutions as Changes of World Viewnot just the sun, were seen differently from the way they had been seenbefore. The same point could be made about any of our earlierexamples. To see oxygen instead of dephlogisticated air, the condenserinstead of the Leyden jar, or the pendulum instead of constrained fall,was only one part of an integrated shift in the scientist’s vision of a greatmany related chemical, electrical, or dynamical phenomena. Paradigmsdetermine large areas of experience at the same time.It is, however, only after experience has been thus determined thatthe search for an operational de!nition or a pure observation-languagecan begin. The scientist or philosopher who asks what measurements orretinal imprints make the pendulum what it is must already be able torecognize a pendulum when he sees one. If he saw constrained fallinstead, his question could not even be asked. And if he saw apendulum, but saw it in the same way he saw a tuning fork or anoscillating balance, his question could not be answered. At least it couldnot be answered in the same way, because it would not be the samequestion. Therefore, though they are always legitimate and areoccasionally extraordinarily fruitful, questions about retinal imprints orabout the consequences of particular laboratory manipulationspresuppose a world already perceptually and conceptually subdivided ina certain way. In a sense such questions are parts of normal science, forthey depend upon the existence of a paradigm and they receivedifferent answers as a result of paradigm change.To conclude this section, let us henceforth neglect retinal impressionsand again restrict attention to the laboratory operations that provide thescientist with concrete though fragmentary indices to what he hasalready seen. One way in which such laboratory operations change withparadigms has already been observed repeatedly. After a scienti!crevolution many old measurements and manipulations becomeirrelevant and are replaced by others instead. One does not apply all thesame tests to oxygen as to dephlogisticated air. But changes of this sortare never total. Whatever he may then see, the scientist after arevolution is still looking at the same world. FurtherVol. II, No. 2129The Structure of Scientific Revolutionsmore, though he may previously have employed them differently, muchof his language and most of his laboratory instruments are still the sameas they were before. As a result, postrevolutionary science invariablyincludes many of the same manipulations, performed with the sameinstruments and described in the same terms, as its prerevolutionarypredecessor. If these enduring manipulations have been changed at all,the change must lie either in their relation to the paradigm or in theirconcrete results. I now suggest, by the introduction of one last newexample, that both these sorts of changes occur. Examining the work ofDalton and his contemporaries, we shall discover that one and the sameoperation, when it attaches to nature through a different paradigm, canbecome an index to a quite different aspect of nature’s regularity. Inaddition, we shall see that occasionally the old manipulation in its newrole will yield different concrete results.Throughout much of the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth,European chemists almost universally believed that the elementaryatoms of which all chemical species consisted were held together byforces of mutual af!nity. Thus a lump of silver cohered because of theforces of af!nity between silver corpuscles (until after Lavoisier thesecorpuscles were themselves thought of as compounded from still moreelementary particles). On the same theory silver dissolved in acid (orsalt in water) because the particles of acid attracted those of silver (orthe particles of water attracted those of salt) more strongly thanparticles of these solutes attracted each other. Or again, copper woulddissolve in the silver solution and precipitate silver, because the copperacid af!nity was greater than the af!nity of acid for silver. A great manyother phenomena were explained in the same way. In the eighteenthcentury the theory of elective af!nity was an admirable chemicalparadigm, widely and sometimes fruitfully deployed in the design andanalysis of chemical experimentation.20Af!nity theory, however, drew the line separating physical20 H. Metzger, Newton, Stahl, Boerlwave et la doctrine chimique (Paris, 1930), pp. 34-68.Vol. II, No. 2130Revolutions as Changes of World Viewmixtures from chemical compounds in a way that has becomeunfamiliar since the assimilation of Dalton’s work. Eighteenth-centurychemists did recognize two sorts of processes. When mixing producedheat, light, effervescence or something else of the sort, chemical unionwas seen to have taken place. If, on the other hand, the particles in themixture could be distinguished by eye or mechanically separated, therewas only physical mixture. But in the very large number of intermediatecases—salt in water, alloys, glass, oxygen in the atmosphere, and so on—these crude criteria were of little use. Guided by their paradigm, mostchemists viewed this entire intermediate range as chemical, because theprocesses of which it consisted were all governed by forces of the samesort. Salt in water or oxygen in nitrogen was just as much an example ofchemical combination as was the combination produced by oxidizingcopper. The arguments for viewing solutions as compounds were verystrong. Af!nity theory itself was well attested. Besides, the formation ofa compound accounted for a solution’s observed homogeneity. If, forexample, oxygen and nitrogen were only mixed and not combined in theatmosphere, then the heavier gas, oxygen, should settle to the bottom.Dalton, who took the atmosphere to be a mixture, was neversatisfactorily able to explain oxygen’s failure to do so. The assimilationof his atomic theory ultimately created an anomaly where there hadbeen none before.21One is tempted to say that the chemists who viewed solutions ascompounds differed from their successors only over a matter ofde!nition. In one sense that may have been the case. But that sense isnot the one that makes de!nitions mere conventional conveniences. Inthe eighteenth century mixtures were not fully distinguished fromcompounds by operational tests, and perhaps they could not have been.Even if chemists had looked for such tests, they would have soughtcriteria that made the solution a compound. The mixture-compounddistinction was part of their paradigm—part of the way they viewed theirwhole21 Ibid., pp. 124-29, 139-48. For Dalton, see Leonard K. Nash, The Atomic-MolecularTheory (“Harvard Case Histories in Experimental Science,” Case 4; Cambridge,Mass., 1950), pp. 14-21.Vol. II, No. 2131The Structure of Scientific Revolutions!eld of research—and as such it was prior to any particular laboratorytest, though not to the accumulated experience of chemistry as a whole.But while chemistry was viewed in this way, chemical phenomenaexempli!ed laws different from those that emerged with theassimilation of Dalton’s new paradigm. In particular, while solutionsremained compounds, no amount of chemical experimentation could byitself have produced the law of !xed proportions. At the end of theeighteenth century it was widely known that some compounds ordinarilycontained !xed proportions by weight of their constituents. For somecategories of reactions the German chemist Richter had even noted thefurther regularities now embraced by the law of chemical equivalents.22But no chemist made use of these regularities except in recipes, and noone until almost the end of the century thought of generalizing them.Given the obvious counterinstances, like glass or like salt in water, nogeneralization was possible without an abandonment of af!nity theoryand a reconceptualization of the boundaries of the chemist’s domain.That consequence became explicit at the very end of the century in afamous debate between the French chemists Proust and Berthollet. The!rst claimed that all chemical reactions occurred in !xed proportion,the latter that they did not. Each collected impressive experimentalevidence for his view. Nevertheless, the two men necessarily talkedthrough each other, and their debate was entirely inconclusive. WhereBerthollet saw a compound that could vary in proportion, Proust sawonly a physical mixture.23 To that issue neither experiment nor a changeof de!nitional convention could be relevant. The two men were asfundamentally at cross-purposes as Galileo and Aristotle had been.This was the situation during the years when John Dalton undertookthe investigations that led !nally to his famous chemical atomic theory.But until the very last stages of those investiga22 J. R. Partington, A Short History of Chemistry (2d ed.; London, 1951), pp. 161-63.23 A. N. Meldrum, “The Development of the Atomic Theory: (1) Berthollet’sDoctrine of Variable Proportions,” Manchester Memoirs, LIV (1910), 1-16.Vol. II, No. 2132Revolutions as Changes of World Viewtions, Dalton was neither a chemist nor interested in chemistry. Instead,he was a meteorologist investigating the, for him, physical problems ofthe absorption of gases by water and of water by the atmosphere. Partlybecause his training was in a different specialty and partly because ofhis own work in that specialty, he approached these problems with aparadigm different from that of contemporary chemists. In particular,he viewed the mixture of gases or the absorption of a gas in water as aphysical process, one in which forces of af!nity played no part. To him,therefore, the observed homogeneity of solutions was a problem, butone which he thought he could solve if he could determine the relativesizes and weights of the various atomic particles in his experimentalmixtures. It was to determine these sizes and weights that Dalton !nallyturned to chemistry, supposing from the start that, in the restrictedrange of reactions that he took to be chemical, atoms could onlycombine one-to-one or in some other simple whole-number ratio.24 Thatnatural assumption did enable him to determine the sizes and weightsof elementary particles, but it also made the law of constant proportiona tautology. For Dalton, any reaction in which the ingredients did notenter in !xed proportion was ipso facto not a purely chemical process. Alaw that experiment could not have established before Dalton’s work,became, once that work was accepted, a constitutive principle that nosingle set of chemical measurements could have upset. As a result ofwhat is perhaps our fullest example of a scienti!c revolution, the samechemical manipulations assumed a relationship to chemicalgeneralization very different from the one they had had before.Needless to say, Dalton’s conclusions were widely attacked when !rstannounced. Berthollet, in particular, was never convinced. Consideringthe nature of the issue, he need not have been. But to most chemistsDalton’s new paradigm proved convincing where Proust’s had not been,for it had implications far wider and more important than a newcriterion for distinguish24 L. K. Nash, “The Origin of Dalton’s Chemical Atomic Theory,” Isis, XLVII(1956), 101-16.Vol. II, No. 2133The Structure of Scientific Revolutionsing a mixture from a compound. If, for example, atoms could combinechemically only in simple whole-number ratios, then a re-examinationof existing chemical data should disclose examples of multiple as well asof !xed proportions. Chemists stopped writing that the two oxides of,say, carbon contained 56 per cent and 72 per cent of oxygen by weight;instead they wrote that one weight of carbon would combine either with1.3 or with 2.6 weights of oxygen. When the results of old manipulationswere recorded in this way, a 2:1 ratio leaped to the eye; and thisoccurred in the analysis of many well-known reactions and of new onesbesides. In addition, Dalton’s paradigm made it possible to assimilateRichter’s work and to see its full generality. Also, it suggested newexperiments, particularly those of Gay-Lussac on combining volumes,and these yielded still other regularities, ones that chemists had notpreviously dreamed of. What chemists took from Dalton was not newexperimental laws but a new way of practicing chemistry (he himselfcalled it the “new system of chemical philosophy”), and this proved sorapidly fruitful that only a few of the older chemists in France andBritain were able to resist it.25 As a result, chemists came to live in aworld where reactions behaved quite differently from the way they hadbefore.As all this went on, one other typical and very important changeoccurred. Here and there the very numerical data of chemistry began toshift. When Dalton !rst searched the chemical literature for data tosupport his physical theory, he found some records of reactions that!tted, but he can scarcely have avoided !nding others that did not.Proust’s own measurements on the two oxides of copper yielded, forexample, an oxygen weight-ratio of 1.47:1 rather than the 2:1 demandedby the atomic theory; and Proust is just the man who might have beenexpected to achieve the Daltonian ratio.26 He was, that is, a !ne25 A. N. Meldrum, “The Development of the Atomic Theory: (6) The ReceptionAccorded to the Theory Advocated by Dalton,” Manchester Memoirs, LV (1911), 1-10.26 For Proust, see Meldrum, “Berthollet’s Doctrine of Variable Proportions,”Manchester Memoirs, LIV (1910), 8. The detailed history of the gradual changes inmeasurements of chemical composition and of atomic weights hag yet to bewritten, but Partington, op. cit., provides many useful leads to itVol. II, No. 2134Revolutions as Changes of World Viewexperimentalist, and his view of the relation between mixtures andcompounds was very close to Dalton’s. But it is hard to make nature !t aparadigm. That is why the puzzles of normal science are so challengingand also why measurements undertaken without a paradigm so seldomlead to any conclusions at all. Chemists could not, therefore, simplyaccept Dalton’s theory on the evidence, for much of that was stillnegative. Instead, even after accepting the theory, they had still to beatnature into line, a process which, in the event, took almost anothergeneration. When it was done, even the percentage composition of wellknown compounds was different. The data themselves had changed.That is the last of the senses in which we may want to say that after arevolution scientists work in a different world.Vol. II, No. 2135

O NEIntroductionCITIZENS OF T H E REPUBLIC, Socrates advised, should be educated andassigned by merit to thre e classes: rulers , auxiliaries , and craftsmen. A stable society demand s that these ranks be honore d andthat citizens accept the status conferred upo n them. But how canthis acquiescence be secured? Socrates , unabl e to devise a logicalargument, fabricates a myth. With some embarrassment, he tellsGlaucon:I will speak, although I really know not how to look you in the face, or inwhat words to utter the audacious fiction. . . . They [the citizens] are to betold that their youth was a dream, and the education and training whichthey received from us, an appearance only; in reality during all that timethey were being formed and fed in the womb of the earth. . . .Glaucon, overwhelmed , exclaims : “Yo u had goo d reason to beashamed of the lie which you wer e going to tell.” “True, ” repliedSocrates , “but ther e is mor e coming ; I hav e only told you half.”Citizens, we shall say to them in our tale, you are brothers, yet God hasframed you differently. Some of you have the power of command, and inthe composition of these he has mingled gold, wherefore also they havethe greatest honor; others he has made of silver, to be auxiliaries; othersagain who are to be husbandmen and craftsmen he has composed of brassand iron; and the species will generally be preserved in the children. . . .An oracle says that when a man of brass or iron guards the State, it will bedestroyed. Such is the tale; is there any possibility of making our citizensbelieve in it?Glaucon replies : “No t in the present generation; ther e i s no way ofaccomplishing this; but their sons ma y be mad e to believe in thetale, and thei r son’s sons, and posterity after them. “5 2 T H E M I S M F A S U R E O F M A NGlaucon had uttered a prophesy. Th e same tale, in differentversions, has been promulgated and believed ever since. Th e jus –tification for ranking groups by inborn worth has varied with thetides of Western history. Plato relied upo n dialectic, the Churc hupo n dogma . For the past two centuries , scientific claims hav ebecome the primary agent for validating Plato’s myth.Thi s book i s about the scientific version of Plato’s tale. Th e general argument may be called biological determinism. It holds thatshared behavioral norms , and the social and economi c differencesbetween huma n groups—primaril y races, classes, and sexes—aris efrom inherited, inborn distinctions and that society, in this sense, isan accurate reflection of biology. Thi s book discusses, in historicalperspective, a principal theme within biological determinism: theclaim that worth can be assigned to individuals and groups by measuring intelligence as a single quantity. Tw o major sources of data havesupported this theme : craniometry (or measurement of the skull)and certain styles of psychological testing.Metals have ceded to genes (though we retain an etymologicalvestige of Plato’s tale in speaking of people’ s worthiness as their“mettle”). But the basic argument has not changed: that social andeconomi c roles accurately reflect the innate construction of people .O n e aspect of the intellectual strategy has altered, however . Socrates knew that he was telling a lie.Determinists have often invoked the traditional prestige of science as objective knowledge , free from social and political taint.The y portray themselves as purveyor s of harsh truth and theiropponent s as sentimentalists, ideologues , and wishful thinkers .Loui s Agassiz (1850, p. 111), defending his assignment of blacks toa separate species, wrote: “Naturalists have a right to conside r thequestions growing out of men’s physical relations as merely scientific questions , and to investigate them without referenc e to eitherpolitics or religion. ” Car l C. Brigham (1923), arguing for the exclusion of southern and eastern European immigrant s who hadscored poorly on supposed tests of innate intelligence stated: “Th esteps that should be taken to preserve or increase ou r present intellectual capacity must of course be dictated by science and not bypolitical expediency. ” An d Cyril Burt, invoking faked data compiled by the nonexistent Ms. Conway , complained that doubt sabout the genetic foundation of IQ “appea r to be based rathe r onINTRODUCTIO N 53the social ideals or the subjective preference s of the critics than onany first-hand examination of the evidenc e supporting the oppo –site view” (in Conway , 1959, p. 15).Since biological determinism possesses such evident utility forgroup s in power , on e might be excused for suspecting that it alsoarises in a political context, despite the denials quoted above . Afte rall, if the status qu o is an extension of nature , then any majorchange , if possible at all, mus t inflict an enormou s cost—psycholog –ical fo r individuals , or economi c for society—in forcing peopl e intounnatura l arrangements . In his epochal book, An American Dilemma(1944), Swedish sociologist Gunna r Myrda l discussed the thrus t ofbiological and medical argument s about huma n nature : “The yhav e been associated in America , as in the rest of the world, withconservative and even reactionary ideologies . Unde r thei r longhegemony , ther e has been a tendenc y to assume biological causation without question, and to accept social explanations only unde rthe dures s of a siege of irresistible evidence . In political questions ,this tendenc y favored a do-nothing policy.” Or , as Condorce t saidmor e succinctly a long time ago: they “mak e natur e herself anaccomplice in the crime of political inequality. “Thi s book seeks to demonstrat e both the scientific weaknessesa nd political context s of determinis t arguments . Even so, I do notintend to contrast evil determinists wh o stray from the path of scientific objectivity with enlightened antideterminist s wh o approachdata with an ope n mind and therefor e see truth. Rather , I criticizethe myth that science itself is an objective enterprise, don e properl yonly when scientists can shuck the constraints of thei r cultur e andview the world as it really is.Amon g scientists, few conscious ideologue s hav e entered thesedebates on either side. Scientists needn’t become explicit apologistsfor thei r class or cultur e in orde r to reflect these pervasive aspectsof life. My message is not that biological determinists wer e bad scientists or even that they wer e always wrong . Rather , I believe thatscience mus t be understood as a social phenomenon , a gutsy,huma n enterprise , not the work of robots programe d to collectpur e information. I also present this view as an upbea t for science,n ot as a gloomy epitaph for a noble hop e sacrificed on the altar ofhuma n limitations.Science, since peopl e mus t do it, is a socially embedde d activity.54 T H E MISMEASUR E O F MA NIt progresses by hunch, vision, and intuition. Much of its chang ethrough time doe s not record a closer approach to absolute truth,but the alteration of cultural context s that influence it so strongly.Facts are not pur e and unsullied bits of information; cultur e alsoinfluences what we see and how we see it. Theories , moreover , ar enot inexorabl e inductions from facts. Th e mos t creative theoriesa r e often imaginative visions imposed upo n facts; the sourc e ofimagination is also strongly cultural.Thi s argument, although still anathema to many practicing scientists, would, I think, be accepted by nearly every historian ofscience. In advancing it, however , I do not ally myself with anoverextension now popula r in some historical circles: the purel yrelativistic claim that scientific chang e only reflects the modificationof social contexts , that truth is a meaningles s notion outside cultural assumptions , and that science can therefor e provide noendurin g answers . As a practicing scientist, I share the cred o of mycolleagues : I believe that a factual reality exists and that science,thoug h often in an obtuse and erratic manner , can learn about it.Galileo was not shown the instrument s of torture in an abstractdebat e about lunar motion. He had threatened the Church’ s conventional argumen t for social and doctrinal stability: the staticworld orde r with planets circling about a central earth, priests subordinat e to the Pope and serfs to thei r lord. But the Churc h soonmad e its peac e with Galileo’s cosmology. The y had no choice; theearth really doe s revolve about the sun.Y e t the history of many scientific subjects i s virtually free fromsuch constraints of fact for two major reasons. First, some topicsa r e invested with enormou s social importanc e but blessed with ver ylittle reliable information. Whe n the ratio of data to social impac tis so low, a history of scientific attitudes ma y be little mor e than anoblique record of social change . Th e history of scientific views onrace, for example , serves as a mirro r of social movement s (Provine,1973). Thi s mirror reflects in goo d times and bad, in periods ofbelief in equality and in eras of rampan t racism. Th e death knellof the old eugenic s in Americ a was sounded mor e by Hitler’s par –ticular use of once-favored argument s for sterilization and racialpurification than by advance s in geneti c knowledge .Second, many questions are formulated by scientists in such arestricted way that any legitimate answe r can only validate a socialINTRODUCTIO N 55preference . Muc h of the debat e on racial difference s in mentalworth, for example , proceeded upo n the assumption that intelligenc e is a thing in the head. Until this notion was swept aside, noamoun t of data could dislodge a strong Western tradition forordering related items into a progressive chain of being.Science cannot escape its curious dialectic. Embedde d in surroundin g culture , it can, nonetheless , be a powerful agent for ques –tioning and even overturning the assumptions that nurtur e it.Science can provide information to reduc e the ratio of data tosocial importance . Scientists can struggle to identify the culturalassumptions of thei r trade and to ask how answer s might be formulated unde r different assertions. Scientists can propos e creativetheories that force startled colleagues to confront unquestionedprocedures . Bu t science’s potential as an instrument for identifyingthe cultural constraints upo n it cannot be fully realized until scientists give up the twin myths of objectivity and inexorabl e marchtoward truth. On e must, indeed, locate the beam in one’s own eyebefor e interpreting correctly the pervasive motes in everybodyelse’s. Th e beams can then become facilitators, rather than impediments .Gunna r Myrda l (1944) captured both sides of this dialecticwhe n he wrote:A handful of social and biological scientists over the last 50 years havegradually forced informed people to give up some of the more blatant ofour biological errors. But there must be still other countless errors of thesame sort that no living man can yet detect, because of the fog within whichour type of Western culture envelops us. Cultural influences have set upthe assumptions about the mind, the body, and the universe with which webegin; pose the questions we ask; influence the facts we seek; determinethe interpretation we give these facts; and direct our reaction to theseinterpretations and conclusions.Biological determinism is too large a subject for one ma n ando ne book—fo r it touches virtually every aspect of the interactionbetween biology and society since the dawn of moder n science. Ihav e therefor e confined myself to on e central and manageabl eargumen t in the edifice of biological determinism—a n argumen t int wo historical chapters , based on two dee p fallacies, and carriedforth in on e commo n style.56 T H E MISMEASUR E O F MA NT h e argumen t begins with one of the fallacies—reification, oro u r tendenc y to conver t abstract concept s into entities (from theLatin res, or thing). We recogniz e the importanc e of mentality ino u r lives and wish to characteriz e it, in par t so that we can mak ethe divisions and distinctions amon g peopl e that our cultural andpolitical systems dictate. We therefor e give the word “intelligence”to this wondrousl y comple x and multifaceted set of huma n capabilities. Thi s shorthand symbol is then reified and intelligenceachieves its dubious status as a unitary thing.Onc e intelligence become s an entity, standard procedure s ofscience virtually dictate that a location and physical substrate besought for it. Since the brain is the seat of mentality, intelligencemus t reside there.We now encounte r the second fallacy—ranking, or our propensity for ordering comple x variation as a gradua l ascendingscale. Metaphor s of progres s and gradualism hav e been amon g themost pervasive in Western thought—se e Lovejoy’s classic essay(1936) on the great chain of being or Bury’ s famous treatment(1920) of the idea of progress . Thei r social utility should be evidentin the following advice fro m Booke r T. Washington (1904, p. 245)to black America :For my race, one of its dangers is that it may grow impatient and feel thatit can get upon its feet by artificial and superficial efforts rather than bythe slower but surer process which means one step at a time through allthe constructive grades of industrial, mental, moral and social development which all races have had to follow that have become independentand strong.B u t ranking requires a criterion for assigning all individual s totheir prope r status in the single series. An d what better criterionthan an objective number ? Thus , the commo n style embodyin gboth fallacies of thought has been quantification, or the measure –ment of intelligence as a single numbe r for each person. * Thi sbook, then, is about the abstraction of intelligence as a single entity,its location within the brain, its quantification as on e numbe r for*Peter Medawar (1977, p. 13) has presented other interesting examples of “theillusion embodied in the ambition to attach a single number valuation to complexquantities”—for example, the attempts made by demographers to seek causes fortrends in population in a single measure of “reproductive prowess,” or the desire ofsoil scientists to abstract the “quality” of a soil as a single number.INTRODUCTIO N 57each individual, and the use of these number s to rank peopl e in asingle series of worthiness , invariably to find that oppressed anddisadvantaged groups—races , classes, or sexes—ar e innately inferior and deserv e thei r status. In short, this book is about the Mismeasur e o f Man. *Different argument s for ranking hav e characterized the lasttwo centuries . Craniometr y was the leading numerical science ofbiological determinism durin g the nineteenth century. I discuss(Chapte r 2) the most extensive data compiled befor e Darwin torank races by the sizes of their brains—the skull collection of Philadelphi a physician Samue l Georg e Morton. Chapte r 3 treats theflowering of craniometry as a rigorous and respectable science inthe school of Paul Broc a in late nineteenth-centur y Europe . Chap –ter 4 then underscore s the impac t of quantified approache s tohuma n anatomy in nineteenth-century biological determinism. Itpresent s two case studies: the theory of recapitulation as evolution’sprimar y criterion for unilinear ranking of huma n groups , and theattempt to explain criminal behavior as a biological atavismreflected in the apish morpholog y of murderer s and othe r miscreants .Wha t craniometr y was for the nineteenth century , intelligencetesting has become for the twentieth, when it assumes that intelligenc e (or at least a dominant par t of it) is a single, innate, heritable,a nd measurabl e thing. I discuss the two component s of this invalidapproach to mental testing in Chapte r 5 (the hereditarian versionof the IQ scale as an American product) and Chapte r 6 (the argument for reifying intelligence as a single entity by the mathematicaltechnique of factor analysis). Factor analysis is a difficult mathe –matical subject almos t invariably omitted from document s writtenfor nonprofessionals . Ye t I believe that it can be mad e accessiblea nd explained in a pictorial and nonnumerica l way. Th e materialof Chapte r 6 is still not “easy reading, ” but I could not leave it out —for the history of intelligence testing cannot be understood withoutgrasping the factor analytic argumen t and understanding its dee p

Following strictures of the argument outlined above, I do not treat all theories ofcraniometries (I omit phrenology, for example, because it did not reify intelligenceas a single entity but sought multiple organs with the brain). Likewise, I excludemany important and often quantified styles of determinism that did not seek tomeasure intelligence as a property of the brain—for example, most of eugenics.5 * T H E MISMEASUR E O F MA Nconceptual fallacy. Th e great I Q debat e make s no sense withoutthis conventionally missing subject.I hav e tried to treat these subjects in an unconventiona l way byusing a metho d that falls outside the traditional purview of eithera scientist or historian operating alone. Historians rarely treat thequantitative details in sets of primar y data. The y write, as I cannotadequately, about social context, biography , or general intellectualhistory. Scientists are used to analyzing the data of thei r peers , butfew ar e sufficiently interested in history to apply the metho d totheir predecessors . Thus , many scholars hav e written about Broca’ simpact, but no on e has recalculated his sums .I hav e focused upo n the reanalysis of classical data sets in craniometr y and intelligence testing for two reasons beyond my incompetenc e to proceed in any othe r fruitful way and my desire to dosomething a bit different. I believe, first of all, that Satan alsodwell s with Go d in the details. If the cultural influences upo n scienc e can be detected in the humdru m minutiae of a supposedl yobjective, almos t automati c quantification, then the status of biological determinism as a social prejudice reflected by scientists inthei r own particular mediu m seems secure.T h e second reason for analyzing quantitative data arises fro mthe special status that number s enjoy. Th e mystique of science proclaims that number s are the ultimate test of objectivity. Surely wecan weigh a brain or score an intelligence test without recordingo u r social preferences . If ranks ar e displayed in hard number sobtained by rigorous and standardized procedures , then they mus treflect reality, even if they confirm what we wanted to believe fromthe start. Antideterminist s have understood the particular prestigeof number s and the special difficulty that their refutation entails.Leonc e Manouvrie r (1903, p. 406), the nondeterminis t black sheepof Broca’ s fold, and a fine statistician himself, wrote of Broca’ s dataon the small brains of women :Women displayed their talents and their diplomas. They also invoked philosophical authorities. But they were opposed by numbers unknown to Condorcet or to John Stuart Mill. Thes e numbers fell upon poor women likea sledge hammer, and they were accompanied by commentaries and sarcasms more ferocious than the most misogynist imprecations of certainchurch fathers. Th e theologians had asked if women had a soul. Severalcenturies later, some scientists were ready to refuse them a human intelligence.INTRODUCTIO N 59If—a s I believe I hav e shown—quantitative data ar e as subject tocultural constraint as any othe r aspect of science, then they hav eno special claim upo n final truth.In reanalyzing these classical data sets, I hav e continuallylocated a prior i prejudice, leading scientists to invalid conclusionsfrom adequat e data, or distorting the gathering of data itself. In afew cases—Cyril Burt’ s documente d fabrication o f data-on IQ o fidentical twins, and my discovery that Goddar d altered photographs to sugges t mental retardation in the Kallikaks—we canspecify conscious fraud as the cause of inserted social prejudice.B ut fraud is not historically interesting except as gossip because theperpetrator s know what they ar e doing and the unconscious biasesthat record subtle and inescapable constraints of culture ar e notillustrated. In mos t cases discussed in this book, we can be fairlycertain that biases—thoug h often expressed as egregiously as incases of conscious fraud—wer e unknowingl y influential and thatscientists believed they wer e pursuing unsullied truth.Since many of the cases presented her e ar e so patent, even risible, by today’s standards , I wish to emphasiz e that I hav e not takencheap shots at margina l figures (with the possible exceptions of Mr .Bean in Chapte r 3, who m I use as a curtain-raiser to illustrate agenera l point, and Mr . Cartwright in Chapte r 2, whos e statementsa r e too precious to exclude). Chea p shots come in thick catalogues—fro m a eugenicis t name d W. D. McKim , Ph.D. (1900), wh othought that all nocturnal housebreaker s should be dispatchedwith carboni c acid gas , to a certain English professor wh o touredthe United States during the late nineteenth century, offering theunsolicited advice that we might solve ou r racial problems if everyIrishman killed a Negr o and got hange d for it.* Chea p shots arealso gossip, not history; they are ephemera l and uninfluential,howeve r amusing . I have focused upo n the leading and mos t influential scientists of their times and hav e analyzed thei r major works .I hav e enjoyed playing detective in mos t of the case studies thatmak e up this book: finding passages expurgate d without commen t
Also too precious to exclude is my favorite modern invocation of biological determinism as an excuse for dubious behavior. Bill Lee, baseball’s self-styled philosopher, justifying the beanball (New York Times, 24 July 1976): “I read a book in collegecalled ‘Territorial Imperative.’ A fellow always has to protect his master’s homemuch stronger than anything down the street; My territory is down and away fromthe hitters. If they’re going out there and getting the ball, I’ll have to come in close.”6o T H E MISMEASUR E O F MA Nin published letters, recalculating sums to locate error s that suppor t expectations , discovering how adequat e data can be filteredthrough prejudices to predetermined results, even giving theArm y Mental Tes t for illiterates to my own student s with interesti ng results. But I trust that whateve r zeal any investigator mus tinvest in details has not obscured the general message: that deter –minist argument s for ranking peopl e according to a single scale ofintelligence, no matter now numerically sophisticated, hav e recorde d little mor e than social prejudice—an d that we learn something hopeful about the natur e of science in pursuing such ananalysis.If this subject wer e merel y a scholar’s abstract concern, I couldapproach it in mor e measured tone. But few biological subjectshav e had a mor e direct influence upo n millions of lives. Biologicaldeterminism is, in its essence, a theory of limits. It takes the currentstatus of groups as a measur e of wher e they should and mus t be(even while it allows some rare individual s to rise as a consequenc eof thei r fortunat e biology).I hav e said little about the current resurgenc e of biologicaldeterminism becaus e its individual claims are usually so ephemera lthat thei r refutation belongs in a magazine article or newspape rstory. Wh o even remember s the hot topics of ten years ago : Shockley’s proposal s for reimbursing voluntarily sterilized individual saccording t o their numbe r o f IQ points below too , the great XY Ydebate , or the attempt to explain urban riots by diseased neurolog yof rioters. I thought that it would be mor e valuable and interestingto examine the original sources of the argument s that still surroun d us. These , at least, display great and enlightening errors .B u t I was inspired to write this book because biological determinism is rising in popularity again, as it always does in times of political retrenchment. Th e cocktail party circuit has been buzzing withits usual profundit y about innate aggression, sex roles , an d thenaked ape . Millions of peopl e are now suspecting that their socialprejudices ar e scientific facts after all. Ye t these latent prejudicesthemselves , not fresh data, are the primar y sourc e of renewe dattention.We pass throug h this world but once . Few tragedies can bemor e extensive than the stunting of life, few injustices deepe r thanthe denial of an opportunit y to strive or even to hope , by a limitINTRODUCTIO N 6limposed from without, but falsely identified as lying within. Cicer otells the story of Zopyrus , wh o claimed that Socrates had inbornvices evident in his physiognomy . His disciples rejected the claim,but Socrates defende d Zopyrus and stated that he did indeed possess the vices, but had cancelled their effects through the exerciseof reason. We inhabit a world of huma n differences and predilections, but the extrapolation of these facts to theories of rigid limitsis ideology.Georg e Eliot well appreciated the special tragedy that biologicallabeling imposed upo n member s o f disadvantaged groups . Sheexpressed it for peopl e like herself—wome n of extraordinar y talent. I woul d appl y it mor e widely—no t only to those whos e dreamsa r e flouted but also to those wh o neve r realize that they ma ydream . But I cannot match he r pros e (from the prelude to Middlemarch):Some have felt that these blundering lives are due to the inconvenientindefiniteness with which the Supreme Power has fashioned the naturesof women: if there were one level of feminine incompetence as strict asthe ability to count three and no more, the social lot of women might betreated with scientific certitude. Th e limits of variation are really muchwider than anyone would imagine from the sameness of women’s coiffureand the favorite love stories in prose and verse. Here and there a cygnet isreared uneasily among the ducklings in the brown pond, and never findsthe living stream in fellowship with its own oary-footed kind. Here andthere is born a Saint Theresa, foundress of nothing, whose loving heartbeats and sobs after an unattained goodness tremble off and are dispersedamong hindrances instead of centering in some long-recognizable deed.T W OAmerican Polygeny andCraniometry before DarwinBlacks and Indians as Separate,Inferior SpeciesOrder is Heaven’s first law; and, this confessed,Some are, and must be, greater than the rest.— ALEXANDER POPE, Essay on Man (1733)APPEALS TO REASON or to the natur e of the universe hav e been usedthroughout history to enshrine existing hierarchies as prope r andinevitable. Th e hierarchies rarely endur e for mor e than a few generations , but the arguments , refurbished for the nex t roun d ofsocial institutions, cycle endlessly.T h e catalogue of justifications based on natur e traverses arang e of possibilities: elaborate analogies between ruler s and ahierarchy of subordinat e classes with the central earth of Ptolemaicastronomy and a ranked orde r of heavenly bodies circling aroundit; or appeal s to the universal orde r of a “great chain of being, “ranging in a single series from amoeba e to God , and including nea rits ape x a grade d series of huma n races and classes. To quot e Alex –ande r Pope again:Without this just gradation, could they beSubjected, these to those, or all to thee?From Nature’s chain whatever link you strike,Tenth, or ten thousandth, breaks the chain alike.AMERICA N POLYGEN Y AN D CRANIOMETR Y 63T h e humblest, as well as the greatest, play thei r par t in preservingthe continuity of universal order ; all occupy thei r appointed roles.Thi s boo k treats an argumen t that, to many people’ s surprise,seems to be a latecomer : biological determinism, the notion thatpeopl e at the bottom are constructed of intrinsically inferior material (poor brains , bad genes , or whatever). Plato, as we hav e seen,cautiously floated this proposal in the Republic, but finally brande dit as a lie.Racial prejudic e ma y be as old as recorded huma n history, butits biological justification imposed the additional burde n of intrinsic inferiority upo n despised groups , and precluded redemptionby conversion or assimilation. Th e “scientific” argumen t hasforme d a primar y line of attack for mor e than a century. In discussing the first biological theory supported by extensive quantitative data—earl y nineteenth-centur y craniometry— I mus t begin byposing a question of causality: did the introduction of inductivescience add legitimate data to chang e or strengthen a nascent argumen t for racial ranking? Or did a prior i commitment to rankingfashion the “scientific” questions asked and even the data gatheredto suppor t a foreordained conclusion?A shared context of cultureIn assessing the impac t of science upo n eighteenth- and nineteenth-century views of race, we mus t first recogniz e the culturalmilieu of a society whos e leader s and intellectuals did not doubtthe propriet y of racial ranking—with Indians below whites, andblacks below everybody else (Fig. 2.1). Unde r this universalumbrella, argument s did not contrast equality with inequality. On egroup)—we might call them “hard-liners”—held that blacks wer einferior and that thei r biological status justified enslavement andcolonization. Anothe r group—th e “soft-liners, ” if you will—agreedthat blacks wer e inferior , but held that a people’ s right to freedo md id not depen d upo n their level of intelligence. “Whateve r be thei rdegre e of talents, ” wrot e Thoma s Jefferson, “it i s no measur e ofthei r rights. “Soft-liners held various attitudes about the natur e of black disadvantage . Som e argue d that prope r education and standard o flife could “raise” blacks to a white level; other s advocated perma –64 T H E MISMEASUR E O F MA Nnent black ineptitude. The y also disagreed about the biological orculturalroot s of black inferiority. Yet, throughout the egalitariantradition of the European Enlightenment and the American revolution, I cannot identify any popula r position remotely like the “cultural relativism” that prevails (at least by lip-service) in liberal circlestoday. Th e nearest approach i s a commo n argument that black inferiority is purel y cultural and that it can be completely eradicated byeducation to a Caucasian standard.All America n culture heroe s embraced racial attitudes thatwould embarras s public-school mythmakers . Benjamin Franklin,while viewing the inferiority of blacks as purel y cultural and completely remediable , nonetheles s expressed his hop e that Americ awould become a domain of whites, undiluted by less pleasing colors.I could wish their numbers were increased. And while we are, as I may callit, scouring our planet, by clearing America of woods, and so making thisside of our globe reflect a brighter light to the eyes of inhabitants in Mars orVenus, why should we . . . darken its people? Why increase the Sons ofAfrica, by planting them in America, where we have so fair an opportunity,by excluding all blacks and tawneys, of increasing the lovely white and red?*(Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, 1751).Other s amon g ou r heroe s argue d for biological inferiority.Thoma s Jefferson wrote, albeit tentatively: ” I advanc e it, therefore ,as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whethe r originally a distinct race,or mad e distinct by time and circumstance, ar e inferior to the whitesin the endowmen t both of body and mind” (in Gossett, 1965, p. 44).Lincoln’ s pleasure at the performanc e of black soldiers in the Unionarmy greatly increased his respect for freedme n and forme r slaves.B ut freedom doe s not imply biological equality, and Lincoln neve r
I have been struck by the frequency of such aesthetic claims as a basis of racialpreference. Although J. F. Blumenbach, the founder of anthropology, had statedthat toads must view other toads as paragons of beauty, many astute intellectualsnever doubted the equation of whiteness with perfection. Franklin at least had thedecency to include the original inhabitants in his future America; but, a centurylater, Oliver Wendell Holmes rejoiced in the elimination of Indians on aestheticgrounds: “. . . and so the red-crayon sketch is rubbed out, and the canvas is readyfor a picture of manhood a little more like God’s own image” (in Gossett, 1965,p. 243).GreekApollo Belvidere2*1 The unilinear scale of human races and lower relatives according toNott and Gliddon, 1868. Th e chimpanzee skull is falsely inflated, and theNegro jaw extended, to give the impression that blacks might even ranklower than the apes.66 T H E MISMEASUR E O F MA Nabandone d a basic attitude, so strongly expressed in the Dougla sdebates (1858):Ther e is a physical difference between the white and black races whichI believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of socialand political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they doremain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and Ias much as any other man am in favor of having the superior positionassigned to the white race.Lest we choos e to regard this statement as mer e campaign rhetoric ,I cite this private j o t t i n g, scribbled on a fragment of pape r in 1859:Negro equality! Fudge! How long, in the Government of a God greatenough to make and rule the universe, shall there continue knaves to vend,and fools to quip, so low a piece of demagogism as this (in Sinkler, 1972,P- 47)-I do not cite these statements in orde r to release skeletons fromancient closets. Rather , I quot e the men wh o have justly earnedo u r highes t respect in orde r to show that white leader s of Westernnations did not question the propriety of racial ranking durin g theeighteenth and nineteenth centuries . In this context, the pervasiveassent given by scientists to conventional rankings arose fromshared social belief, not from objective data gathered to test an openquestion. Yet, in a curious case of reversed causality, these pronouncement s wer e read as independent suppor t for the politicalcontext.All leading scientists followed social conventions (Figs. 2.2 and2.3). In the first forma l definition of huma n races in moder n taxonomi c terms , Linnaeus mixed character with anatomy (Systema naturae, 1758). Homo sapiens afer (the African black), he proclaimed, is“ruled by caprice” ; Homo sapiens europaeus is “ruled by customs. ” OfAfrican women , he wrote : mammae lactantes prolixae—breasts lactateprofusely. Th e men, he added , are indolent and annoint themselveswith grease.T h e three greates t naturalists of the nineteenth century did nothold blacks in high esteem. George s Cuvier , widely hailed in Franc eas the Aristotle of his age , and a founde r of geology , paleontology ,a nd moder n comparativ e anatomy , referred to native Africans asAlgerian Negro Saharran NegroGorilla2 » 2 An unsubtle attempt to suggest strong affinity between blacks andgorillas. From Nott and Gliddon, Types of Mankind, 1854. Nott and Gliddon comment on this figure: “The palpable analogies and dissimilitudesbetween an inferior type of mankind and a superior type of monkeyrequire no comment.”

AMERICA N POLYGEN Y AN D CRANIOMETR Y 6 9“the most degrade d of huma n races, whose form approache s thatof the beast and whos e intelligence i s nowher e great enoug h toarrive at regula r government ” (Cuvier , 1812, p. 105). Charle s Lyell,the conventional founde r of moder n geology , wrote:T he brain of the Bushman . . . leads towards the brain of the Simiadae[monkeys]. This implies a connexion between want of intelligence andstructural assimilation. Each race of Man has its place, like the inferioranimals (in Wilson, 1970, p. 347).Charle s Darwin, the kindly liberal and passionate abolitionist,*wrote about a futur e time when the ga p between huma n and apewill increase by the anticipated extinction of such intermediate s aschimpanzee s and Hottentots .T h e break will then be rendered wider, for it will intervene betweenman in a more civilized state, as we may hope, than the Causasian, and someape as low as a babon, instead of as at preent between the negro or Australian and the gorilla [Descent of Man, 1871, p. 201).Even mor e instructive are the beliefs of those few scientists oftencited in retrospec t as cultural relativisits and defender s of equality.J. F. Blumenbac h attributed racial difference s to the influences ofclimate. He protested rankings based on presume d mental abilitya nd assembled a collection of books written by blacks. Nonetheless ,he did not doub t that white peopl e set a standard, from which allothe r races mus t be viewed as departure s (see essay 4 at end of boo kfor mor e information about Blumenbach):T h e Caucasian must, on every physiological principle, be considered asthe primary or intermediate of these five principal Races. Th e two extremesinto which it has deviated, are on the one hand the Mongolian, on the otherthe Ethiopian [African blacks] (1825, P- 37)-

Darwin wrote, for example, in the Voyage of the Beagle: “Near Rio de Janeiro I livedopposite to an old lady, who kept screws to crush the fingers of her female slaves. Ihave stayed in a house where a young household mulatto, daily and hourly, wasreviled, beaten, and persecuted enough to break the spirit of the lowest animal. Ihave seen a little boy, six or seven years old, struck thrice with a horse-whip (beforeI could interfere) opn his naked head, for having handed me a glass of water notquite clean. . . . And these deeds are done and palliated by men, who profess tolove their neighbors as themselves, who believe in God, and pray that his Will bedone on earth! It makes one’s blood boil, yet heart tremble, to think that we Englishmen and our American descendants, with their boastful cry of liberty, havebeen and are so guilty.”7o T H E MISMEASUR E O F MA NAlexande r von Humboldt, world traveler , statesman, and greatest popularize r of nineteenth-centur y science, would be the her o ofall moder n egalitarians wh o seek antecedent s in history. He , mor ethan any othe r scientist of his time, argue d forcefully and at lengthagainst ranking on mental or aesthetic grounds . He also drew political implications from his convictions, an d campaigned against allforms of slavery and subjugation as impediment s to the naturalstriving of all peopl e to attain mental excellence . He wrot e in themost famous passage of his five-volume Cosmos:Whilst we maintain the unity of the human species, we at the same timerepel the depressing assumption of superior and inferior races of men.Ther e are nations more susceptible of cultivation than others—but none inthemselves nobler than others. All are in like degre e designed for freedom(1849, p. 368).Y e t even Humbold t invoked innate menta l differenc e to resolvesome dilemma s of huma n history. Why , he asks in the second volu m e of Cosmos, did the Arab s explod e in cultur e and science soonafter the rise of Islam, while Scythian tribes of southeastern Europ estuck to their ancient ways ; for both people s wer e nomadi c andshared a commo n climate and environment ? Humbold t did findsome cultural differences—greate r contac t of Arab s with sur –roundin g urbanized cultures , for example . But, in the end, he labeled Arabs as a “mor e highly gifted race ” with greate r “naturaladaptability for mental cultivation” (1849, P- 57^)-Alfred Russel Wallace, codiscovere r of natural selection withDarwin, is justly hailed as an antiracist. Indeed , he did affirm nea requality in the innate mental capacity of all peoples . Yet, curiously,this very belief led him to abandon natural selection and return todivine creation as an explanation for the huma n mind—muc h toDarwin’ s disgust. Natura l selection, Wallac e argued, can only buildstructures immediately useful to animal s possessing them. Th ebrain of savages is, potentially, as good as ours . Bu t they do not useit fully, as the rudenes s and inferiority of thei r culture indicates.Since moder n savages ar e muc h like huma n ancestors , ou r brainmus t have developed its highe r capacities long befor e we put themto any use.AMERICA N POLYGEN Y AN D CRANIOMETR Y 7′Preevolutionary styles of scientific racism:monogenism and polygenismPreevolutionary justifications for racial ranking proceeded intwo modes . Th e “softer ” argument—agai n using inappropriat edefinitions from moder n perspectives—uphel d the scriptural unityof all people s in the single creation of Ada m and Eve. Thi s view wascalled monogenism—or origin from a single source. Huma n racesare a produc t of degeneration from Eden’ s perfection. Races hav edeclined to different degrees , whites least and blacks most. Climateproved most popula r as a primar y cause for racial distinction. Degenerationist s differed on the remediability of moder n deficits.Some held that the differences , though developed gradually unde rthe influence of climate, wer e now fixed and could neve r be reversed. Other s argue d that the fact of gradua l development impliedreversibility in appropriat e environments . Samue l Stanhope Smith,president of the Colleg e of New Jersey (later Princeton), hope d thatAmerican blacks, in a climate mor e suited to Caucasian tempera –ments , would soon turn white. But othe r degenerationist s felt thatimprovement in benevolent climes could not proceed rapidlyenoug h to hav e any impac t upo n huma n history.T h e “harder ” argumen t abandone d scripture a s allegorical andheld that huma n races wer e separate biological species, the descendant s of different Adams . As anothe r form of life, blacks need notparticipate in the “equality of man. ” Proponent s of this argumentwer e called “polygenists. “Degenerationism was probably the mor e popula r argument, ifonly because scripture was not to be discarded lightly. Moreover ,the interfertility of all huma n races seemed to guarante e their unionas a single species unde r Buffon’ s criterion that member s of a species be able to breed with each other , but not with representatives ofany othe r group . Buffo n himself, the greates t naturalist of eighteenth-century France , was a strong abolitionist and exponen t ofimprovement for inferior races in appropriat e environments . Buthe neve r doubted the inherent validity of a white standard:T h e most temperate climate lies between the 40th and 50th degree oflatitude, and it produces the most handsome and beautiful men. It is fromthis climate that the ideas of the genuine color of mankind, and of thevarious degrees of beauty ought to be derived.72 T H E MISMEASUR E O F MA NSom e degenerationist s cited thei r commitment s in the name ofhuma n brotherhood. Etienne Serres , a famous French medicalanatomist, wrot e in i860 that the perfectability of lowe r races distinguished humans as the only species subject to improvement by itso wn efforts. He lambasted polygeny as a “savage theory ” that “seemsto lend scientific suppor t to the enslavement of races less advancedin civilization than the Caucasian” :Their conclusion is that the Negro is no more a white man than a donkeyis a horse or a zebra—a theory put into practice in the United States ofAmerica, to the shame of civilization (i860, pp. 407-408).Nonetheless , Serres worke d to document the signs of inferiorityamon g lower races. As an anatomist, he sought evidenc e within hisspecialty and confessed to some difficulty in establishing both criteria and data. He settled on the theory of recapitulation—the ideathat highe r creatures repea t the adult stages of lower animal s durin gthei r own growth (Chapte r 4). Adult blacks, he argued , should belike white children, adult Mongolians like white adolescents . Hesearched diligently but devised nothing muc h better than the distance between navel and penis—”tha t ineffaceable sign of embry –onic life in man. ” Thi s distance is small relative to body height inbabies of all races. Th e navel migrates upwar d during growth, butattains greate r height s in whites than in yellows, and neve r gets veryfar at all in blacks. Blacks remain perpetually like white children andannounc e thei r inferiority thereby.Polygeny, thoug h less popular , had its illustrious supporter s aswell. David Hum e did not spend his life absorbed in pur e thought.He held a numbe r of political posts, including the stewardship of theEnglish colonial office in 1766. Hum e advocated both the separatecreation and innate inferiority of nonwhit e races:I am apt to suspect the negroes and in general all the other species ofmen (for there are four or five different kinds) to be naturally inferior tothe whites. Ther e never was a civilized nation of any other complexion thanwhite, nor even any individual eminent either in action or speculation.* Noingenious manufacturers amongst them, no arts, no sciences. . . . Such a*This “inductive” argument from human cultures is far from dead as a defense ofracism. In his Study of History (1934 edition), Arnold Toynbee wrote: “When weclassify mankind by color, the only one of the primary races, given by this classification, which has not made a creative contribution to any of our twenty-one civilizations is the Black Race” (in Newby, 1969, p. 217).AMERICA N POLYGEN Y AN D CRANIOMETR Y 73uniform and constant difference could not happen in so many countriesand ages, if nature had not made an original distinction betwixt these breedsof men. Not to mention our colonies, there are negroe slaves dispersed allover Europe, of which none ever discovered any symptoms of ingenuity,tho’ low people without education will start up amongst us, and distinguishthemselves in every profession. In Jamaica indeed they talk of one negroeas a man of parts and learning; but ’tis likely he is admired for very slenderaccomplishments like a parrot who speaks a few words plainly (in Popkin,1974, p. 143; see Popkin’s excellent article for a long analysis of Hume asa polygenist).Charle s White , an English surgeon, wrot e the stronges t defens eof polygeny in 1799—Account of the Regular Gradation in Man. Whit eabandone d Buffon’ s criterion of interfertility in defining species,pointing to successful hybrids between such conventionally separategroups as foxes , wolves , and j a c k a l s . * He railed against the idea thatclimate might produc e racial differences , arguing that such ideasmight lead, by extension, to the “degradin g notion” of evolutionbetween species. He disclaimed any political motivation and announced an untainted purpose : “to investigate a proposition in natural history.” He explicitly rejected any extension of polygeny to“countenanc e the pernicious practice of enslaving mankind. “White’s criteria of ranking tended toward the aesthetic, and his argumen t included the following gem , often quoted. Wher e else butamon g Caucasians , he argued , can we find. . . that nobly arched head, containing such a quantity of brain. . . .Where that variety of features, and fulness of expression; those long, flow-
Modern evolutionary theory does invoke a barrier to interfertility as the primarycriterion for status as a species. In the standard definition: “Species are actually orpotentially interbreeding populations sharing a common gene pool, and reproductively isolated from all other groups.” Reproductive isolation, however, does notmean that individual hybrids never arise, but only that the two species maintaintheir integrity in natural contact. Hybrids may be sterile (mules). Fertile hybridsmay even arise quite frequently, but if natural selection acts preferentially againstthem (as a result of inferiority in structural design, rejection as mates by full members of either species, etc.) they will not increase in frequency and the two specieswill not amalgamate. Often fertile hybrids can be produced in the laboratory byimposing situations not encountered in nature (forced breeding between speciesthat normally mature at different times of the year, for example). Such examplesdo not refute a status as separate species because the two groups do not amalgamatein the wild (maturation at different times of the year may be an efficient means ofreproductive isolation).74 T H E MISMEASUR E O F MA Ning, graceful ring-lets; that majestic beard, those rosy cheeks and coral lips?Where that. . . noble gait? In what other quarter of the globe shall we findthe blush that overspreads the soft features of the beautiful women ofEurope, that emblem of modesty, of delicate feelings . . . where, except onthe bosom of the European woman, two such plump and snowy whitehemispheres, tipt with vermillion (in Stanton, i960, p. 17).Louis Agassiz—America’s theorist of polygenyRalph Wald o Emerson argue d that intellectual emancipationshould follow political independence . America n scholars shouldabandon thei r subservience to Europea n styles and theories . Wehave, Emerson wrote , “listened too long to the courtly muses ofEurope. ” “W e will walk on ou r own feet; we will wor k with ou r ownhands ; we will speak ou r own minds ” (in Stanton, ig6o , p. 84).In the early to mid-nineteenth century, the buddin g professionof America n science organized itself to follow Emerson’ s advice. Acollection of eclectic amateurs , bowing befor e the prestige of Euro –pean theorists, became a grou p of professional s with indigenousideas and an internal dynami c that did not requir e constant fuelingfrom Europe . Th e doctrine of polygeny acted a s an important agentin this transformation; for it was one of the firs t theories of largelyAmerica n origin that won the attention and respec t of Europeanscientists—so muc h so that Europeans referred to polygeny as the“American school ” of anthropology . Polygeny had European antecedents , as we have seen, but Americans developed the data cited inits suppor t and based a large body of research on its tenets. I shallconcentrat e on the two mos t famous advocates of polygeny—Agas –siz the theorist and Morton the data analyst; and I shall try to uncove r both the hidden motives and the finagling of data so centralto thei r support. * Fo r starters, it is obviously not accidental that anation still practicing slavery and expelling its aboriginal inhabitantsfrom thei r homelands should hav e provided a base for theories thatblacks and Indians are separate species, inferior to whites.Loui s Agassi z (1807—1873), the great Swiss naturalist, won hisreputation in Europe , primarily as Cuvier’ s disciple and a student of
An excellent history of the entire “American school” can be found in W. Stanton’sThe Leopard’s Spots.AMERICA N POLYGEN Y AN D CRANIOMETR Y IOI

Miscalculations and convenient omissions: All miscalculations and omissions that I have detected are in Morton’ s favor . Herounde d the negroid Egyptian averag e dow n to 79, rather than upto 80. He cited averages of 90 for Germans and Anglo-Saxons , butthe correct values ar e 88 and 89. He excluded a large Chines e skulla nd an Eskimo subsampl e from his final tabulation for mongoloids ,thus depressing their averag e below the Caucasian value.Y e t through all this juggling , I detect no sign of fraud or conscious manipulation. Morton mad e no attempt to cove r his tracksa nd I must presum e that he was unawar e he had left them. Heexplained all his procedure s and published all his raw data. All Ican discern is an a prior i conviction about racial ranking so powerful that it directed his tabulations along preestablished lines. Ye tMorton was widely hailed as the objectivist of his age , the ma n whowould rescue America n science from the mir e of unsupportedspeculation.The American school and slaveryT h e leading American polygenists differed in their attitudetoward slavery. Mos t wer e Northerners , and most favored someversion of Squier’ s quip: “[I hav e a] precious poo r opinion of niggers .. . a still poore r one of slavery” (in Stanton, i960, p. 193).B ut the identification of blacks as a separate and unequa l species had obvious appeal as an argument for slavery. Josiah Nott, aleading polygenist, encountered particularly receptive audiences inthe South for his “lectures on niggerology ” (as he called them).Morton’ s Crania Aegyptiaca received a warm welcome in the South(in Stanton, i960, pp. 52-53). On e supporte r of slavery wrote thatthe South need no longe r be “so much frightened” by “voices ofEurope or of Northern America ” in defending its “peculiar institutions.” Whe n Morton died, the South’ s leading medical journa lproclaimed (R. W. Gibbs , Charleston Medical Journal, 1851 , quotedin Stanton, i960, p. 144): “We of the South should consider him aso ur benefactor , for aiding most materially in giving to the negr ohis true position as an inferior race. “Nonetheless , the polygenis t argument did not occupy a primar yplace in the ideology of slavery in mid-nineteenth-century Amer –ica—and for a goo d reason. For most Southerners , this excellentargument entailed too high a price. Th e polygenist s had railed102 T H E MISMEASUR E O F MA Nagainst ideologues as barrier s to thei r pur e search for truth, buttheir targets wer e parsons mor e often than abolitionists. Thei r theory, in asserting a plurality of huma n creations , contradicted thedoctrine of a single Ada m and contravened the literal truth ofscripture. Althoug h the leading polygenists held a diversity of religious attitudes, none wer e atheists. Morton and Agassi z wer e conventionally devout, but they did believe that both science andreligion would be aided if untrained parsons kept thei r noses outof scientific issues and stopped proferring the Bible as a documen tto settle debates in natural history. Josiah Nott stated his goal in aforceful way (Agassiz and Morton would not hav e put it so baldly):“. . . to cut loose the natural history of mankind from the Bible,a nd to place each upo n its own foundation, wher e it may remainwithout collision or molestation” (in Stanton, ig6o, p. 119).T h e polygenists forced defender s of slavery into a quandary :Should they accept a strong argumen t from science at the cost oflimiting religion’s sphere ? In resolving this dilemma , the Bible usually won. Afte r all, scriptural argument s for supporting slaverywer e not wanting. Degeneration of blacks unde r the curs e of Ha mwas an old and eminently functional standby. Moreover , polygenywas not the only quasi-scientific defens e available.Joh n Bachman , for example , was a South Carolina parson andprominent naturalist. As a committed monogenist, he spent a goo dpar t of his scientific career attempting to refut e polygeny . He alsoused monogenis t principles to defend slavery:In intellectual power the African is an inferior variety of our species.His whole history affords evidence that he is incapable of self-government.Our child that we lead by the hand, and who looks to us for protection andsupport is still of our own blood notwithstanding his weakness and ignorance (in Stanton, i960, p. 63).Amon g nonpolygenist, “scientific” defenses of slavery, no argument s ever matched in absurdity the doctrines of S. A. Cartwright,a prominent Southern physician. (I do not cite these as typical andI doub t that many intelligent Southerner s paid them muc h attention; I merely wish to illustrate an extreme within the rang e of“scientific” argument.) Cartwright traced the problems of blackpeopl e to inadequat e decarbonization of blood in the lungs (insufficient remova l of carbon dioxide): “It is the defective . . . atmospherization of the blood, conjoined with a deficiency of cerebralAMERICA N POLYGEN Y AN D CRANIOMETR Ymatter in the cranium . . . that is the true cause of that debasementof mind, which has rendered the peopl e of Afric a unabl e to takecare of themselves ” (from Chorover , 1979; all quotes from Cartwright ar e taken from paper s he presented to the 1851 meeting ofthe Louisiana Medical Association.)Cartwright even had a name for it—dysesthesia, a disease ofinadequat e breathing. He described its symptoms in slaves: “Whe ndriven to labor .. . he performs the task assigned to him in a headlong and careless manner , treading dow n with his feet or cuttingwith his hoe the plants he is put to cultivate—breaking the tools heworks with, an d spoiling everything he touches. ” Ignorant Northerner s attributed this behavior to “the debasing influence of slavery, ” but Cartwright recognized it as the expression of a truedisease. He identified insensibility to pain as anothe r symptom:“Whe n the unfortunat e individual is subjected to punishment, heneither feels pain of any consequenc e . . . [nor] any unusua l resentment mor e than stupid sulkiness. In some cases . . . there appear sto be an almost total loss of feeling. ” Cartwright proposed the following cure :T h e liver, skin and kidneys should be stimulated to activity .. . to assistin decarbonizing the blood. Th e best means to stimulate the skin is, first,to have the patient well washed with warm water and soap; then to anointit all over with oil, and to slap the oil in with a broad leather strap; then toput the patient to some hard kind of work in the open air and sunshinethat will compel him to expand his lungs, as chopping wood, splitting rails,or sawing with the crosscut or whip saw.Cartwright did not end his catalogue of diseases with dysesthesia. He wondere d why slaves often tried to flee, and identifiedthe cause as a mental disease called drapetomania, or the insanedesire to run away. “Lik e children, they ar e constrained by unalter –able physiological laws, to love those in authority ove r them.Hence , from a law of his nature , the negr o can no mor e help loving a kind master , than the child can help loving he r that gives itsuck.” For slaves afflicted with drapetomania , Cartwright proposed a behavioral cure : owner s should avoid both extreme per –missiveness and cruelty: “The y hav e only to be kept in that state,and treated like children, to prevent and cur e them from runningaway. “T h e defender s of slavery did not need polygeny . Religion stillT H E MISMEASUR E O F MA Nstood above science as a primar y source for the rationalization ofsocial order . But the American debat e on polygeny may representthe last time that argument s in the scientific mod e did not form afirs t line of defens e for the status quo and the unalterable qualityof huma n differences . Th e Civil Wa r lay jus t aroun d the corner ,b ut so did 1859 and Darwin’ s Origin of Species. Subsequent argument s for slavery, colonialism, racial differences , class structures,a nd sex roles would go forth primarily unde r the banne r of science.FIVET he HereditarianTheory of IQAn American InventionAlfred Binet and the original purposes of the Binet scaleBinet flirts with craniometryWhen Alfred Binet (1857-1911), director of the psychologylaboratory at the Sorbonne, first decided to study the measurementof intelligence, he turned naturally to the favored method of awaning century and to the work of his great countryman PaulBroca. He set out, in short, to measure skulls, never doubting atfirst the basic conclusion of Broca’s school:T h e relationship between the intelligence of subjects and the volumeof their head .. . is very real and has been confirmed by all methodicalinvestigators, without exception. .. . As these works include observationson several hundred subjects, we conclude that the preceding proposition[of correlation between head size and intelligence] must be considered asincontestable (Binet, 1898, pp. 294-295).During the next three years, Binet published nine papers oncraniometry in L’Annee psychologique, the j o u r n al he had founded in
By the end of this effort, he was no longer so sure. Fivestudies on the heads of school children had destroyed his originalfaith.Binet went to various schools, making Broca’s recommendedmeasurement s on the heads of pupils designated by teachers astheir smartest and stupidest. In several studies, he increased hissample from 62 to 230 subjects. “I began, ” he wrote, “with the ideaT H E HEREDITARI A N THEOR Y O F I Qimpressed upon me by the studies of so many other scientists, thatintellectual superiority is tied to superiority of cerebral volume “(1900, p. 427).Binet found his differences, but they were much too small tomatter and might only record the greater average height of betterpupils (1.401 vs. 1.378 meters). Most measures did favor the betterstudents, but the average difference between good and pooramounted to a mere millimeter—”extremement petite” as Binet wrote.Binet did not observe larger differences in the anterior region ofthe skull, where the seat of higher intelligence supposedly lay, andwhere Broca had always found greatest disparity between superiorand less fortunate people. To make matters worse, some measuresusually judge d crucial in the assessment of mental worth favoredthe poorer pupils—fo r anteroposterior diameter of the skull,poorer students exceeded their smarter colleagues by 3.0 mm .Even if most results tended to run in the “right” direction, themethod was surely useless for assessing individuals. Th e differences were too small, and Binet also found that poor students varied more than their smarter counterparts. Thus , although thesmallest value usually belonged to a poor pupil, the highest oftendid as well.Binet also fueled his ow n doubts with an extraordinary studyof his own suggestibility, an experiment in the primary theme ofthis book—th e tenacity of unconscious bias and the surprisingmalleability of “objective,” quantitative data in the interest of a preconceived idea. “I feared,” Binet wrote (1900, p. 323), “that inmaking measurement s on heads with the intention of finding a difference in volume between an intelligent and a less intelligenthead, I would be led to increase, unconsciously and in good faith,the cephalic volume of intelligent heads and to decrease that ofunintelligent heads. ” He recognized the greater dange r lurkingwhen biases are submerged and a scientist believes in his ow nobjectivity (1900, p. 324): “Suggestibility . . . works less on an act ofwhich we have full consciousness, than on a half-conscious act —and this is precisely its danger. “H ow much better off we would be if all scientists submittedthemselves to self-scrutiny in so forthright a fashion: “I want tostate very explicitly,” Binet wrote (1900, p. 324), “what I haveobserved about myself. Th e details that follow are those that theIJ8 T H E MISMEASUR E O F MA Nmajority of authors do not publish; one does not want to let thembe known. ” Both Binet and his student Simon had measured thesame heads of “idiots and imbeciles” at a hospital where Simon wasin intern. Binet noted that, for one crucial measurement, Simon’svalues were consistently less than his. Binet therefore returned tomeasure the subjects a second time. Th e first time, Binet admits,“I took my measures mechanically, without any other preconception than to remain faithful to my methods. ” But the second time“I had a different preconception. .. . I was bothered by the difference” between Simon and myself. “I wanted to reduce it to its truevalue. . . . Thi s is self-suggestion. Now , capital fact, the measurestaken during the second experiment, unde r the expectation of adiminution, are indeed smaller than the measures taken [on thesame heads] during the first experiment. ” In fact, all but one headh ad “shrunk” between the two experiment s and the average diminution was 3 mm— a good deal more than the average differencebetween skulls of bright and poor students in his previous work.Binet spoke graphically of his discouragement:I was persuaded that I had attacked an intractable problem. Th e measures had required travelling, and tiring procedures of all sorts; and theyended with the discouraging conclusion that there was often not a millimeter of difference between the cephalic measures of intelligent and lessintelligent students. Th e idea of measuring intelligence by measuringheads seemed ridiculous. .. . I was on the point of abandoning this work,and I didn’t want to publish a single line of it (1900, p. 403).At the end, Binet snatched a weak and dubious victory fromthe jaws of defeat. He looked at his entire sample again, separatedo ut the five top and bottom pupils from eacb group, and eliminated all those in the middle. Th e differences between extremeswere greater and mor e consistent—3 to 4 mm on average. But eventhis difference did not exceed the average potential bias due tosuggestibility. Craniometry, the jewel of nineteenth-century objectivity, was not destined for continued celebration.Binet’s scale and the birth of IQWhen Binet returned to the measurement of intelligence in1904, he remembered his previous frustration and switched toother techniques. He abandoned what he called the “medical”T H E HEREDITARIA N THEOR Y O F I Qapproaches of craniometry and the search for Lombroso’ s anatomical stigmata, and decided instead on “psychological” methods . Th eliterature on mental testing, at the time, was relatively small anddecidedly inconclusive. Galton, without notable success, had exper –imented with a series of measurements , mostly records of physiolo gy and reaction time, rather than tests of reasoning. Binet decidedto construct a set of tasks that might assess various aspects of reasoning more directly.In 1904 Binet was commissioned by the minister of publiceducation to perform a study for a specific, practical purpose: todevelop techniques for identifying those children whose lack ofsuccess in normal classrooms suggested the need for some form ofspecial education. Binet chose a purely pragmatic course. Hedecided to bring together a large series of short tasks, related toeveryday problems of life (counting coins, or assessing which faceis “prettier,” for example) , but supposedly involving such basicprocesses of reasoning as “direction (ordering) , comprehension,invention and censure (correction)” (Binet, 1909). Learned skillslike reading would not be treated explicitly. Th e tests were administered individually by trained examiner s who led subjects throughthe series of tasks, graded in their order of difficulty. Unlike previous tests designed to measure specific and independent “faculties” of mind, Binet’s scale was a hodgepodg e of diverse activities.He hoped that by mixing together enough tests of different abilities he would be able to abstract a child’s general potential with asingle score. Binet emphasized the empirical nature of his workwith a famous dictum (1911 , p. 329): “On e might almost say, ‘Itmatters very little what the tests are so long as they arenumerous.’ “Binet published three versions of the scale before his death in1911 . Th e original 1905 edition simply arranged the tasks in anascending order of difficulty. Th e 1908 version established the criterion used in measuring the so-called IQ ever since. Binet decidedto assign an age level to each task, defined as the younges t age atwhich a child of normal intelligence should be able to complete thetask successfully. A child began the Binet test with tasks for theyoungest ag e and proceeded in sequence until he could no longercomplete the tasks. Th e age associated with the last tasks he couldperform became his “mental age, ” and his general intellectual leveli8o T H E MI S MEASUR E O F MA Nwas calculated by subtracting this mental age from his true chronological age. Children whose mental ages were sufficiently behindtheir chronological ages could then be identified for special educational programs , thus fulfilling Binet’s charge from the ministry.In 1912 the German psychologist W. Stern argued that mental ag eshould be divided by chronological age, not subtracted from it,*and the intelligence quotient, or IQ , was born.IQ testing has had momentous consequences in our century. Inthis light, we should investigate Binet’s motives, if only to appreciate ho w the tragedies of misuse might have been avoided if itsfounde r had lived and his concerns been heeded.In contrast with Binet’s general intellectual approach, the mostcurious aspect of his scale is its practical, empirical focus. Manyscientists work this way by dee p conviction or explicit inclination.The y believe that theoretical speculation is vain and that true science progresses by induction from simple experiment s pursued togather basic facts, not to test elaborate theories. But Binet was primarily a theoretician. He asked big questions and participated withenthusiasm in the major philosophical debates of his profession.He had a long-standing interest in theories of intelligence. He published his first book on the “Psychology of Reasoning” in 1886, andfollowed in 1903 with his famous “Experimental Study of Intelligence, ” in which he abjured previous commitment s and developeda new structure for analyzing human thinking. Ye t Binet explicitlydeclined to award any theoretical interpretation to his scale ofintelligence, the most extensive and important work he had donein his favorite subject. Why should a great theoretician have actedin such a curious and apparently contradictory way?Binet did seek “to separate natural intelligence and instruction”(1905, p. 42) in his scale: “It is the intelligence alone that we seekto measure, by disregarding in so far as possible, the degre e ofinstruction which the child possesses. . . . We give him nothing toread, nothing to write, and submit him to no test in which he might

Division is more appropriate because it is the relative, not the absolute, magnitudeof disparity between mental and chronological age that matters. A two-year disparity between mental age two and chronological age four may denote a far severerdegree of deficiency than a two-year disparity between mental age fourteen andchronological age sixteen. Binet’s method of subtraction would give the same resultin both cases, while Stern’s IQ measures 50 for the first case and 88 for the second.(Stern multiplied the actual quotient by 100 to eliminate the decimal point.)T H E HEREDITARI A N THEOR Y O F I Q 181succeed by means of rote learning” (1905, p. 42). “I t is a speciallyinteresting feature of these tests that they permit us, when necessary, to free a beautiful native intelligence from the trammels ofthe school” (1908, p. 259).Yet, beyond this obvious desire to remove the superficial effectsof clearly acquired knowledge , Binet declined to define and speculate upon the meaning of the score he assigned to each child.Intelligence, Binet proclaimed, is too complex to capture with asingle number . Thi s number , later called IQ , is only a rough,empirical guide constructed for a limited, practical purpose:T he scale, properly speaking, does not permit the measure of the intelligence, because intellectual qualities are not superposable, and thereforecannot be measured as linear surfaces are measured (1905, p. 40).Moreover , the numbe r is only an average of many performances, not an entity unto itself. Intelligence, Binet reminds us, isnot a single, scalable thing like height. “We feel it necessary to insiston this fact,” Binet (1911 ) cautions, “because later, for the sake ofsimplicity of statement, we will speak of a child of 8 years havingthe intelligence of a child of 7 or 9 years; these expressions, ifaccepted arbitrarily, may give place to illusions.” Binet was toogood a theoretician to fall into the logical error that John StuartMill had identified—”to believe that whatever received a namemust be an entity or being, having an independent existence of itsown.”Binet also had a social motive for his reticence. He greatlyfeared that his practical device, if reified as an entity, could beperverted and used as an indelible label, rather than as a guide foridentifying children who needed help. He worried that schoolmasters with “exaggerated zeal” might use IQ as a convenient excuse:“They seem to reason in the following way: ‘Her e is an excellentopportunity for getting rid of all the children who trouble us,’ andwithout the true critical spirit, they designate all who are unruly, ordisinterested in the school” (1905, p. 169). But he feared evenmore what has since been called the “self-fulfilling prophesy.” Arigid label may set a teacher’s attitude and eventually divert achild’s behavior into a predicted path:h is really too easy to discover signs of backwardness in an individuale r> one is forewarned. This would be to operate as the graphologists didT H E MISMEASUR E O F MA Nwho, when Dreyfus was believed to be guilty, discovered in his handwritingsigns of a traitor or a spy” (1905, p. 170).N o t only did Binet decline to label IQ as inborn intelligence; healso refused to regard it as a general device for ranking all pupilsaccording to mental worth. He devised his scale only for the limitedpurpose of his commission by the ministry of education: as a practical guide for identifying children whose poor performance indicated a need for special education—thos e who we would today calllearning disabled or mildly retarded. Binet wrote (1908, p. 263):” We are of the opinion that the most valuable use of our scale willnot be its application to the normal pupils, but rather to those ofinferior grades of intelligence.” As to the causes of poor performance, Binet refused to speculate. His tests, in any case, could notdecide (1905 , p. 37):Our purpose is to be able to measure the intellectual capacity of a childwho is brought to us in order to know whether he is normal or retarded.We should therefore study his condition at the time and that only. Wehave nothing to do either with his past history or with his future; consequently, we shall neglect his etiology, and we shall make no attempt todistinguish between acquired and congenital idiocy. .. . As to that whichconcerns his future, we shall exercise the same abstinence; we do notattempt to establish or prepare a prognosis, and we leave unanswered thequestion of whether this retardation is curable, or even improvable. Weshall limit ourselves to ascertaining the truth in regard to his present mental state.B ut of one thing Binet was sure: whatever the cause of poorperformance in school, the aim of his scale was to identify in orderto help and improve, not to label in order to limit. Some childrenmight be innately incapable of normal achievement, but all couldimprove with special help.T h e difference between strict hereditarians and their opponents is not, as some caricatures suggest, the belief that a child’sperformance is all inborn or all a function of environment andlearning. I doubt that the most committed antihereditarians haveever denied the existence of innate variation amon g children. Th edifferences are mor e a matter of social policy and educational practice. Hereditarians view their measures of intelligence as markersof permanent, inborn limits. Children, so labeled, should be sorted,T H E HEREDITARIA N THEOR Y O F I Q 183trained according to their inheritance and channeled into professions appropriate for their biology. Mental testing becomes a theory of limits. Antihereditarians , like Binet, test in order to identifyand help. Without denying the evident fact that not all children,whatever their training, will enter the company of Newton andEinstein, they emphasize the power of creative education toincrease the achievement s of all children, often in extensive andunanticipated ways. Mental testing becomes a theory for enhancingpotential through prope r education.Binet spoke eloquently of well-meaning teachers, caught in theunwarranted pessimism of their invalid hereditarian assumptions(1909, pp. 16-17):As I know from experience, . . . they seem to admit implicitly that in aclass where we find the best, we must also find the worst, and that this is anatural and inevitable phenomenon, with which a teacher must notbecome preoccupied, and that it is like the existence of rich and poorwithin a society. What a profound error.H o w can we help a child if we label him as unable to achieve bybiological proclamation?If we do nothing, if we don’t intervene actively and usefully, he willcontinue to lose time . . . and will finally become discouraged. Th e situation is very serious for him, and since his is not an exceptional case (sincechildren with defective comprehension are legion), we might say that it isa serious question for all of us and for all of society. Th e child who losesthe taste for work in class strongly risks being unable to acquire it after heleaves school (1909, p. 100).Binet railed against the motto “stupidity is for a long time”(“quand on est bete, c’estpour longtemps”), and upbraided teachers who“are not interested in students who lack intelligence. The y haveneither sympathy nor respect for them, and their intemperate language leads them to say such things in their presence as ‘Thi s is achild who will never amount to anything .. . he is poorly endowed• • • he is not intelligent at all.’ Ho w often have I heard these imprudent words” (1909, p. 100). Binet then cites an episode in his ownbaccalaureate when one examine r told him that he would nevernave a “true” philosophical spirit: “Never ! What a momentousw °rd . Some recent thinkers seem to have given their moral supportt othese deplorable verdicts by affirming that an individual’s intel-184 T H E MISMEASUR E O F MA Nligence is a fixed quandty , a quantity that cannot be increased. Wemust protest and reac t against this brutal pessimism; we mus t tryto demonstrate tha t it is founded upon nothing” (1909, p. 101).T h e children identified by Binet’s test were to be helped, notindelibly labeled. Bine t had definite pedagogical suggestions, andmany were implemented . He believed, first of all, that specialeducation must be tailored to the individual needs of disadvantaged children: it mus t be based on “their character and their aptitudes, and on the necessity for adapting ourselves to their needsa nd their capacities” (1909, p. 15). Binet recommended small classrooms of fifteen to twenty students, compared with sixty to eightythen commo n in publi c schools catering to poor children. In particular, he advocate d special methods of education, including aprogram that he called “mental orthopedics”:What they should learn first is not the subjects ordinarily taught, however important they may be; they should be given lessons of will, of attention, of discipline; before exercises in grammar, they need to be exercisedin mental orthopedics; in a word they must learn how to learn (1908, p.257)-Binet’s interesting program of mental orthopedics included aset of physical exercises designed to improve , by transfer to mentalfunctioning, the will, attention, and discipline that Binet viewed asprerequisites for studying academic subjects. In one, called“Vexercise des statues,” and designed to increase attention span, children move d vigorousl y until told to adopt and retain an immobileposition. (I played this game as a kid in the streets of Ne w York;we also called it “statues.”) Each day the period of immobility wouldbe increased. In another , designed to improve speed, childrenfilled a piece of pape r with as many dots as they could produc e inthe allotted time.Binet spoke with pleasure about the success of his special classrooms (1909, p. 104) and argued that pupils so benefited had notonly increased thei r knowledge, but their intelligence as well. Intelligence, in any meaningful sense of the word, can be augmented bygood education; it is not a fixed and inborn quantity:It is in this practical sense, the only one accessible to us, that we say thatthe intelligence of these children has been increased. We have increasedwhat constitutes the intelligence of a pupil: the capacity to learn and toassimilate instruction.T H E HEREDITARIA N THEOR Y O F I Q i83The dismantling of Binet’s intentions in AmericaIn summary , Binet insisted upon three cardinal principles forusing his tests. All his caveats were later disregarded, and his intentions overturned, by the American hereditarians who translated hisscale into written form as a routine device for testing all children.

Th e scores are a practical device; they do not buttress anytheory of intellect. The y do not define anything innate or permanent. We may not designate what they measure as “intelligence” orany other reified entity.
Th e scale is a rough, empirical guide for identifying mildlyretarded and learning-disabled children who need special help. I tis not a device for ranking normal children.
Whatever the cause of difficulty in children identified forhelp, emphasis shall be placed upon improvement through specialtraining. Lo w scores shall not be used to mark children as innatelyincapable.If Binet’s principles had been followed, and his tests consistently used as he intended, we would have been spared a majormisuse of science in our century. Ironically, many American schoolboards have come full cycle, and now use IQ tests only as Binetoriginally recommended: as instruments for assessing childrenwith specific learning problems. Speaking personally, I feel thattests of the IQ type were helpful in the prope r diagnosis of my ow nlearning-disabled son. His average score, the IQ itself, meant nothing, for it was only an amalgam of some very high and very lowscores; but the pattern of low values indicated his areas of deficit.T h e misuse of mental tests is not inherent in the idea of testingitself. It arises primarily from two fallacies, eagerly (so it seems)embraced by those who wish to use tests for the maintenance ofsocial ranks and distinctions: reification and hereditarianism. Th enext chapter shall treat reification—the assumption that test scoresrepresent a single, scalable thing in the head called general intelligence.T h e hereditarian fallacy is not the simple claim that IQ is tosome degree “heritable.” I have no doubt that it is, though thee gre e has clearly been exaggerated by the most avid hereditarians – I t is hard to find any broad aspect of huma n performance oranatomy that has no heritable component at all. Th e hereditariana c y resides in two false implications draw n from this basic fact:i86 T H E MISMEASUR E O F MA N
Th e equation of “heritable” with “inevitable.” To a biologist,heritability refers to the passage of traits or tendencies along familylines as a result of genetic transmission. It says little about the rangeof environmental modification to which these traits are subject. Ino ur vernacular, “inherited” often means “inevitable.” But not to abiologist. Gene s do not make specific bits and pieces of a body; theycode for a range of forms unde r an array of environmental conditions. Moreover , even when a trait has been built and set, environmental intervention may still modify inherited defects. Millions ofAmericans see normally through lenses that correct innate deficiencies of vision. Th e claim that IQ is so-many percent “heritable”does not conflict with the belief that enriched education canincrease what we call, also in the vernacular, “intelligence.” A partially inherited low I Q might be subject to extensive improvementthrough prope r education. An d it might not. Th e mere fact of itsheritability permits no conclusion.
Th e confusion of within- and between-group heredity. Th emajor political impact of hereditarian theories does not arise fromthe inferred heritability of tests, but from a logically invalid extension. Studies of the heritability of IQ , performed by such traditional methods as comparing scores of relatives, or contrastingscores of adopted children with both their biological and legal parents, are all of the “within-group” type—tha t is, they permit anestimate of heritability within a single, coherent population (whiteAmericans , for example) . Th e common fallacy consists in assumingthat if heredity explains a certain percentage of variation amongindividuals within a group, it must also explain a similar percentageof the difference in average IQ between groups—white s andblacks, for example. But variation amon g individuals within agroup and differences in mean values between groups are entirelyseparate phenomena . On e item provides no license for speculationabout the other.A hypothetical and noncontroversial exampl e will suffice.Huma n height has a highe r heritability than any value ever proposed for IQ . Tak e two separate groups of males. Th e first, withan average height of 5 feet 10 inches, live in a prosperous American town. Th e second, with an average height of 5 feet 6 inches,are starving in a third-world village. Heritability is 95 percent or soin each place—meaning only that relatively tall fathers tend to haveT H E HEREDITARIA N THEOR Y O F I Qtall sons and relatively short fathers short sons. Thi s high withingroup heritability argues neither for nor against the possibility thatbetter nutrition in the next generation might raise the averageheight of third-world villagers above that of prosperous Americans. Likewise, IQ could be highly heritable within groups , and theaverage difference between whites and blacks in America mightstill only record the environmental disadvantages of blacks.I have often been frustrated with the following response to thisadmonition: “O h well, I see what you mean, and you’re right intheory. Ther e may be no necessary connection in logic, but isn’t itmore likely all the same that mean differences between groupswould have the same causes as variation within groups. ” Tb eanswer is still “no. ” Within- and between-group heredity are nottied by rising degrees of probability as heritability increases withingroups and differences enlarge between them. Th e two phenomena are simply separate. Few argument s are mor e dangerous thanthe ones that “feel” right but can’t be justified.Alfred Binet avoided these fallacies and stuck by his three principles. American psychologists perverted Binet’s intention andinvented the hereditarian theory of IQ . The y reified Binet’s scores,and took them as measures of an entity called intelligence. The yassumed that intelligence was largely inherited, and developed aseries of specious argument s confusing cultural differences withinnate properties. The y believed that inherited I Q scores markedpeople and groups for an inevitable station in life. An d theyassumed that average differences between groups were largely theproducts of heredity, despite manifest and profound variation inquality of life.Thi s chapter analyzes the major works of the three pioneers ofhereditarianism in America: H. H. Goddard , who brought Binet’sle to America and reified its scores as innate intelligence; L. M.erman, who developed the Stanford-Binet scale, and dreamed ofa rational society that would allocate professions by IQ scores; andR- M. Yerkes, who persuaded the army to test 1.75 million men inWorld War I, thus establishing the supposedly objective data thatvindicated hereditarian claims and led to the Immigration Restriction Ac t of 1924, with its low ceiling for lands suffering the blight° f poor genes.T h e hereditarian theory of IQ is a home-grow n Americani88 T H E M IS M E A SUR E O F MA Nproduct. If this claim seems paradoxical for a land with egalitariantraditions, remembe r also the jingoistic nationalism of World WarI, the fear of established old Americans facing a tide of cheap (andsometimes politically radical) labor immigrating from southern andeastern Europe, and above all our persistent, indigenous racism.H. H. Goddard and the menace of the feeble-mindedIntelligence as a Mendelian geneGODDARD IDENTIFIES THE MORONIt remains now for someone to determine the nature of feeble-mindedness and complete the theory of the intelligence quotient.— H. H. GODDARD, 1917 , in a review of Terman, 191 6Taxonom y is always a contentious issue because the world doesnot come to us in neat little packages. Th e classification of mentaldeficiency aroused a healthy debate early in our century. Tw o categories of a tripartite arrangement won general acceptance: idiotscould not develop full speech and had mental ages below three;imbeciles could not master written language and ranged fromthree to seven in mental age. (Both terms are now so entrenchedin the vernacular of invectives that few people recognize their technical status in an older psychology.) Idiots and imbeciles could becategorized and separated to the satisfaction of most professionals,for their affliction was sufficiently severe to warrant a diagnosis oftrue pathology. The y are not like us.But consider the nebulous and more threatening realm of“high-grade defectives”—the people who could be trained to function in society, the ones who established a bridge between patholo gy and normality and thereby threatened the taxonomic edifice.Thes e people, with mental ages of eight to twelve, were called debile(or weak) by the French. Americans and Englishmen usually calledthem “feeble-minded, ” a term mired in hopeless ambiguity becauseother psychologists used feeble-minded as a generic term for allmental defectives, not just those of high grade.Taxonomist s often confuse the invention of a name with thesolution of a problem. H. H. Goddard , the energetic and crusadingdirector of research at the Vineland Training School for FeebleMinded Girls and Boys in Ne w Jersey, made this crucial error. Hedevised a name for “high-grade ” defectives, a word that becameT H E HEREDITARIA N THEOR Y O F I Qentrenched in our languag e through a series of jokes that rivaledthe knock-knock or elephant jokes of other generations. Th e metaphorical whiskers on these jokes are now so long that most peoplewould probably grant an ancient pedigre e to the name . But Goddard invented the word in our century. He christened these people“morons, ” from a Greek word meaning foolish.Goddar d was the first popularizer of the Binet scale in America.He translated Binet’s articles into English, applied his tests, andagitated for their general use. He agreed with Binet that the testsworked best in identifying people jus t below the normal range —Goddard’ s newly christened morons. But the resemblance betweenBinet and Goddar d ends there. Binet refused to define his scoresas “intelligence,” and wished to identify in order to help. Goddar dregarded the scores as measures of a single, innate entity. Hewished to identify in order to recognize limits, segregate, and curtail breeding to prevent further deterioration of an endangeredAmerican stock, threatened by immigration from without and byprolific reproduction of its feeble-minded within.A UNILINEAR SCALE OF INTELLIGENCET h e attempt to establish a unilinear classification of mentaldeficiency, a rising scale from idiots to imbeciles to morons , embodies two commo n fallacies pervading most theories of biologicaldeterminism discussed in this book: the reification of intelligenceas a single, measurable entity; and the assumption, extending backto Morton’s skulls (pp.82—101) and forward to Jensen’s universalscaling of general intelligence (pp. 347-350), that evolution is a taleof unilinear progress, and that a single scale ascending fromprimitive to advanced represents the best way of ordering variation. Th e concept of progress is a deep prejudice with an ancientpedigree (Bury, 1920) and a subtle power , even over those whowould deny it explicitly (Nisbet, 1980).C an the plethora of causes and phenomena grouped unde r therubric of mental deficiency possibly be ordered usefully on a singlescale, with its implication that each person owes his rank to therelative amount of a single substance—and that mental deficiencymeans having less than most? Consider some phenomena mixedU P in the common number s once assigned to defectives of highgrade: general low-level mental retardation, specific learning disa-igo T H E MISMEASUR E O F MA Nbilities caused by local neurological damage , environmental disadvantages, cultural differences, hostility to testers. Consider some ofthe potential causes: inherited patterns of function, genetic pathologies arising accidentally and not passed in family lines, congenital brain damag e caused by maternal illness during pregnancy ,birth traumas, poor nutrition of fetuses and babies, a variety ofenvironmental disadvantages in early and later life. Yet, to God –dard, all people with mental ages between eight and twelve weremorons , all to be treated in roughly the same way: institutionalizedor carefully regulated, made happy by catering to their limits, and,above all, prevented from breeding.Goddar d may have been the most unsubtle hereditarian of all.He used his unilinear scale of mental deficiency to identify intelligence as a single entity, and he assumed that everything importantabout it was inborn and inherited in family lines. He wrote in 1920(quoted in Tuddenham , 1962, p. 491):Stated in its boldest form, our thesis is that the chief determiner ofhuman conduct is a unitary mental process which we call intelligence: thatthis process is conditioned by a nervous mechanism which is inborn: thatthe degree of efficiency to be attained by that nervous mechanism and theconsequent grade of intellectual or mental level for each individual isdetermined by the kind of chromosomes that come together with theunion of the germ cells: that it is but little affected by any later influencesexcept such serious accidents as may destroy part of the mechanism.Goddar d extended the range of social phenomena caused bydifferences in innate intelligence until it encompassed almosteverything that concerns us about human behavior. Beginningwith morons , and working up the scale, he attributed most undesirable behavior to inherited mental deficiency of the offenders.Thei r problems are caused not only by stupidity per se, but by thelink between deficient intelligence and immorality.* Hig h intelligence not only permits us to do our sums; it also engender s thegood judgmen t that underlies all moral behavior.T h e intelligence controls the emotions and the emotions are controlledin proportion to the degree of intelligence. .. . It follows that if there is*The link of morality to intelligence was a favorite eugenical theme. Thorndike(1940, pp. 264-265), refuting a popular impression that all monarchs are reprobates, cited a correlation coefficient of 0.56 for the estimated intelligence vs. theestimated morality of 269 male members of European royal families!T H E HEREDITARIA N THEOR Y O F I Qlittle intelligence the emotions will be uncontrolled and whether they bestrong or weak will result in actions that are unregulated, uncontrolledand, as experience proves, usually undesirable. Therefore, when we measure the intelligence of an individual and learn that he has so much lessthan normal as to come within the group that we call feeble-minded, wehave ascertained by far the most important fact about him (1919, p. 272).Many criminals, most alcoholics and prostitutes, and even the“ne’er do wells” who simply don’t fit in, are morons : “We knowwhat feeble-mindednes s is, and we have come to suspect all personsw ho are incapable of adapting themselves to their environmentand living up to the conventions of society or acting sensibly, ofbeing feeble-minded” (1914 , p. 571).At the next level of the merely dull, we find the toiling masses,doing what comes naturally. “Th e people who are doing thedrudgery, ” Goddar d writes (1919 , p. 246), “are, as a rule, in theirproper places.”We must next learn that there are great groups of men, laborers, whoare but little above the child, who must be told what to do and shown howto do it; and who, if we would avoid disaster, must not be put into positionswhere they will have to act upon their own initiative or their own judgment. . . . Ther e are only a few leaders, most must be followers (1919, pp.243-244).At the uppe r end, intelligent men rule in comfort and by right.Speaking before a group of Princeton undergraduate s in 1919 ,Goddard proclaimed:Now the fact is, that workmen may have a 10 year intelligence whileyou have a 20. To demand for him such a home as you enjoy is as absurdas it would be to insist that every laborer should receive a graduate fellowship. How can there be such a thing as social equality with this wide rangeof mental capacity?“Democracy,” Goddar d argued (1919 , p. 237), “means that thepeople rule by selecting the wisest, most intelligent and mosthuman to tell them what to do to be happy. Thu s Democrac y is amethod for arriving at a truly benevolent aristocracy.”BREAKING THE SCALE INTO MENDEL1AN COMPARTMENTSBut if intelligence forms a single and unbroken scale, how canW esolve the social problems that beset us? For at one level, low‘ntelligence generates sociopaths, while at the next grade, indus-T H E MISMEASUR E O F MA Ntrial society needs docile and dull workers to run its machinery andaccept low recompence. Ho w can we convert the unbroken scaleinto two categories at this crucial point, and still maintain the ideathat intelligence is a single, inherited entity? We can now under –stand why Goddar d lavished so much attention upon the moron.T h e moron threatens racial health because he ranks highest amongt he undesirable and might, if not identified, be allowed to flourisha nd propagate. We all recognize the idiot and imbecile and knowwhat must be done ; the scale must be broken jus t above the levelof the moron.T he idiot is not our greatest problem. He is indeed loathsome. . . .Nevertheless, he lives his life and is done. He does not continue the racewith a line of children like himself. .. . It is the moron type that makes forus our great problem (1912, pp. 101-102).Goddar d worked in the first flourish of excitement that greetedthe rediscovery of Mendel’ s work and the basic deciphering ofheredity. We no w know that virtually every major feature of ourbody is built by the interaction of many genes with each other andwith an external environment. But in these early days, many biologists naively assumed that all human traits would behave like thecolor, size, or wrinkling of Mendel’s peas: they believed, in short,that even the most complex parts of a body might be built by singlegenes, and that variation in anatomy or behavior would record thedifferent dominant and recessive forms of these genes. Eugenicistsseized upon this foolish notion with avidity, for it allowed them toassert that all undesirable traits might be traced to single genes andeliminated with proper strictures upon breeding. Th e early literature of eugenics is filled with speculations, and pedigrees laboriously compiled and fudged, about the gene for Wanderlust tracedthrough the family lines of naval captains, or the gene for temperament that makes some of us placid and others domineering. Wemust not be misled by how silly such ideas seem today; they represented orthodox genetics for a brief time, and had a major socialimpact in America.Goddar d joined the transient bandwagon with a hypothesis thatmust represent an ultimate in the attempted reification of intelligence. He tried to trace the pedigrees of mental defectives in hisVineland School and concluded that “feeble-mindedness ” obeyedMendelian rules of inheritance. Mental deficiency mus t thereforeT H E HEREDITARIA N THEOR Y O F I Q ‘ 9 3be a definite thing, and it must be governed by a single gene ,undoubtedl y recessive to normal intelligence (1914 , p. 539). “Nor –mal intelligence,” Goddar d concluded, “seems to be a unit character and transmitted in true Mendelian fashion” (1914 , p. ix).Goddar d claimed that he had been compelled to make thisunlikely conclusion by the press of evidence, not by any prior hopeor prejudice.Any theories or hypotheses that have been presented have been merelythose that were suggested by the data themselves, and have been workedout in an effort to understand what the data seem to comprise. Some ofthe conclusions are as surprising to the writer and as difficult for him toaccept as they are likely to be to many readers (1914, p. viii).C a n we seriously view Goddar d as a forced and reluctant convert to a hypothesis that fit his general scheme so well and solvedhis most pressing problem so neatly? A single gene for normalintelligence removed the potential contradiction between a unilinear scale that marked intelligence as a single, measurable entity,and a desire to separate and identify the mentally deficient as acategory apart. Goddar d had broken his scale into two sections atjust the right place: morons carried a double dose of the bad recessive; dull laborers had at least one copy of the normal gene andcould be set before their machines. Moreover , the scourge of feeble-mindedness might now be eliminated by schemes of breedingeasily planned. On e gene can be traced, located, and bred out. I fone hundred genes regulate intelligence, eugenic breeding mus tfail or proceed with hopeless sloth.THE PROPER CARE AND FEEDING (BUT NOT BREEDING) OF MORONSIf mental deficiency is the effect of a single gene, the path to itseventual elimination lies evidently before us: do not allow suchpeople to bear children:If both parents are feeble-minded all the children will be feebleminded. It is obvious that such matings should not be allowed. It is perfectly clear that no feeble-minded person should ever be allowed to marryor to become a parent. It is obvious that if this rule is to be carried out the•ntelligent part of society must enforce it (1914, p. 561).I f morons could control their ow n sexual urges and desist fort u e good of mankind, we might permit them to live freely amongU s – But they cannot, because immorality and stupidity are inexor-194 T H E MISMEASUR E O F MA Nably linked. Th e wise man can control his sexuality in a rationalmanner : “Consider for a moment the sex emotion, supposed to bethe most uncontrollable of all human instincts; yet it is notoriousthat the intelligent man controls even this” (1919 , p. 273). Th emoron cannot behave in so exemplary and abstemious a fashion:They are not only lacking in control but they are lacking often in theperception of moral qualities; if they are not allowed to marry they arenevertheless not hindered from becoming parents. So that if we are absolutely to prevent a feeble-minded person from becoming a parent, something must be done other than merely prohibiting the marrying. To thisend there are two proposals: the first is colonization, the second is sterilization (1914, p. 566).Goddard did not oppos e sterilization, but he regarded it asimpractical because traditional sensibilities of a society not yetwholly rational would prevent such widespread mayhem. Colonization in exemplary institutions like his ow n at Vineland, Ne w Jersey, must be our preferred solution. Onl y here could thereproduction of morons be curtailed. I f the public balked at thegreat expense of building so many new centers for confinement,the cost could easily be recouped by its ow n savings:If such colonies were provided in sufficient number to take care of allthe distinctly feeble-minded cases in the community, they would verylargely take the place of our present almshouses and prisons, and theywould greatly decrease the numbers in our insane hospitals. Such colonieswould save an annual loss in property and life, due to the action of theseirresponsible people, sufficient to nearly, or quite, offset the expense ofthe new plant (1912, pp. 105-106).Inside these institutions, morons could operate in contentmentat their biologically appointed level, denied only the basic biologyof their ow n sexuality. Goddar d ended his book on the causes ofmental deficiency with this plea for the care of institutionalizedmorons: “Trea t them as children according to their mental age,constantly encourag e and praise, never discourage or scold; andkeep them happy” (1919 , p. 327).Preventing the immigration and propagation of moronsOnc e Goddar d had identified the cause of feeble-mindednessin a single gene, the cure seemed simple enough: don’t allow nativeT H E HEREDITARIA N THEOR Y O F I Q 195morons to breed and keep foreign ones out. As a contribution tothe second step, Goddar d and his associates visited Ellis Island in1912 “to observe conditions and offer any suggestions as to whatmight be done to secure a mor e thorough examination of immigrants for the purpos e of detecting mental defectives” (Goddard,1917 , p. 253).As Goddar d described the scene, a fog hun g over Ne w Yorkharbor that day and no immigrants could land. But one hundredwere about ready to leave, when Goddar d intervened: “We pickedout one youn g man whom we suspected was defective, and,through the interpreter, proceeded to give him the test. Th e boytested 8 by the Binet scale. Th e interpreter said, ‘I could not havedone that when I came to this country,’ and seemed to think thetest unfair. We convinced him that the boy was defective” (Goddard, 1913 , p. 105).Encouraged by this, one of the first applications of the Binetscale in America, Goddar d raised some funds for a mor e thoroughstudy and, in the spring of 1913 , sent two women to Ellis Island fortwo and a half months . The y were instructed to pick out the feebleminded by sight, a task that Goddar d preferred to assign towomen, to whom he granted innately superior intuition:After a person has had considerable experience in this work, he almostgets a sense of what a feeble-minded person is so that he can tell one afaroff. Th e people who are best at this work, and who I believe should do thiswork, are women. Women seem to have closer observation than men. Itwas quite impossible for others to see how these two young women couldpick out the feeble-minded without the aid of the Binet test at all ( 1913, p.106).Goddard’ s women tested thirty-five Jews, twenty-two Hungar –ians, fifty Italians, and forty-five Russians. Thes e groups could notbe regarded as random samples because government officials hadalready “culled out those they recognized as defective.” To balancethis bias, Goddar d and his associates “passed by the obviously normal. Tha t left us the great mass of ‘average immigrants.’ ” (1917 ,p. 244). (I am continually amazed by the unconscious statements ofprejudice that slip into supposedly objective accounts. Not e herethat average immigrants are below normal, or at least not obviouslynormal—the proposition that Goddar d was supposedly testing, notasserting a priori.)T H E MI S MEASUR E O F MA NBinet tests on the four groups led to an astounding result: 83percent of the Jews, 80 percent of the Hungarians , 79 percent ofthe Italians, and 87 percent of the Russians were feeble-minded —that is, below age twelve on the Binet scale. Goddar d himself wasflabbergasted: could anyone be made to believe that four-fifths ofa ny nation were morons? “Th e results obtained by the foregoingevaluation of the data are so surprising and difficult of acceptancethat they can hardly stand by themselves as valid” (1917 , p. 247).Perhaps the tests had not been adequately explained by interpreters? But the Jews had been tested by a Yiddish-speaking psychologist, and they ranked no higher than the other groups . Eventually,Goddar d monkied about with the tests, tossed several out, and gothis figures dow n to 40 to 50 percent, but still he was disturbed.Goddard’ s figures were even more absurd than he imaginedfor two reasons, one obvious, the other less so. As a nonevidentreason, Goddard’ s original translation of the Binet scale scoredpeopl e harshly and made morons out of subjects usually regardedas normal. When Terma n devised the Stanford-Binet scale in 1916,he found that Goddard’ s version ranked people well below his own.Terma n reports (1916 , p. 62) that of 104 adults tested by him asbetween twelve and fourteen years mental ag e (low, but normalintelligence), 50 percent were morons on the Goddar d scale.For the evident reason, consider a group of frightened mena nd women who speak no English and who have jus t endured anoceanic voyag e in steerage. Most are poor and have never gone toschool; many have never held a pencil or pen in their hand. The ymarch off the boat; one of Goddard’ s intuitive women takes themaside shortly thereafter, sits them down, hands them a pencil, andasks them to reproduce on paper a figure shown to them a momentago, but now withdrawn from their sight. Could their failure be aresult of testing conditions, of weakness, fear, or confusion, ratherthan of innate stupidity? Goddar d considered the possibility, butrejected it:The next question is ‘drawing a design from memory,’ which is passedby only 50 percent. To the uninitiated this will not seem surprising since itlooks hard, and even those who are familiar with the fact that normalchildren of 10 pass it without difficulty may admit that persons who havenever had a pen or pencil in their hands, as was true of many of theimmigrants, may find it impossible to draw the design (1917, p. 250).T H E HEREDITARIA N THEOR Y O F I Q 7 9 7Permitting a charitable view of this failure, what but stupidity couldexplain an inability to state mor e than sixty words, any words , inone’s own languag e during three minutes?What shall we say of the fact that only 45 percent can give 60 words inthree minutes, when normal children of 11 years sometimes give 200words in that time! It is hard to find an explanation except lack of intelligence or lack of vocabulary, and such a lack of vocabulary in an adultwould probably mean lack of intelligence. How could a person live even15 years in any environment without learning hundreds of names of whichhe could certainly think of 60 in three minutes? (1917, p. 251)Or ignorance of the date, or even the month or year?Must we again conclude that the European peasant of the type thatimmigrates to America pays no attention to the passage of time? That thedrudgery of life is so severe that he cares not whether it is January or July,whether it is 1912 or 1906? Is it possible that the person may be of considerable intelligence and yet, because of the peculiarity of his environment,not have acquired this ordinary bit of knowledge, even though the calendar is not in general use on the continent, or is somewhat complicated asin Russia? If so what an environment it must have been! (1917, p. 250)Since environment, either European or immediate, could notexplain such abject failure, Goddar d stated: “We cannot escape thegeneral conclusion that these immigrants were of surprisingly lowintelligence” (1917 , p. 251). Th e high proportion of morons stillbothered Goddard , but he finally attributed it to the changingcharacter of immigration: “It should be noted that the immigrationof recent years is of a decidedly different character from the earlyimmigration. . . . We are now getting the poorest of each race”(1917> P- 266). “Th e intelligence of the average ‘third class’ immigrant is low, perhaps of moron grade ” (1917 , p. 243). Perhaps ,Goddard hoped out loud, things were better on the uppe r decks,but he did not test these wealthier customers.What then should be done? Should all these morons be shippedback, or prevented from starting out in the first place? Foreshadowing the restrictions that would be legislated within a decade,Goddard argued that his conclusions “furnish important considerations for future actions both scientific and social as well as legislative” (1917 , p. 261). But by this time Goddar d had softened hisearlier harsh position on the colonization of morons . Perhaps thereJQC? T H E MISMEASUR E O F MA Nwere not enough merely dull workers to fill the vast numbe r offrankly undesirable jobs. Th e moron might have to be recruited:“The y do a great deal of work that no one else will do. . . . Ther e isan immense amount of drudger y to be done , an immense amountof work for which we do not wish to pay enough to secure moreintelligent workers. . . . May it be that possibly the moron has hisplace” (1917 , p. 269).Nonetheless , Goddar d rejoiced in the general tightening ofstandards for admission. He reports that deportations for mentaldeficiency increased 350 percent in 191 3 and 570 percent in 1914over the average of the five preceding years:This was due to the untiring efforts of the physicians who wereinspired by the belief that mental tests could be used for the detection offeeble-minded aliens. .. . If the American public wishes feeble-mindedaliens excluded, it must demand that congress provide the necessary facilities at the ports of entry (1917, p. 271).Meanwhile, at home , the feeble-minded mus t be identified andkept from breeding. In several studies, Goddar d exposed the menace of moronity by publishing pedigrees of hundreds of worthlesssouls, charges upon the state and community , who would neverhave been born had their feeble-minded forebears been debarredfrom reproduction. Goddar d discovered a stock of pauper s andne’er-do-wells in the pine barrens of Ne w Jersey and traced theirancestry back to the illicit union of an upstanding man with a supposedly feeble-minded tavern wench. Th e same man later marrieda worthy Quakeres s and started another line composed wholly ofupstanding citizens. Since the progenitor had fathered both a gooda nd a bad line, Goddar d combined the Greek words for beauty(kallos) and bad (kakos), and awarded him the pseudonym MartinKallikak. Goddard’ s Kallikak family functioned as a primal mythof the eugenics movement for several decades.Goddard’ s study is little more than guesswork rooted in conclusions set from the start. His method, as always, rested upon thetraining of intuitive women to recognize the feeble-minded bysight. Goddar d did not administer Binet tests in pine-barrenshacks. Goddard’ s faith in visual identification was virtuallyunbounded. In 191 9 he analyzed Edwin Markham’ s poem “Th eM a n With Th e Hoe” :T H E HEREDITARIA N THEOR Y O F I Q 799Bowed by the weight of centuries he leansUpon his hoe and gazes at the ground,T h e emptiness of ages in his faceAnd on his back the burden of the world. . . .Markham’ s poem had been inspired by Millet’s famous painting ofthe same name. Th e poem, Goddar d complained (1919 , p. 239),“seems to imply that the man Millet painted came to his conditionas the result of social conditions which held him dow n and mad ehim like the clods that he turned over.” Nonsense, exclaimed God –dard; most poor peasants suffer only from their ow n feeble-mindedness, and Millet’s painting proves it. Couldn’t Markham see thatthe peasant is mentally deficient? “Millet’s Man With Th e Ho e is aman of arrested mental development—th e painting is a perfect picture of an imbecile” (1919 , pp. 239-240). To Markham’ s searingquestion: “Whos e breath blew out the light within this brain?” God –dard replied that mental fire had never been kindled.Since Goddar d could determine degrees of mental deficiencyby examining a painting, he certainly anticipated no trouble withflesh and blood. He dispatched the redoubtable Ms. Kite, soon tosee further service on Ellis Island, to the pine barrens and quicklyproduced the sad pedigree of the kakos line. Goddar d describesone of Ms. Kite’s identifications (1912 , pp. 77-78):Used as she was to the sights of misery and degradation, she was hardlyprepared for the spectacle within. Th e father, a strong, healthy, broadshouldered man, was sitting helplessly in a corner. . . . Thre e children,scantily clad and with shoes that would barely hold together, stood aboutwith drooping jaws and the unmistakable look of the feeble-minded. . . .The whole family was a living demonstration of the futility of trying tomake desirable citizens from defective stock through making and enforcing compulsory education laws. . . . Th e father himself, though strong andvigorous, showed by his face that he had only a child’s mentality. Th emother in her filth and rags was also a child. In this house of abjectpoverty, only one sure prospect was ahead, that it would producemore feeble-minded children with which to clog the wheels of humanprogress.If these spot identifications seem a bit hasty or dubious , conf e r Goddard’ s method for inferring the mental state of theeParted, or otherwise unavailable (1912 , p. 15):5 . 7 An honest picture of Deborah, the Kallikak descendant living inGoddard’s institution.T H E HEREDITARIA N THEOR Y O F I Q 20IAfter some experience, the field worker becomes expert in inferringthe condition of those persons who are not seen, from the similarity of thelanguage used in describing them to that used in describing persons shehas seen.It may be a small item in the midst of such absurdity, but Idiscovered a bit of more conscious skulduggery. My colleague Steven Selden and I were examining his copy of Goddard’ s volume ofthe Kallikaks. Th e frontispiece shows a membe r of the kakos line,saved from depravity by confinement in Goddard’ s institution atVineland. Deborah, as Goddar d calls her, is a beautiful woman (Fig.5.1). She sits calmly in a white dress, reading a book, a cat lyingcomfortably on her lap. Thre e other plates show member s of thekakos line, living in poverty in their rural shacks. All have a depraved look about them (Fig. 5.2). Thei r mouths are sinister inappearance; their eyes are darkened slits. But Goddard’ s books arenearly seventy years old, and the ink has faded. It is now clear thatall the photos of noninstitutionalized kakos were altered by insertingheavy dark lines to give eyes and mouths their diabolical appear –ance. Th e three plates of Deborah are unretouched.Selden took his book to Mr. James H. Wallace, Jr., director ofPhotographic Services at the Smithsonian Institution. Mr. Wallacereports (letter to Selden, 17 March 1980):There can be no doubt that the photographs of the Kallikak family members have been retouched. Further, it appears that this retouching waslimited to the facial features of the individuals involved—specifically eyes,eyebrows, mouths, nose and hair.By contemporary standards, this retouching is extremely crude andobvious. It should be remembered, however, that at the time of the original publication of the book, our society was far less visually sophisticated.The widespread use of photographs was limited, and casual viewers of thetime would not have nearly the comparative ability possessed by even preteenage children today. . . .T he harshness clearly gives the appearance of dark, staring features,sometimes evilness, and sometimes mental retardation. It would be difficult to understand why any of this retouching was done were it not to givethe viewer a false impression of the characteristics of those depicted. Ibelieve the fact that no other areas of the photographs, or the individualshave been retouched is significant in this regard also. . . .I find these photographs to be an extremely interesting variety of photographic manipulation.

202 T H E MISMEASUR E O F MA NGoddard recantsBy 1928 Goddar d had changed his mind and become a latterd ay supporter of the man whose work he had originally perverted,Alfred Binet. Goddar d admitted, first of all, that he had set theuppe r limit of moronity far too high:It was for a time rather carelessly assumed that everybody who tested12 years or less was feeble-minded. . . . We now know, of course, that onlya small percentage of the people who test 12 are actually feeble-minded—that is, are incapable of managing their affairs with ordinary prudence orof competing in the struggle for existence (1928, p. 220).B ut genuine morons still abound at their redefined level. Whatshall be done with them? Goddar d did not abandon his belief intheir inherited mentality, but he now took Binet’s line and arguedthat most, if not all, could be trained to lead useful lives in society:T h e problem of the moron is a problem of education and training.. . . This may surprise you, but frankly when I see what has been made outof the moron by a system of education, which as a rule is only half right, Ihave no difficulty in concluding that when we get an education that isentirely right there will be no morons who cannot manage themselves andtheir affairs and compete in the struggle for existence. If we could hopeto add to this a social order that would literally give every man a chance, Ishould be perfectly sure of the result (1928, pp. 223-224).B ut if we let morons live in society, will they not marry and bearchildren; is this not the greatest dange r of all, the source ofGoddard’ s previous and passionate warnings?Some will object that this plan neglects the eugenic aspect of the problem. In the community, these morons will marry and have children. Andwhy not? .. . It may still be objected that moron parents are likely to haveimbecile or idiot children. Ther e is not much evidence that this is the case.T h e danger is probably negligible. At least it is not likely to occur any52 Altered photographs of members of the Kallikak family living in poverty in the New Jersey pine barrens. Not e how mouths and eyebrows are accentuated to produce an appearance of evil or stupidity. Th e effect is much clearer on the original photographs produced in Goddard’s book. 204 T H E MISMEASUR E O F MA N oftener than it does in the general population. I assume that most of you,like myself, will find it difficult to admit that the foregoing may be the trueview. We have worked too long under the old concept (1928, pp. 223-224).Goddar d concluded (1928, p. 225) in reversing the two bulwarks of his former system:

Feeble-mindedness (the moron) snot incurable [Goddard’s italics].
The feeble-minded do not generally need to be segregated in institutions.” A s for myself,” Goddar d confessed (p. 224), “I think I have goneover to the enemy. “Lewis M. Terman and the mass marketing of innate IQWithout offering any data on all that occurs between conception and theage of kindergarten, they announce on the basis of what they have gotout of a few thousand questionnaires that they are measuring the hereditary mental endowment of human beings. Obviously, this is not aconclusion obtained by research. It is a conclusion planted by the will tobelieve. It is, I think, for the most part unconsciously planted. .. . If theimpression takes root that these tests really measure intelligence, thatthey constitute a sort of last judgment on the child’s capacity, that theyreveal “scientifically” his predestined ability, then it would be a thousandtimes better if all the intelligence testers and all their questionnaires weresunk without warning in the Sargasso Sea.— WALTER LIPPMANN, in the course of a debate with Lewis TermanMass testing and the Stanford-BinetLewis M. Terman , the twelfth child in an Indiana farm familyof fourteen, traced his interest in the study of intelligence to anitinerant book peddle r and phrenologis t who visited his homewhen he was nine or ten and predicted good things after feelingthe bumps on his skull. Terma n pursued this early interest, neverdoubting that a measurable mental worth lay inside people’s heads.In his doctoral dissertation of 1906, Terma n examined seven“bright” and seven “stupid” boys and defended each of his tests asa measure of intelligence by appealing to the standard catalogue of*Do not read into this statement more than Goddard intended. He had not abandoned his belief in the heritability of moronity itself. Moron parents will havemoron children, but they can be made useful through education. Moron parents,however, do not preferentially beget defectives oflower grade—idiots and imbeciles.T H E HEREDITARIA N THEOR Y O F I Qracial and nadonal stereotypes. Of tests for invention, he wrote:” We have only to compar e the negro with the Eskimo or Indian,a nd the Australian native with the Anglo-Saxon, to be struck by anapparent kinship between general intellectual and inventive ability” (1906, p. 14). Of mathematical ability, he proclaimed (1906, p.29): “Ethnolog y shows that racial progress has been closely paralleled by development of the ability to deal with mathematical concepts and relations.”Terma n concluded his study by committing both of the fallaciesidentified on p. 185 as foundations of the hereditarian view. Hereified average test scores as a “thing” called general intelligenceby advocating the first of two possible positions (1906, p. 9): “Isintellectual ability a bank account, on which we can draw for anydesired purpose, or is it rather a bundl e of separate drafts, eachdrawn for a specific purpose and inconvertible?” And , while admitting that he could provide no real suppor t for it, he defended theinnatist view (1906, p. 68): “While offering little positive data onthe subject, the study has strengthened my impression of the relatively greater importance of endowment over training as a determinant of an individual’s intellectual rank among his fellows.”Goddar d introduced Binet’s scale to America, but Terma n wasthe primary architect of its popularity. Binet’s last version of 191 1included fifty-four tasks, graded from prenursery to mid-teen-ageyears. Terman’ s first revision of 1916 extended the scale to “superior adults” and increased the-number of tasks to ninety. Terman ,by then a professor at Stanford University, gave his revision a namethat has become part of our century’s vocabulary—the StanfordBinet, the standard for virtually all “IQ ” tests that followed. *I offer no detailed analysis of content (see Block and Dworkin,1976 or Chase , 1977), but present two examples to show how Ter –man’s tests stressed conformity with expectation and downgradedoriginal response. Whe n expectations are society’s norms , then do“Terman (1919) provided a lengthy list of the attributes of general intelligencecaptured by the Stanford-Binet tests: memory, language comprehension, size ofvocabulary, orientation in space and time, eye-hand coordination, knowledge offamiliar things, judgment, likeness and differences, arithmetical reasoning,resourcefulness and ingenuity in difficult practical situations, ability to detectabsurdities, speed and richness of association of ideas, power to combine the dissected parts of a form board or a group of ideas into a unitary whole, capacity togeneralize from particulars, and ability to deduce a rule from connected facts.206 T H E MI S MEASUR E O F MA Nthe tests measure some abstract property of reasoning, or familiarity with conventional behavior? Terma n added the following itemto Binet’s list:An Indian who had come to town for the first time in his life saw awhite man riding along the street. As the white man rode by, the Indiansaid—’The white man is lazy; he walks sitting down.’ What was the whiteman riding on that caused the Indian to say, ‘He walks sitting down.’Terma n accepted “bicycle” as the only correct response—not carsor other vehicles because legs don’t go up and dow n in them; nothorses (the most commo n “incorrect” answer) because any selfrespecting Indian would have know n what he was looking at. ( Imyself answered “horse,” because I saw the Indian as a clever ironist, criticizing an effete city relative.) Such original responses as “acripple in a wheel chair,” and “a person riding on someone’s back”were also marked wrong.Terma n also included this item from Binet’s original: “Myneighbor has been having queer visitors. First a doctor came to hishouse, then a lawyer, then a minister. What do you think happenedthere?” Terma n permitted little latitude beyond “a death, ” thoughhe did allow “a marriage” from a boy he described as “an enlightened young eugenist” who replied that the doctor came to see ift he partners were fit, the lawyer to arrange, and the minister to tiethe knot. He did not accept the combination “divorce and remarriage,” though he reports that a colleague in Reno, Nevada , hadfound the response “very, very common. ” He also did not permitplausible but uncomplicated solutions (a dinner , or an entertainment) , or such original responses as: “someone is dying and is getting married and making his will before he dies.”B ut Terman’ s major influence did not reside in his sharpeningor extension of the Binet scale. Binet’s tasks had to be administeredby a trained tester working with one child at a time. The y couldnot be used as instruments for general ranking. But Terma nwished to test everybody, for he hoped to establish a gradation ofinnate ability that could sort all children into their prope r stationsin life:What pupils shall be tested? Th e answer is, all. If only selected childrenare tested, many of the cases most in need of adjustment will be over-T H E HEREDITARIA N THEOR Y O F I Q 2 07looked. Th e purpos e of the tests is to tell us what we do not already know,an d it would be a mistake to test only those pupils who ar e recognized asobviously below or above average. Some of the biggest surprises ar eencountere d in testing thos e who have been looked upo n as close to average in ability. Universal testing is fully warranted (1923, p. 22).T h e Stanford-Binet, like its parent, remained a test for individuals, but it became the paradigm for virtually all the written versions that followed. By careful juggling and elimination,* Terma nstandardized the scale so that “average” children would score 100at each ag e (mental age equal to chronological age) . Terma n alsoevened out the variation amon g children by establishing a standarddeviation of 15 or 16 points at each chronological age. With itsmean of 100 and standard deviation of 15, the Stanford-Binetbecame (and in many respects remains to this day) the primarycriterion forjudging a plethora of mass-marketed written tests thatfollowed. Th e invalid argument runs: we know that the StanfordBinet measures intelligence; therefore, any written test that correlates strongly with Stanford-Binet also measures intelligence. Muchof the elaborate statistical work performed by testers during thepast fifty years provides no independent confirmation for theproposition that tests measure intelligence, but merely establishescorrelation with a preconceived and unquestioned standard.Tesdn g soon became a multimillion-dollar industry; marketingcompanies dared not take a chance with tests not proven by theircorrelation with Terman’ s standard. Th e Arm y Alpha (see pp.222-252) initiated mass testing, but a flood of competitors greetedschool administrators within a few years after the war’s end. Aquick glance at the advertisements appended to Terman’ s laterbook (1923) illustrates, dramatically and unintentionally, how allTerman’ s cautious words about careful and lengthy assessment(1919 , p. 299, for example) could evaporate before strictures ofcost and time when his desire to test all children became a reality(Fig. 5.3). Thirt y minutes and five tests might mark a child for life,if schools adopted the following examination, advertised in Ter –m an 1923, and constructed by a committee that included Thorn –dike, Yerkes , and Terma n himself.This, in itself, is not finagling, but a valid statistical procedure for establishing uniformity of average score and variance across age levels. 53 An advertisement for mass mental testing using an examinationwritten by, among others, Terman and Yerkes.T H E HEREDITARIA N THEOR Y O F I Q 2 0 9National Intelligence Tests for Grades 3-8T h e direct result of the application of the army testing methods to schoolneeds. . . . Th e tests have been selected from a large group of tests after atry-out and a careful analysis by a statistical staff. Th e two scales preparedconsist of five tests each (with practical exercises) and either may be administered in thirty minutes. They are simple in application, reliable, andimmediately useful in classifying children in Grades 3 to 8 with respect tointellectual ability. Scoring is unusually simple.Binet, had he lived, might have been distressed enough by sucha superficial assessment, but he would have reacted even morestrongly against Terman’ s intent. Terma n agreed with Binet thatthe tests worked best for identifying “high-grade defectives,” buthis reasons for so doing stand in chilling contrast with Binet’sdesire to segregate and help (1916 , pp. 6-7):It is safe to predict that in the near future intelligence tests will bringtens of thousands of these high-grade defectives under the surveillanceand protection of society. This will ultimately result in curtailing the reproduction of feeble-mindedness and in the elimination of an enormousamount of crime, pauperism, and industrial inefficiency. It is hardly necessary to emphasize that the high-grade cases, of the type now so frequently overlooked, are precisely the ones whose guardianship it is mostimportant for the State to assume.Terma n relentlessly emphasized limits and their inevitability.He needed less than an hour to crush the hopes and belittle theefforts of struggling, “well-educated” parents afflicted with a childofl Q 75-Strange to say, the mother is encouraged and hopeful because she seesthat her boy is learning to read. She does not seem to realize that at his agehe ought to be within three years of entering high school. The forty-minute test has told more about the mental ability of this boy than the intelligent mother had been able to learn in eleven years of daily and hourlyobservation. For X is feeble-minded; he will never complete the grammarschool; he will never be an efficient worker or a responsible citizen (1916).Walter Lippmann, then a young journalist, saw through Ter –man’s number s to the heart of his preconceived attempt, and wrotein measured anger :T he danger of the intelligence tests is that in a wholesale system ofeducation, the less sophisticated or the more prejudiced will stop when2 IO T H E MISMEASUR E O F MA Nthey have classified an d forget that their duty is to educate . The y will grad et h e retarde d child instead of fighting the causes of his backwardness. Forthe whole drift of the propagand a based on intelligence testing is to treatpeopl e with low intelligence quotients as congenitally an d hopelesslyinferior.Terman’s technocracy of innatenessIf it were true, the emotional and worldly satisfactions in store for theintelligence tester would be very great. If he were really measuring intelligence, and if intelligence were a fixed hereditary quantity, it would befor him to say not only where to place each child in school, but alsowhich children should go to high school, which to college, which into theprofessions, which into the manual trades and common labor. If thetester would make good his claim, he would soon occupy a position ofpower which no intellectual has held since the collapse of theocracy. Thevista is enchanting, and even a little of the vista is intoxicating enough. Ifonly it could be proved, or at least believed, that intelligence is fixed byheredity, and that the tester can measure it, what a future to dreamabout! The unconscious temptation is too strong for the ordinary criticaldefenses of the scientific methods. With the help of a subtle statisticalillusion, intricate logical fallacies and a few smuggled obiter dicta, selfdeception as the preliminary to public deception is almostautomatic. — WALTER LIPPMANN, in a debate with TermanPlato had dreamed of a rational world ruled by philosopherkings. Terma n revived this dangerous vision but led his corps ofmental testers in an act of usurpation. If all people could be tested,a nd then sorted into roles appropriate for their intelligence, thena just, and, above all, efficient society might be constructed for thefirst time in history.Dealing off the bottom, Terma n argued that we must firstrestrain or eliminate those whose intelligence is too low for aneffective or moral life. Th e primary cause of social pathology isinnate feeble-mindedness . Terma n (1916 , p. 7) criticized Lombroso for thinking that the externalities of anatomy might recordcriminal behavior. Innateness, to be sure, is the source, but itsdirect sign is low IQ , not long arms or a jutting jaw:T h e theories of Lombroso have been wholly discredited by the results ofintelligence tests. Such tests have demonstrated , beyond any possibility ofdoubt, that the most importan t trait of at least 25 percent of ou r criminalsis menta l weakness. Th e physical abnormalities which have been found socommo n amon g prisoners ar e not the stigmata of criminality, but thephysical accompaniments of feeble-mindedness. The y have no diagnosticsignificance except in so far as they ar e indications of mental deficiency(1916, p. 7).T H E HEREDITARIA N THEOR Y O F I Q 211Feeble-minded people are doubly burdened by their unfortunate inheritance, for lack of intelligence, debilitating enough initself, leads to immorality. If we would eliminate social pathology,we must identify its cause in the biology of sociopaths themselves —a nd then eliminate them by confinement in institutions and, aboveall, by prevendng their marriage and the production of offspring.Not all criminals are feeble-minded, but all feeble-minded persons areat least potential criminals. That every feeble-minded woman is a potentialprostitute would hardly be disputed by anyone. Moral judgment, like business judgment, social judgment, or any other kind of higher thought process, is a function of intelligence. Morality cannot flower and fruit ifintelligence remains infantile (1916, p. 11).T h e feeble-minded, in the sense of social incompetents, are by definition a burden rather than an asset, not only economically but still morebecause of their tendencies to become delinquent or criminal. . . . Th e onlyeffective way to deal with the hopelessly feeble-minded is by permanentcustodial care. Th e obligations of the public school rest rather with thelarge and more hopeful group of children who are merely inferior (1919,pp. 132-133).In a plea for universal testing, Terma n wrote (1916 , p. 12): “Considering the tremendous cost of vice and crime, which in all probability amount s to not less than $500,000,000 per year in theUnited States alone, it is evident that psychological testing hasfound here one of its richest applications.”After marking the sociopath for removal from society, intelligence tests might then channel biologically acceptable people intoprofessions suited for their mental level. Terma n hoped that histesters would “determine the minimum ‘intelligence quotient’ necessary for success in each leading occupation” (1916 , p. 17). An yconscientious professor tries to find jobs for his students, but feware audacious enough to tout their disciples as apostles of a newsocial order :Industrial concerns doubtless suffer enormous losses from the employment of persons whose mental ability is not equal to the tasks they areexpected to perform. . . . Any business employing as many as 500 or 1000workers, as, for example, a large department store, could save in this wayseveral times the salary of a well-trained psychologist.Terma n virtually closed professions of prestige and monetaryreward to people with IQ below 100 (1919 , p. 282), and argued2 / 2 T H E MI S MEASUR E O F MA Nthat “substantial success” probably required an IQ above 11 5 or
But he was mor e interested in establishing ranks at the lowe nd of the scale, amon g those he had deemed “merely inferior.”Modern industrial society needs its technological equivalent of theBiblical metaphor for more bucolic times—the hewers of wood anddrawers of water. An d there are so many of them:T h e evolution of moder n industrial organization togethe r with themechanization of processes by machinery is making possible the larger an dlarger utilization of inferior mentality. On e ma n with ability to think andplan guides the labor of ten or twenty laborers, who do what they ar e toldto do and have little nee d for resourcefulness or initiative (1919, p. 276).IQ of 75 or below should be the realm of unskilled labor, 75 to85 “preeminently the range for semi-skilled labor.” Mor e specificjudgment s could also be made. “Anything above 85 IQ in the caseof a barber probably represents so much dead waste” (1919 , p.288). IQ 75 is an “unsafe risk in a motorman or conductor , and itconduces to discontent” (Terman, 1919). Proper vocational training and placement is essential for those “of the 70 to 85 class.”Without it, they tend to leave school “and drift easily into the ranksof the anti-social or join the army of Bolshevik discontents” (1919 ,p. 285).Terma n investigated I Q amon g professions and concludedwith satisfaction that an imperfect allocation by intelligence hadalready occurred naturally. Th e embarrassing exceptions heexplained away. He studied 47 express company employees , forexample, men engaged in rote, repetitive work “offering exceedingly limited opportunity for the exercise of ingenuity or even personal judgment ” (1919 , p. 275). Yet their median IQ stood at 95,a nd fully 25 percent measured above 104, thus winning a placeamon g the ranks of the intelligent. Terma n was puzzled, but attributed such low achievement primarily to a lack of “certain emotional, moral, or other desirable qualities,” though he admitted that“economi c pressures” might have forced some “out of schoolbefore they were able to prepar e for mor e exacting service” (1919 ,p. 275). In another study, Terma n amassed a sample of 256“hoboes and unemployed, ” largely from a “hobo hotel” in PaloAlto. He expected to find their average IQ at the bottom of his list;yet, while the hobo mean of 89 did not suggest enormous endowment, they still ranked above motormen, salesgirls, firemen, andT H E HEREDITARIA N THEOR Y O F I Qpolicemen. Terma n suppressed this embarrassment by orderinghis table in a curious way. Th e hobo mean was distressingly high,but hobos also varied more than any other group, and included asubstantial numbe r of rather low scores. So Terma n arranged hislist by the scores of the lowest 25 percent in each group, and sunkhis hobos into the cellar.H a d Terma n merely advocated a meritocracy based b n achievement, one might still decry his elitism, but applaud a scheme thatawarded opportunity to hard work and strong motivation. ButTerma n believed that class boundaries had been set by innate intelligence. His coordinated rank of professions, prestige, and salariesreflected the biological worth of existing social classes. If barbersdid not remain Italian, they would continue to arise from the poora nd to stay appropriately amon g them:T h e common opinion that the child from a cultured home does betterin tests solely by reason of his superior home advantages is an entirelygratuitous assumption. Practically all of the investigations which have beenmade of the influence of nature and nurture on mental performanceagree in attributing far more to original endowment than to environment.Common observation would itself suggest that the social class to which thefamily belongs depends less on chance than on the parents’ native qualitiesof intellect and character. . . . Th e children of successful and cultured parents test higher than children from wretched and ignorant homes for thesimple reason that their heredity is better (1916, p. 115).Fossil IQ’s of past geniusesSociety may need masses of the “merely inferior” to run itsmachines, Terma n believed, but its ultimate health depends uponthe leadership of rare geniuses with elevated IQ’s . Terma n and hisassociates published a five-volume series on Genetic Studies of Geniusin an attempt to define and follow peopl e at the uppe r end of theStanford-Binet scale.In one volume , Terma n decided to measure, retrospectively,the IQ of history’s prime movers—it s statesmen, soldiers, and intellectuals. I f they ranked at the top, then IQ is surely the single measure of ultimate worth. But how can a fossil IQ be recoveredwithout conjuring up young Copernicus and asking him what thewhite man was riding? Undaunted , Terma n and his colleaguestried to reconstruct the I Q of past notables, and published a thickbook (Cox, 1926) that must rank as a primary curiosity within a214 T H E MISMEASUR E O F MA Nliterature already studded with absurdity—though Jensen (1979,p p . 113 and 355) and others still take it seriously.*Terma n (1917 ) had already published a preliminary study ofFrancis Galton and awarded a staggering IQ of 200 to this pioneerof mental testing. He therefore encouraged his associates to proceed with a larger investigation. J. M. Cattell had published a ranki ng of the i ,000 prime movers of history by measuring the lengthsof their entries in biographical dictionaries. Catherine M. Cox ,Terman’ s associate, whittled the list to 282, assembled detailedbiographical information about their early life, and proceeded toestimate two I Q values for each—one , called A i IQ , for birth toseventeen years; the other, A2 IQ , for ages seventeen to twentysix.C o x ran into problems right at the start. She asked five people,including Terman , to read her dossiers and to estimate the two IQscores for each person. Thre e of the five agreed substantially intheir mean values, with A i I Q clustering around 135 and A2 I Qnear 145. But two of the raters differed markedly, one awardingan average IQ well above, the other well below, the common figure.C o x simply eliminated their scores, thereby throwing out 40 percent of her data. Thei r low and high scores would have balancedeach other at the mean in any case, she argued (1926, p. 72). Ye t iffive people working in the same research group could not agree,what hope for uniformity or consistency—not to mention objectivity—could be offered?Apar t from these debilitating practical difficulties, the basiclogic of the study was hopelessly flawed from the first. Th e differences in IQ that Co x recorded among her subjects do not measuretheir varying accomplishments, not to mention their native intelligence. Instead, the differences are a methodological artifact of thevarying quality of information that Co x was able to compile aboutthe childhood and early youth of her subjects. Co x began by assigni ng a base IQ of 100 to each individual; the raters then added to(or, rarely, subtracted from) this value according to the data provided.•Jensen writes: “The average estimated IQ of three hundred historical persons . . .on whom sufficient childhood evidence was available for a reliable estimate was IQ
. . . Thus the majority of these eminent men would most likely have been recognized as intellectually gifted in childhood had they been given IQ tests” (Jensen,!979. P- H3)-T H E HEREDITARIA N THEOR Y O F I Q 2 1 5Cox’ s dossiers are motley lists of childhood and youthfulaccomplishments , with an emphasis on examples of precocity.Since her method involved adding to the base figure of 100 foreach notable item in the dossier, estimated I Q records little morethan the volume of available information. In general, low IQ’ sreflect an absence of information, and high IQ’ s an extensive list.(Cox even admits that she is not measuring true IQ , but only whatcan be deduced from limited data, though this disclaimer wasinvariably lost in translation to popular accounts.) To believe, evenfor a moment, that such a procedur e can recover the prope r ordering of I Q amon g “men of genius,” one must assume that the childhood of all subjects was watched and recorded with roughly equalattention. On e must claim (as Co x does) that an absence of documented childhood precocity indicates a humdru m life not worthwriting about, not an extraordinary giftedness that no one bothered to record.T w o basic results of Cox’ s study immediately arouse our strongsuspicion that her IQ scores reflect the historical accidents of surviving records, rather than the true accomplishment s of hergeniuses. First, IQ is not supposed to alter in a definite directionduring a person’s life. Ye t average A i IQ is 135 in her study, andaverage A2 IQ is a substantially higher 145. Whe n we scrutinizeh er dossiers (printed in full in Cox , 1926), the reason is readilyapparent, and a clear artifact of her method. She has mor e information on her subjects as young adults than as children (A2 IQrecords achievements during ages seventeen through twenty-six;A i I Q marks the earlier years). Second, Co x published disturbinglylow A 1 I Q figures for some formidable characters, including Cer –vantes and Copernicus , both at 105. He r dossiers show the reason:little or nothing is know n about their childhood, providing no datafor addition to the base figure of 100. Co x established seven levelsof reliability for her figures. Th e seventh, believe it or not, is“guess, based on no data.”As a further and obvious test, consider geniuses born into humble circumstances, where tutors and scribes did not abound toencourag e and then to record daring feats of precocity. JohnStuart Mill may have learned Greek in his cradle, but did Faradayor Bunyan ever get the chance? Poor children are at a double disadvantage; not only did no one bother to record their early years,2/6 T H E MISMEASUR E O F MA Nbut they are also demoted as a direct result of their poverty. ForCox , using the favorite ploy of eugenicists, inferred innate parentalintelligence from their occupations and social standing! She rankedparents on a scale of professions from 1 to 5, awarding their children an IQ of 100 for parental rank 3, and a bonus (or deficit) of10 IQ points for each step above or below. A child who did nothingworth noting for the first seventeen years of his life could still scorean IQ of 120 by virtue of his parent’s wealth or professional standing.Consider the case of poor Massena, Napoleon’ s great general,w ho bottomed out at 100 A i IQ and about whom, as a child, weknow nothing except that he served as a cabin boy for two longvoyages on his uncle’s ship. Co x writes (p. 88):Nephews of battleship commanders probably rate somewhat above 100IQ; but cabin boys who remain cabin boys for two long voyages and ofwhom there is nothing more to report until the age of 17 than their serviceas cabin boys, may average below 100 IQ.Othe r admirable subjects with impoverished parents and meag er records should have suffered the ignominy of scores below
But Co x managed to fudg e and temporize, pushing them allabove the triple-digit divide, if only slightly. Consider the unfortunate Saint-Cyr, saved only by remote kin, and granted an A i I Qof 105: “Th e father was a tanner after having been a butcher,which would give his son an occupational IQ status of 90 to 100;but two distant relatives achieved signal martial honors, thus indicating a higher strain in the family” (pp. 90-91). John Bunyanfaced more familial obstacles than his famous Pilgrim, but Co xmanaged to extract a score of 105 for him:Bunyan’s father was a brazier or tinker, but a tinker of recognizedposition in the village; and the mother was not of the squalid poor, but ofpeople who were “decent and worthy in their ways.” This would be sufficient evidence for a rating between 90 and 100. But the record goes further, and we read that notwithstanding their “meanness andinconsiderableness,” Bunyan’s parents put their boy to school to learn“both to read and write,” which probably indicates that he showed something more than the promise of a future tinker (p. 90).Michael Faraday squeaked by at 105, overcoming the demerit ofparental standing with snippets about his reliability as an errandT H E HEREDITARIA N THEOR Y O F I Q 2 1 7boy and his questioning nature. His elevated A2 IQ of 150 onlyrecords increasing information about his mor e notable youn g manhood. In one case, however , Co x couldn’t bear to record theunpleasant result that her methods dictated. Shakespeare, of humble origin and unknow n childhood, would have scored below 100.So Co x simply left him out, even though she included several others with equally inadequate childhood records.Amon g other curiosities of scoring that reflect Co x and Ter –man’s social prejudices, several precocious youngster s (Clive, Liebig, and Swift, in particular) were downgraded for theirrebelliousness in school, particularly for their unwillingness tostudy classics. An animus against the performing arts is evident inthe rating of composers , who (as a group) rank jus t above soldiersat the bottom of the final list. Consider the following understatement about Mozar t (p. 129): “A child who learns to play the pianoat 3, who receives and benefits by musical instruction at that age,a nd who studies and executes the most difficult counterpoint at ag e14, is probably above the average level of his social group. “In the end, I suspect that Co x recognized the shaky basis of herwork, but persisted bravely nonetheless. Correlations between rankin eminenc e (length of Cattell’s entry) and awarded IQ were disappointing to say the least—a mer e 0.25 for eminence vs. A2 IQ ,with no figure recorded at all for eminenc e vs. A i IQ (it is a lower0.20 by my calculation). Instead, Co x makes much of the fact thather ten most eminent subjects average 4 —ye s only 4 — A 1 I Q pointsabove her ten least eminent.C o x calculated her strongest correlation (0.77) between A 2 I Qa nd “index of reliability,” a measure of available information abouther subjects. I can imagine no better demonstration that Cox’ s IQ’ sare artifacts of differential amount s of data, not measures of innateability or even, for that matter, of simple talent. Co x recognizedthis and, in a final effort, tried to “correct” her scores for missinginformation by adjusting poorly documented subjects upwardtoward the group means of 135 for A i I Q and 145 for A 2 IQ .Thes e adjustments boosted average IQ’ s substantially, but led toother embarrassments. For uncorrected scores, the most eminentfifty averaged 142 for A i IQ , while the least eminent fifty scoredcomfortably lower at 133. With corrections, the first fifty scored160, the last fifty, 165. Ultimately, only Goethe and Voltaire scored2l8 T H E MISMEASUR E O F MA Nnear the top both in I Q and eminence. On e might paraphrase Voltaire’s famous quip about Go d and conclude that even thoughadequate information on the I Q of history’s eminent men does notexist, it was probably inevitable that the American hereditarianswould try to invent it.Terman on group differencesTerman’ s empirical work measured what statisticians call the“within-group variance” of IQ—tha t is, the differences in scoreswithin single populations (all children in a school, for example) . Atbest, he was able to show that children testing well or poorly at ayoung age generally maintain their ordering with respect to otherchildren as the population grows up. Terma n ascribed most ofthese differences to variation in biological endowment, withoutmuch evidence beyond an assertion that all right-minded peoplerecognize the domination of nurture by nature. Thi s brand ofhereditarianism might offend our present sensibilities with itselitism and its accompanying proposals for institutional care andforced abstinence from breeding, but it does not, by itself, entailthe more contentious claim for innate differences between groups .Terma n made this invalid extrapolation, as virtually all hereditarians did and still do. He then compounde d his error by confusing the genesis of true pathologies with causes for variation innormal behavior. We know, for example , that the mental retardation associated with Down’s syndrome has its origin in a specificgenetic defect (an extra chromosome) . But we cannot thereforeattribute the low I Q of many apparently normal children to aninnate biology. We might as well claim that all overweight peoplecan’t help it because some very obese individuals can trace theircondition to hormonal imbalances. Terman’ s data on the stabilityof ordering in IQ within groups of growing children relied largelyupon the persistently low I Q of biologically afflicted individuals,despite Terman’ s attempt to bring all scores unde r the umbrella ofa normal curve (1916 , pp. 65-67), and thus to suggest that all variation has a common root in the possession of mor e or less of asingle substance. In short, it is invalid to extrapolate from variationwithin a grou p to differences between groups . It is doubly invalidto use the innate biology of pathological individuals as a basis forascribing normal variation within a grou p to inborn causes.At least the IQ hereditarians did not follow their craniologicalT H E HEREDITARIA N THEOR Y O F I Q 2/9forebears in harsh judgment s about women. Girls did not scorebelow boys in IQ , and Terma n proclaimed their limited access toprofessions both unjust and wasteful of intellectual talent (1916 , p.72; 1919, p. 288). He noted, assuming that IQ should earn its monetary reward, that women scoring between 100 and 120 generallyearned, as teachers or “high-grade stenographers,” what men withan IQ of 85 received as motormen, firemen, or policemen (1919 ,p. 278).B ut Terma n took the hereditarian line on race and class andproclaimed its validation as a primary aim of his work. In endinghis chapter on the uses of IQ (1916 , pp. 19-20), Terma n posedthree questions:Is the place of the so-called lower classes in the social and industrialscale the result of their inferior native endowment, or is their apparentinferiority merely a result of their inferior home and school training? Isgenius more common among children of the educated classes than amongthe children of the ignorant and poor? Are the inferior races really inferior, or are they merely unfortunate in their lack of opportunity to learn?Despite a poor correlation of 0.4 between social status and IQ ,Terma n (1917 ) advanced five major reasons for claiming that“environment is much less important than is original endowmentin determining the nature of the traits in question” (p. 91). Th efirst three, based on additional correlations, add no evidence forinnate causes. Terma n calculated: 1) a correlation of 0.55 betweensocial status and teachers’ assessments of intelligence; 2) 0.47between social status and school work; and 3) a lower, butunstated,* correlation between “age-grade progress” and social status. Since all five properties—IQ , social status, teacher’s assessment, school work, and age-grade progress—ma y be redundantmeasures of the same comple x and unknow n causes, the correlation between any additional pair adds little to the basic result of 0.4between IQ and social status. I f the 0.4 correlation offers no evidence for innate causes, then the additional correlations do noteither.T h e fourth argument, recognized as weak by Terma n himself*It is annoyingly characteristic of Terman’s work that he cites correlations whenfhey are high and favorable, but does not give the actual figures when they are lowbut still favorable to his hypothesis. This ploy abounds in Cox’s study of posthumousgenius and in Terman’s analysis of IQ among professions, both discussed previ-220 T H E MISMEASUR E O F MA N(1916 , p. 98), confuses probable pathology with normal variationand is therefore irrelevant, as discussed above: feeble-minded children are occasionally born to rich or to intellectually successful parents.T h e fifth argument reveals the strength of Terman’ s hereditarian convictions and his remarkable insensitivity to the influence ofenvironment. Terma n measured the I Q of twenty children in aCalifornia orphanage. Onl y three were “fully normal,” while seventeen ranged from 75 to 95. Th e low scores cannot be attributedto life without parents, Terma n argues, because (p. 99):T h e orphanage in question is a reasonably good one and affords anenvironment which is about as stimulating to normal mental developmentas average home life among the middle classes. Th e children live in theorphanage and attend an excellent public school in a California village.L o w scores must reflect the biology of children committed to suchinstitutions:Some of the tests which have been made in such institutions indicatethat mental subnormality of both high and moderate grades is extremelyfrequent among children who are placed in these homes. Most, thoughadmittedly not all of these, are children of inferior social classes (p. 99).Terma n offers no direct evidence about the lives of his twenty children beyond the fact of their institutional placement. He is noteven certain that they all came from “inferior social classes.” Surely,the most parsimonious assumption would relate low IQ scores tothe one incontestable and common fact about the children—thei rlife in the orphanag e itself.Terma n moved easily from individuals, to social classes, toraces. Distressed by the frequency of IQ scores between 70 and 80,he lamented (1916 , pp. 91-92):Among laboring men and servant girls there are thousands like them.. . . The tests have told the truth. Thes e boys are ineducable beyond themerest rudiments of training. No amount of school instruction will evermake them intelligent voters or capable citizens. . . . They represent thelevel of intelligence which is very, very common among Spanish-Indianand Mexican families of the Southwest and also among negroes. Theirdullness seems to be racial, or at least inherent in the family stocks fromwhich they came. Th e fact that one meets this type with such extraordinaryfrequency among Indians, Mexicans, and negroes suggests quite forciblyE HEREDITARIA N THEOR Y O F I Q 221that the whole question of racial differences in mental traits will have to betaken up anew and by experimental methods. Th e writer predicts thatwhen this is done there will be discovered enormously significant racialdifferences in general intelligence, differences which cannot be wiped outby any scheme of mental culture. Children of this group should be segregated in special classes and be given instruction which is concrete and practical. They cannot master abstractions, but they can often be macfe efficientworkers, able to look out for themselves. Ther e is no possibility at presentof convincing society that they should not be allowed to reproduce,although from a eugenic point of view they constitute a grave problembecause of their unusually prolific breeding.Terma n sensed that his argument s for innateness were weak.Yet what did it matter? Do we need to prove what common senseproclaims so clearly?After all, does not common observation teach us that, in the main, nativequalities of intellect and character, rather than chance, determine thesocial class to which a family belongs? From what is already known aboutheredity, should we not naturally expect to find the children of well-to-do,cultured, and successful parents better endowed than the children whohave been reared in slums and poverty? An affirmative answer to theabove question is suggested by nearly all the available scientific evidence(1917, p. 99).Whose common sense?Terman recantsTerman’ s book on the Stanford-Binet revision of 1937 was sodifferent from the original volume of 1916 that common authorship seems at first improbable. But then times had changed andintellectual fashions of jingoism and eugenics had been swampedin the morass of a Great Depression. In 191 6 Terma n had fixedadult mental ag e at sixteen because he couldn’t get a random sample of older schoolboys for testing. In 1937 he could extend hisscale to age eighteen; for “the task was facilitated by the extremelyunfavorable employment situation at the time the tests were made ,which operated to reduce considerably the school elimination normally occurring after fourteen” (1937 , p. 30).Terma n did not explicity abjure his previous conclusions, but aveil of silence descended upon them. No t a word beyond a fewstatements of caution do we hear about heredity. All potential rea-2 2 2 T H E MISMEASUR E O F MA Nsons for differences between groups are framed in environmentalterms. Terma n presents his old curves for average differences inI Q between social classes, but he warns us that mean differencesare too small to provide any predictive information for individuals.We also do not kno w how to partition the average differencesbetween genetic and environmental influences:It is hardly necessary to stress the fact that these figures refer to meanvalues only, and that in view of the variability of the IQ within each groupthe respective distributions greatly overlap one another. Nor should it benecessary to point out that such data do not, in themselves, offer any conclusive evidence of the relative contributions of genetic and environmentalfactors in determining the mean differences observed.A few pages later, Terma n discusses the differences betweenrural and urban children, noting the lower country scores and thecurious finding that rural IQ drops with ag e after entrance toschool, while IQ for urban children of semiskilled and unskilledworkers rises. He expresses no firm opinion, but note that the onlyhypotheses he wishes to test are now environmental:It would require extensive research, carefully planned for the purpose,to determine whether the lowered IQ of rural children can be ascribed tothe relatively poorer educational facilities in rural communities, andwhether the gain for children from the lower economic strata can beattributed to an assumed enrichment of intellectual environment thatschool attendance bestows.Autres temps, autres moeurs.R. M. Yerkes and the Army Mental Tests:IQ comes of agePsychology’s great leap forwardRobert M. Yerkes , about to turn forty, was a frustrated man in1915 . He had been on the faculty of Harvard University since
He was a superb organizer, and an eloquent promotor ofhis profession. Ye t psychology still wallowed in its reputation asa “soft” science, if a science at all. Some colleges did not acknowledg e its existence; others ranked it amon g the humanities andplaced psychologists in department s of philosophy. Yerkes wished,above all, to establish his profession by proving that it could be as

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