scholarly journals DEMOCRACY AND EXPERTISE IN THE LIPPMANN–TERMAN CONTROVERSY

2017 ◽  
Vol 16 (02) ◽  
pp. 561-592 ◽  
Author(s):  
TOM ARNOLD-FORSTER
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
John Dewey ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Democratic Theory ◽  
Intelligence Testing ◽  
American Political Thought ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Walter Lippmann ◽  
And Control

Historians often interpret American political thought in the early twentieth century through an opposition between the technocratic power of expertise and the deliberative promise of democracy, respectively represented by Walter Lippmann and John Dewey. This article explores Lippmann's concurrent controversy with Lewis Terman about intelligence testing, in which Dewey also intervened. It argues that the Lippmann–Terman controversy dramatized and developed a range of ideas about the politics of expertise in a democracy, which centered on explaining how democratic citizens might engage with and control the authority of experts. It concludes by examining the controversy's influence on democratic theory.

scholarly journals Teacher, Tester, Soldier, Spy: Psychologists Talk about Teachers in the Intelligence-Testing Movement, 1910s-1930s

2017 ◽  
Vol 57 (3) ◽  
pp. 371-398
Author(s):  
Clémentine Beauvais
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Intelligence Testing ◽  
Intelligence Tests ◽  
Academic Literature ◽  
Early Twentieth Century

This article focuses on teachers in the discourses of early twentieth-century proponents of intelligence testing in America. Teachers were often a targeted enemy in the academic literature on intelligence testing—their methods belittled, their unreliability emphasized. Yet, in part because teachers were essential for intelligence tests to be given in schools, they were also often talked about in more ambiguous ways. In particular, this paper argues that psychologists’ ways of talking to, at, and about teachers presented a relationship characterized by an originary indebtedness of teachers toward psychology. Intelligence tests, it was implied, were a gift for teachers, and psychologists’ help a favor that teachers should repay by using the tests and showing rigor, obedience, and gratefulness in doing so. Arguably, the debt was framed in such ways as to render impossible its repayment and to make illegible the potential contributions and initiatives of teachers in the intelligence-testing movement.

Pragmatism and Prophecy: H. G. Wells and the Metaphysics of Socialism

2017 ◽  
Vol 112 (2) ◽  
pp. 409-422 ◽  
Author(s):  
DUNCAN BELL
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Evolutionary Theory ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Philosophical Orientation ◽  
High Profile ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Main Components ◽  
Political Thinker

Read throughout the world, H. G. Wells was one of the most famous political thinkers of the early twentieth century. During the first half of the 1900s, he elaborated a bold and idiosyncratic cosmopolitan socialist vision. In this article, I offer a new reading of Wells's political thought. I argue that he developed a distinctivepragmatistphilosophical orientation, which he synthesized with his commitments to Darwinian evolutionary theory. His pragmatism had four main components: a nominalist metaphysics; a verificationist theory of truth; a Jamesian “will to believe”; and a conception of philosophy as an intellectual exercise dedicated to improving practice. His political thought was shaped by this philosophical orientation. Wells, I contend, was the most high-profile pragmatist political thinker of the opening decades of the twentieth century. Acknowledging this necessitates a re-evaluation of both Wells and the history of pragmatism.

Reading Dewey: Reflections on the Study of Routine

2007 ◽  
Vol 28 (5) ◽  
pp. 773-786 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael D. Cohen
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cognitive Processes ◽  
John Dewey ◽  
Organizational Research ◽  
Strong Emphasis ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Conceptual Difficulties

Early twentieth-century American pragmatists such as John Dewey placed a strong emphasis on the human faculties of habit and emotion. That contrasts with the emphasis in recent decades on cognitive processes. In contemporary organizational research there has been an increasing interest in recurring action patterns, such as routines and practices. The conceptual difficulties this work has encountered are usefully illuminated by Dewey's view of the primacy of habit and its interplay with emotion and cognition.

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