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The Construction of Colorimetry by Committee1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2008

Sean F. Johnston
Sean F. Johnston
Affiliation:
Department of HistoryUniversity of York, U.K.
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Abstract

This paper explores the confrontation of physical and contextual factors involved in the emergence of the subject of color measurement, which stabilized in essentially its present form during the interwar period. The contentions surrounding the specialty had both a national and a disciplinary dimension. German dominance was curtailed by American and British contributions after World War I. Particularly in America, communities of physicists and psychologists had different commitments to divergent views of nature and human perception. They therefore had to negotiate a compromise between their desire for a quantitative system of description and the perceived complexity and human-centeredness of color judgment. These debates were played out not in the laboratory but rather in institutionalized encounters on standards committees. Such groups constitute a relatively unexplored historiographic and social site of investigation. The heterogeneity of such committees, and their products, highlight the problems of identifying and following such ephemeral historical “actors”.

Type
Article
Information
Science in Context , Volume 9 , Issue 4 , Winter 1996 , pp. 387 - 420
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1996

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Footnotes

1

An earlier version of this paper was presented at a seminar of the History & Philosophy of Science Division of the Philosophy Department, University of Leeds, in March 1994. I would like to thank Geoffrey Cantor and Graeme Gooday, as well as two anonymous referees, for providing very helpful criticism, and David Macadam for informative correspondence.

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