The Definition of a Profession (ebook)

Argumento de The Definition of a Profession (ebook)

In the early twentieth century, a small group of psychologists built a profession upon the new social technology of intelligence testing. They imagined the human mind as quantifiable, defining their new enterprise through analogies to the better established scientific professions of medicine and engineering. Offering a fresh interpretation of this controversial movement, JoAnne Brown reveals how this group created their professional sphere by semantically linking it to historical systems of cultural authority. She maintains that at the same time psychologists participated in a form of Progressivism, which she defines as a political culture founded on the technical exploitation of human intelligence as a "new" natural resource. This book addresses the early days of the mental testing enterprise, including its introduction into the educational system. Moreover, it examines the processes of social change that construct, and are constructed by, shared and contested cultural vocabularies. Brown argues that language is an integral part of social and political experience, and its forms and uses can be specified historically. The historical and theoretical implications will interest scholars in the fields of history, politics, psychology, sociology of knowledge, history and philosophy of social science, and sociolinguistics.0Acknowledgments Introduction 3 Ch. 1 The Semantics of Profession: A Theory 18 Ch. 2 Psychology as a Science 35 Ch. 3 Education as a Profession 46 Ch. 4 The Biographical Referents of Metaphor 62 Ch. 5 Historical Meanings of Medical Language 76 Ch. 6 Human Engineering 96 Ch. 7 The Great War 109 Ch. 8 The Lingua Franca of Progressivism 126 Notes 141 Bibliographic Essay 191 Index 205