Credulity

Ogden, Emily

doi:10.7208/chicago/9780226532479.001.0001

Cited by 59 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…62 William Cullen Bryant and John O'Sullivan, editors of the New York Evening Post and Democratic Review, respectively, also supported Buchanan during the 1840s. 63 The congressman and Smithsonian regent Robert Dale Owen claimed that the discoveries by "Buchanan will hereafter rank, not with those of Gall and Spurzheim alone, but hardly second to [those] of any philosopher or philanthropist, who ever devoted his life to the cause of science and the benefit of the human race." 64 Owen was a bit more balanced in his private correspondence, telling Smithsonian secretary Joseph Henry that Buchanan was "a man of considerable talent; whether a practical man and accurate observer I know not [for] he seemed to me misled by imaginative theories, beyond the strict results of dispassionate experiment."…”

Section: Subjective Science In An Objective Agementioning

confidence: 99%

Measuring souls: Psychometry, female instruments, and subjective science, 1840–1910

Strang

2019

Hist Sci

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This essay focuses on the history of psychometry, the science of soul measuring. For its founder, Dr Joseph Rodes Buchanan, the soul was simultaneously an object for anthropological research and a measuring instrument capable of revealing human character, interpreting natural history, and demonstrating the reality of an immortal soul. Psychometry taught that human souls, especially those of women, were capable of acting as instruments because they could feel the mysterious energies that people and objects radiated. Although orthodox male scientists rejected the visions of sensitive women as the antithesis of reliable data, psychometric researchers believed that the feelings of women were both the instruments and information that made their science possible. Psychometry promised to revolutionize science by insisting that sympathy and subjectivity, not detachment and objectivity, ought to undergird research. Yet as male experimenters worked to prove psychometry’s effectiveness, they almost invariably cast themselves as detached observers accurately recording the data provided by their female instruments. Thus, despite pushing for scientific reform, the methods and discourse of male psychometric experimenters eroded their field’s core arguments about connectedness and subjectivity and, instead, reinforced the notion that detachment and objectivity were essential to legitimate science. Challenges to objectivity could prove just how thoroughly it dominated scientific discourse and practice. Still, some psychometers, particularly women who practiced at home, were untroubled by the fact that their research was predicated on subjective feelings, and psychometry remained a viable pursuit among spiritualists even as it faded from the realm of science. Psychometry emerged and, ultimately, fractured amid tensions between widespread enthusiasm for sciences that emphasized spiritual connectedness and the mounting pressure to legitimize scientific knowledge through the language and practices of objectivity.

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Section: Subjective Science In An Objective Agementioning

confidence: 99%

Measuring souls: Psychometry, female instruments, and subjective science, 1840–1910

Strang

2019

Hist Sci

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“…Monsters in the academy stand for an entire domain of enchantment that bleak modernity can't kill. But as Ogden () and Sornito () have recently reminded me, the idea of enchantment arises and endures in the idea of disenchantment, like the idea of the savage in the idea of the civilized. Enchantment does not linger in a disenchanted modernity as some unmetabolized remainder.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

At the Edge of Chaos: Poetics of American Monsters, here and there

Lepselter¹

2019

J Historical Sociology

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Although we often use the term “monster” in a self‐evident way, what that term signifies is highly varied and sometimes contradictory. What, in fact, is a monster? This paper explores various beings called “monsters,” from obese bodies on reality TV to occult lizard people in conspiracy theories. Taking off from classic anthropological theories of monsters as deconstructed and reassembled natural objects, I question their affective and meaningful associations in contemporary America, and explore why the idea of the monster, which has no stable referent, is nonetheless ubiquitous in a seemingly disenchanted world.

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Spiritualism in Pierre;

Murray¹

2022

A New Companion to Herman Melville

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Credulity

Cited by 59 publications

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Measuring souls: Psychometry, female instruments, and subjective science, 1840–1910

Measuring souls: Psychometry, female instruments, and subjective science, 1840–1910

At the Edge of Chaos: Poetics of American Monsters, here and there

Spiritualism in Pierre;

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