“A Vitious Way of Observing”: Kinnebrook and the Prehistory of the Personal Equation | Isis: Vol 116, No 3

[Christopher Green]

Fellow Historians of Psychology,

As you will recall, E. G. Boring related the familiar story of the British Astronomer Royal, Nevil Maskelyne, firing his assistant, "Kinnebrook," for reporting star transit times that were consistently slower than his own. And later, the Swiss astronomer, Friedrich Bessel, took this dispute as the basis of the "personal equation," which Boring took to be one of the first quantifiable problems of psychology, leading to a whole industry in early reaction time studies. 

Boring relied entirely on Maskelyne's report of the dispute. David Kinnebrook's account of the matter was not available to Boring, nor to the other history of psychology textbook writers who have repeated it. Kinnebrook's account did not re-emerge until 1985. The latest issue of the journal Isis, however, has published an article that provides the fullest account yet of the matter. The abstract is here:
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/736892

You can probably pull the full article from your own library's digital collections.

Best,

Chris

...........................................

Christopher Green

Professor Emeritus 

Department of Psychology

York University

Toronto, ON M3J 1P3

Canada

[Harry Heft]

Thanks Chris!   Harry

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Cheiron Forum" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to cheiron-foru...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/cheiron-forum/0808D136-D29D-4168-8E1C-6514B9A6D5BA%40yorku.ca.

--

Harry Heft

Professor Emeritus

Denison University

Home address:

93 S. Ardmore Road

Columbus, Ohio 43209

USA