5Normal people

Ian Hacking

During the nineteenth century, the idea of normal people displaced the Enlight­enment ideal of Human Nature. The transition is pervasive and infects all of the ways in which we undertake the human sciences, social studies, medicine, and ecology. No field is more suffused with the idea of normalcy than educational theory and practice. Normality does not name a mode of thought. It is a meta­concept that structures a great many modes of thinking. It is one of the most un­derstudied phenomena of the industrial and information-theoretic worlds in which we lived and live. It can be thought of in many contexts, including the political. Here is William Connolly in his recent Politics and Ambiguity. He emphasizes norms and normalization more than I shall in what follows. This is because of his analysis of democracy, whose “ social ontology,” he holds, is ‘ ‘a trunk with two main branches. The trunk is formed by the principle of a sub­ject realizing its essence in a larger world’ ’ (Connolly, 1987, p. 9). One branch is individualist, the other is collectivist. Connolly holds that recourse to what counts as normal is an essential way of enabling the two counterpoised branches to interact. In the course of his argument, he points to the extraordi­nary efflorescence of normality during the past century or so:

If, as I have suggested, contemporary democratic theory tends to ob­scure normalizing tendencies built into modem democratic practice, where are the disciplines which foster and maintain these norms? They are located below die threshold of practices incorporated into the logicof democratic legitimation___The proliferation of dualities of normality(normal/abnormal, healthy/sick, rational/irrational, responsible/irresponsi- ble, stable/unstable) correlates with the enlargement of life into which bureaucratically enforced norms have penetrated. The growth of the lat­ter has been dramatic. By comparison, for instance, to a hundred years ago, a much larger proportion of the American population today is ei­ther employed in institutions whose primary purpose is to observe, con­trol, confine, reform, cure, or regulate other people (e.g., the police, the military, intelligence agencies, polling centers, reform schools, therapeu­tic centers, halfway houses, prisons, welfare agencies, nursing homes, judicial institutions) or is the object of these operations (e.g., illegal ali­ens, prisoners, tax evaders, dissidents, welfare recipients, delinquents, the mentally disturbed, the retarded, nursing home clients, divorcees). (Connolly, 1987, p. 8)

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Connolly, a political scientist, is properly preoccupied by relatively man­ifest features of our society, even if normalizing tendencies are obscured by present theories about democracy. Hence he emphasizes institutions whose mandate is to enforce norms. I see that as only one aspect of the way in which the idea of being normal acts upon us and influences our interactions with others. I intend to guide you, both in time and subject matter, behind the scene that Connolly so forcefully describes.

Kinds o f people

There are many different if interlocking reasons for thinking about normal, the idea. I should first explain my own. I do not expect every reader to agree with me, but I would like to make plain the way that I organize this chapter.

I am interested in kinds of people and their behavior, especially those kinds that are, or have become, objects of knowledge, of scientific inquiry. For short I give the name human kinds to these objects of scientific investi­gation and speculation. I intend an obvious parallel to the philosopher’s ex­pression natural kinds.

There are a great many alleged differences between the natural and the human sciences. I don’t believe in them or at any rate, most of the alleged differences are far from my present concern. I don’t, for example, believe in exactly two different methodologies, one for the natural sciences, one for the human sciences. I don’t believe that one requires positivist inferences while the other demands Verstehen. But I do think that many human kinds do importantly differ, in one respect, from natural kinds. I hold a very general thesis about human kinds, which 1 won’t defend or elaborate here. I think that human kinds have what I call a looping effect. In our scientific attempts to know about people and their behavior - sometimes for the sheer sake of knowledge and understanding, but usually in order to help them, to change them, to cure them, to make them behave better, to socialize them - we constantly create new classifications. But the classifications and our knowl­edge interact with the people classified, who often change or modify their behavior simply in the light of being classified and known about. Also the devising of new classes means that new descriptions of behavior become available. If intentional action is action “ under a description,’’ new classi­fications of behavior change the space of our possibilities: there are new things to do, new ways to be, new kinds of intentional acts to perform. As people quite literally do new things or modify old behaviors, the very knowl­edge that came into being with the new classifications has to be adjusted, corrected, changed, demanding new knowledge, new classes, and so it goes. Thereby arises what I call the looping effect of human kinds (Hacking, 1995).

This is the only theoretical difference between the natural sciences and the positive human sciences that I shall attend to here. Is there such a looping effect? I state this doctrine not to defend it here, but to place my discussion of normalcy within this perspective. The idea of normalcy is one of the primary enforcers of the looping effect of human kinds.

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A metaconcept

The idea of normalcy is at one remove from most of the topics discussed in this volume, although it almost deserves the title of a mode of thought in its own right. Thinking about what’s normal or not and worrying about being abnormal, is an endemic feature of both our popular and our scientific culture. The route is from scientific to popular rather than the other way about. Want­ing to fit in, to behave pretty much like other people, aside from a few personal choices, must be a characteristic feature of most people in most societies. Perhaps that is a tautology; that’s part of what’s involved in being a society. But the way of describing the general run of practices and condi­tions as normal is inherited from more scientific, esoteric talk and practice. I am here concerned with the knowledge end of normalcy, with normality as a mode not so much of thought as of knowledge. It is a way of conceptu­alizing people and their behaviors. What I call human kinds are kinds about which we try to have knowledge, objects of at least proto-sciences, and it is in connection with such kinds that the idea of the normal exerts its greatest power.

We should begin, however, with a logical fact. Normalcy is what I call a metaconcept, or a second-order concept. These labels will be more familiar to logicians than educators or sociologists. The point is that nothing is normal, full stop. The adjective “ normal” has a clear meaning only in conjunction with a noun phrase: a normal five-year-old. In this respect it resembles many English adjectives. One is the word “ real.” When one speaks of a real X, the criteria for being X are what matter: a real constable, a real Constable. There is no direct sense (argued J. L. Austin, and I agree) in which something can simply be real (Austin, 1962, pp. 62-77).

There are lots of words like that. As the logician Gottlob Frege taught well over a century ago, there is no such thing as simply being two. How many are on the stage? (We are watching Bartok’s opera, Bluebeard’s Cas­tle.) Two singers, five people, one opera. Numbers, in Frege’s formulation, are concepts that apply to concepts. Existence, as Kant taught over two cen­turies ago, is not a predicate, although it can sensibly be used as a predicate of predicates. In similar fashion there is no such thing as simply being nor­mal. Your temperature is normal. It’s normal to have trouble remembering proper names at your age. A normal five-year-old can (so said Gesell in 1926) draw a triangle from a copy, interpret humor, discriminate weights, and lace shoes.

When I call “normal” a second-order concept, I do not mean that it is more general than some others but that it does not apply directly to individ­ual things or living beings at all. A first-order concept, such as “ five-year- old child” applies (or does not apply) to individuals without further ado. So do more general concepts such as “ child,” “person,” or “mammal.” But “normal” does not apply until we append a first-order concept, such as “child.”

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A creature o f the nineteenth century

The first modem colloquial meaning of “ normal” listed in my dictionary (Collins) is “ usual, regular, common, typical.” The Oxford English Dictionary reports that this usage became current only after 1840 and cites a translation from a French biological work in 1828 as the first occurrence in English. The French Revolution did give us the icoles normales, set up in 1794. They were to establish the standard for well-regulated education of revolutionary citizens. They were to set the norms for teaching, what should be done, and what should be required. That is the second sense of “ normal” given by my dictionary, “ constituting a standard.” In fact the first given sense, that of being usual or typical, emerged in French only later. A French historical dictionary gives Balzac’s Eugenie Gründet of 1833, where the con­text is “ the normal state,” in this case, the normal state of a nose. Later, in Cousine Bette, laziness is called the normal state of artists. Balzac notoriously liked to mock medical jargon, and “ normal,” in its sense of usual or typical, comes from medicine, and there, the historical dictionaries notwithstanding, we must go for the origins of the modem meaning of “ normal.”

The classic history of normalcy is Georges Canguilhem’s The Normal and the Pathological, which began as a thise for the French doctorate of medicine in 1943 (Canguilhem, 1978). That book is no mere narrative. It is an account of how the idea of normalcy entered medicine at a particular conjuncture, as part of the pair normal/pathological. It played an essential role in a struggle between the physiologists and the pathologists in their attempt to settle who would have primary rights over the human body. Canguilhem was well aware that there are many routes to the idea of the normal. On the standard or “ norm” side of normal, the new industrial world needed norms of manufac­turing, if only so that the parts of machines would fit together. The great armies of the Napoleonic era needed standards. But above all, the battle between physiology and pathology determined the empirical side of normal­ity, namely, as what is usual, to be expected - or healthy.

To oversimplify, the debate went like this. Is disease to be defined as deviation from good health, which is “ normal” ? Or is the normal to be defined as absence of pathological symptoms and organs? Needless to say, the debate required for its very existence a view of disease as localized in organs and tissues. It required pathological anatomy, in which the defects in parts of cadavers could be recognized by essentially visual criteria - one could see what was wrong with the organ. These criteria were independent of the symptoms of the sick person when still alive. Thus two sets of criteria, physiological and living, and pathological but dead, vied with each other as the very nature of disease.

Canguilhem located the emergence of the normal/pathological above all in the work of the French physician F. J. V. Broussais (1772-1838). In 1816 this young military doictor was a radical critic of what he called the received theories of medicine. He was hated by the establishment. By 1831 he was the professor of general pathology in the medical faculty of Paris. One of his core theses was truly innovative in its day. He held that there is a continuum

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between the normal and the pathological and that each must be understood to understand the other. How did normality pass beyond the range of medi­cine? Auguste Comte, near the beginning of his Systeme de politique positive, wrote that *'‘until Broussais, the pathological state obeyed laws completely different from those governing the normal state, so that observation of one could decide nothing for the other___I do not hesitate to state that Brous­sais’s principle [that there is a continuum between the normal and the path­ological] must be extended in” the direction of the collective organism, “ and I have often applied it there to confirm or perfect sociological laws” (Comte, 1851, Vol. 1, pp. 651-652). William Connolly listed several “dualities of normality (normal/abnormal, healthy/sick, rational/irrational, responsible/ir- responsible, stable/unstable).” His list is excellent except that it omits the root duality, normal/pathological.

Comte lifted the medical concept of the normal state, or condition of an organ of the body, and made it available for describing society. Indeed, by what seems almost a monstrous pun, he turned this term devised for dis­cussing the body into one that could apply to the normal, that is, healthy, state (body politic). Today we are more familiar with Dürkheim’s writing on normal and pathological societies than with Comte’s interminable analyses. Dürkheim’s lineage is direct, simple and on the surface for all to read. It goes back to Comte, and from there back to Broussais. No depth analysis is needed here. My account of the matter is deeply in debt to Canguilhem’s analysis (Hacking, 1990, ch. 17).

Displacing human nature

I began by saying that the Enlightenment idea (and ideal) of Human Nature was displaced during the nineteenth century by the idea of normal people. I mean that with complete seriousness: it is a very strong claim that I do not expect everyone to believe on the spot. I shall not repeat my argument here, but it is a background assumption of this chapter. Not that I rely on it for what I shall say; rather I am driven by it. It makes what I say germane to the philosophy and practice of education. Let me explain why.

What we might call Human-Nature-Thinking is assuredly one highbrow mode of thought, shared by all the memorable figures of the Enlightenment. It was at the core of their moral philosophy. It underlay their vision of ra­tionality. Now one of the themes of the editors’ organization of this volume is a contrast between modem and postmodern, with rationality, abstraction, theorizing, and unification of knowledge being a feature of the modem. I do not myself much use those words, “modem” and “postmodern,” so popular at present and clearly so helpful to many other thinkers. But here goes. I do think that the modem is all too often described by supposedly postmodern thinkers in a disastrously “ modem” and totalizing way, as if our postmod­ems were so oedipally transfixed that they regress to modernism when think­ing about modernism. The earlier era of human nature and the utterly different present era of normal people are both presented, by our thoroughly modem postmodernists, as part of what they call the modem. It is true that

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the organizing concepts of human nature and of normal people are both hegemonic. Each provides a way of thinking that is applied to human beings - their actions and their societies - in every possible aspect. Each provides a completely unifying theme and even methodology. Each in short is what is currently called modem. They are nevertheless completely different ways of thinking, and we smudge and blend them at our peril.

I do not say that we have simply lost the concept of human nature. I do not say that normal people have replaced human nature in our frame of thinking. I say that one conception has displaced another. In a vast range of reflections about people and societies we ask after what is normal for a per­son, in some respect or another, rather than thinking about the nature of being human. How many research grants at our host institution, the Ontario Institute for the Study of Education, make reference to normality and abnormality in people or their behavior? How many are about a contrast between normal and somehow abnormal children, be they gifted or hindered? Lots, I am told. How many grants investigate human nature? How many, in their grant pro­posals, state that they are about to investigate the nature of children?

One might well say, for example, that the research of Susan Carey and others into the cognitive development of children is into the nature of the developing child, an aspect of human nature. As a matter of fact we don’t put it that way. We talk about normal development, the maturation of normal children, the normal range of abilities, the normal range of ages at which various conceptual organizations can be elicited from children.

From a distance one can quite properly see cognitive science as an inves­tigation of human nature or, as Noam Chomsky has so often put it, of the human mind. There is no doubt that the cognitive revolution marked a return to human nature, one made most explicit by Chomsky in his homage to the Enlightenment, Cartesian Linguistics. Certainly the nature/normal polarity is quite different from that described by David Olson, who contrasts the modem with Jerome Bruner’s notion of narrative thinking. There is nothing narrative about normality. Insofar as postmodern movements oppose unification and encourage diversity, they are also opposed to normalization and, at least from within ivory towers, opposed to many of the institutions mentioned by Wil­liam Connolly in my opening quotation. But I believe that both cognitivists and postmodernists would be unwise to underestimate the way in which the idea of the normal permeates our lives. I believe it to be inescapable. It may also be integral to what makes a democratic society possible, for that re­gretfully is Connolly’s theme.

It may also be part of what makes an avowedly egalitarian society pos­sible. That takes us closer to the day-to-day working of innumerable non­controlling bits of administration and bureaucracy. The broad range of the middle classes in our societies all collaborate in using normality as a guide in life. It is part of our ethos that we don’t want dictators, yet we can’t possibly manage all the information that involves public decisions, zoning, garbage collecting, schooling, safety, health. Normality and deviations furnish not only the oil that smooths our debates; it is also the machinery that main­tains us in discussion. Some of my remarks will sound as if I’m trying to

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undermine the normal; the situation is more complex and, as Richard Rorty puts it, ironic. Normality, to switch metaphors, is one of the threads woven into the fabric of daily life in a communicative age. We can’t escape it without ripping apart the cloth in which we so dearly need to wrap ourselves.

Fact and value

It may seem strange to date usage of the word “ normal” (meaning common, usual, or typical) back only to the 1820s. Yet every historical dictionary in every language confirms that. Of course there has always been Latin norm­end the Greek ortho-. Norma was Latin for a T square. These Greek and Latin roots automatically span the conventional distinction between fact and value. T squares make a right angle: at ninety degrees (descriptive) and right (evaluative). A line normal, or orthogonal, to another is a perpendicular, descriptive, but it is also called right because it is right. The orthodox are, from the point of view of the relevant doxa, right, but we also describe people as orthodox. Orthodontists put the teeth of children right, improve them. They force the teeth to be like those of normal children - a purely descriptive dental structure but, of course, the way children’s mouths ought to be. The middle classes spend a fortune on braces, and their children endure years of a kind of oral clitorodectomy or circumcision, all in honor of the great god Normal.

My dictionary’s second sense of “ normal,” as constituting a standard, seems to precede its first sense, of usual or typical. Canguilhem’s medical history shows how the first sense became paramount. When “ normal” came to mean healthy and to contrast with pathological, it came to be more de­scriptive - the general run of healthy people. But, of course, what it was describing was desirable. Who would not want a normal heart, kidneys, liver, spleen, lungs, as opposed to diseased ones, subject for pathology? As the word was transferred to sociology and politics, normal conditions were the good ones. Warring states normalized relations. Dürkheim, who explicitly considered some societies - including the one in which he found himself - to be pathological, strongly wanted a return to what he conceived of as nor­malcy.

Thus one can use the word “ normal” descriptively to say how things are. But one can also use it to say how things ought to be, to say what is healthy and desirable. The magic of the word is that one can often do both things with a single utterance. The norm may be what is usual, but our most pow­erful ethical constraints are also called norms. (Incidentally, “ norm” in this sense is an even more recent usage than “ normal.” )

The normal curve

Perhaps the most powerful, but not the only, scientific meaning of “ normal” has been fixed for over a century by that most influential of metasciences, the theory of statistical inference. During the 1880s Francis Galton, inventor of regression and correlation, began to call the curve of errors “ the Normal

curve” - with a capital N because he thought the bell-shaped curve repre­sented the way that many measurable biological characteristics were normally distributed in populations.

It is instructive to trace a brief history of this curve; for more detail, see, for example, Gigerenzer et al. (1989). The curve begins with tossing a fair coin many times. If we toss it 100 times and note only the number of heads, we may get any of the 101 results 0, 1 , . . . , 100. The central results, such as 49 or 53, will occur more often in repetitions of this experiment, and a graph of this distribution will be a hump, with almost nothing at the tails (0, 1, 2, or 98, 99, 100). As early as 1708 Abraham de Moivre proved that as we make the number of tosses increase without bound, the limit of this bi­nomial distribution is a smooth curve, which we now describe as shaped like a bell. The next step was the curve of errors, studied around 1800 by Laplace and Gauss. It was a model of the distribution of errors of measurement around a true unknown value, such as the position of a heavenly body. By 1850, at the hands of the astronomer Quetelet, it had become the distribution of many biological quantities, the mean was no longer a true value, regardless of measurement, but an average characteristic of a population. Finally, because the curve was found approximately in so many distributions, psychological tests - most famously IQ tests - were designed so that the distribution of results would follow the curve of errors. In the 1880s Francis Galton began to call the curve of error ‘‘N orm al^- with a capital N. His protege Karl Pearson confirmed this nomenclature in the 1890s. The influence of the bi­ometric and eugenic work of Galton and Pearson was so great that the name stuck in English - but only in English. In other languages we have the prob­ability curve, the Gaussian curve, the curve of errors. But if the curve was the normal or usual distribution, then it could be used to calibrate constructed or theoretical quantities. Thus the distribution of intelligence was “ normal­ized” so that the distribution of answers to test questions was distributed along a curve of errors. This was not an empirical discovery, as was the fact that many biometric quantities are so distributed. Instead, tests were designed to have this normal distribution of results.

Thus the progress of the bell curve is as follows: (1) coin tossing; (2) a curve of errors modeled by a Gaussian distribution whose mean is a true unknown quantity, given in nature; (3) a biometric distribution whose mean is an average and that may be a stable property of a population; (4) an artificial distribution of measurements designed so as to take the shape of the curve of errors, because that is believed to be ‘ ‘normal’§ for biological mea­surements.

Mediocre and normal

There is another tension on the value side of normality. In its medical roots, the normal contrasts with the pathological. The normal is healthy, the good, the desired. That was put in place in the 1820s. Later in the century, normality picked up the statistical connotations that I have just described. Quetelet set

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things up when, in the 1840s, he gave us the average man. Any characteristic of a human being that could be measured could be averaged, and we could plot the dispersion or deviation around the mean. Thus I'homme moyen came into being, cloaked in a Gaussian curve of error. Quetelet began with a dis­tribution of chests of soldiers from Scottish Highland regiments, but he ploughed on and in no time was measuring intellectual and moral qualities as best he could. Crime, suicide, madness, and the like were his meat, but he did not stop at the seamy side of life; he had distributions for poetic talent too. The Aristotelian Golden mean would be replaced by the physiognomy of the average man, which would be the canon of beauty henceforward. After that it would become a mental standard, a moral standard, a spiritual standard.

Deviations weren't thought about sufficiently before Francis Galton, who in the 1870s worked out the theory of regression and correlation. We tran­quilly speak of regression toward the mean. That comfortable elitist Galton was more blunt. He who invented the idea called it regression toward me­diocrity. The curve in terms of which one did the computations came to be called “ the normal curve’’ - Galton’s term, but made official by his protege Karl Pearson. Notice that in this usage the normal is not necessarily desirable. For we get the normal as mediocre rather than the normal as healthy. Hence arises a fundamental tension. I have found it useful to represent the tension in terms of two figureheads, Galton and Dürkheim (Hacking, 1990, pp. 168- 169). Dürkheim worked within the normal/pathological medical tradition transmitted to his generation by Comte and a host of others. Galton worked within the statistical tradition transmitted to him by Quetelet, but where Que­telet saw the average, the mean, as a canon of beauty - thus still in the medical tradition - Galton transformed it to something else. We still work unwittingly with both notions and glide effortlessly from one to the other without consciously noticing it or, at any rate, without noting it.

Yet our language reflects our apperceptions, our dim awarenesses. Allow me to put on my hat as a philosopher in the tradition of linguistic analysis. Consider phrases of the form “ a normal N,” where N is a noun: a normal child. We use this form of words - and I mean exactly this form of words, not some paraphrase - only for nouns for kinds of things or beings for which we think there may be health or pathology, or so it appears. A normal bridge? A normal pie? If we overhear talk of a normal lake, we at once think of one that is not polluted or turned acid by rain, that is, a healthy, nonpathological lake.

We don’t use the expression “ a normal N” in a bell-shaped, Galtonian way, where the normal may be mediocre. We use it in a Broussaisian, medical way. A normal eight-year-old contrasts with a child who is retarded or dis­turbed but not (at first hearing) with a gifted eight-year-old. But, to return to my historicist mode, it is not to be thought that the concept “ eight-year-old child” automatically takes the metaconcept “ normal.” On the contrary, the eight-year-old must be thought of as a being whose development can be healthy or pathological, and that requires an entire infrastructure of medical, pedagogic, and psychological thinking.

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Normal and typical

There’s one last tension that I must mention in this anatomy of normality. The dictionary said that “ normal” means common, usual, typical. But when we turn to the social, human, medical, educational, and even cognitive sci­ences, there’s a very big divide between the typical and what is normal as determined by statistical analysis. The battles have been fought out over and over again. For social scientists we have the contrast between Dürkheim and Weber. Weber believed in ideal types. Dürkheim, although no Galtonian, used a century of French suicide statistics as the basis of what seems to be his most oft-cited book. In medicine in the 1850s Claude Bernard inveighed against statistics. Since he was investigating urine at the time, he rudely said that if you want the urine of the average man, collect it at the pissoir of the gäre de Lyon. No, insisted this greatest of biomedical investigators, we want an individual and to know about that man and his urine as specimens of the type. In social economics Ferdinand Le Play provided the most extraordinary household budgets of the European worker, from the Urals to Sheffield, from Lapland to North Africa. The first stage in his inquiry was to spend a very long time in a community, talking to many people, especially leadership people, to determine the typical mining family of the region, the typical laundress and her family, the typical cabinetmaker and his family.

American studies of child development provide a cameo illustration of the struggles between the normal as typical and the normal as statistical. I take for granted here the idea that children do develop physically, mentally, and morally in a lawlike way. That is itself by no means a universally human conception, but one that, as the West knows it, was established as common knowledge only during the nineteenth century. Even within that framework, the normal child was something new. Perhaps the first author to publish that very phrase was the founder of American psychology and teacher of the first generation American graduate students in the subject, G. Stanley Hall. In 1879 he had already written descriptively, using the phrase “ normal people.” He was writing about the normal child by 1891. By 1894 his students would routinely say, for example, “ Ten boys, normal, were tested.” I am indebted to James Wong’s The Very Idea o f the Normal Child (1993) for this and the following information.

Hall’s conception was not statistical. Its roots were in the journals, tran­scribed by parents, about their children’s growing up. Charles Darwin was a trendsetter. In 1877 he published notes on the intellectual and physical de­velopment of an infant: his son. Specially formatted diaries for noting the developmental events of childhood were in print from 1882 as The Mother’s Record. In 1883 Hall published his findings about the knowledge of children entering school (a study patterned after much earlier German work). Does the child know the number 3? The number 4? Its elbow? Has it ever seen a beehive? A willow? He made his results known as The Contents o f Children’s Minds. The consequences for child-centered education were immense. Here I emphasize only that Hall aimed at describing the typical child entering school. His model was in some ways Galtonian, but it was not statistical.

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How was it Galtonian? Galton had made composite photographs of military officers, criminals, Jews, using multiple exposures to produce what he held to be characteristic physiognomy of each class. Hall designed questionnaires whose results could be combined to give the characteristic mental profile of a child at a certain age. The project went mad, for Hall won the ear of Elias Russell, principal of Worcester Normal School, who set his student teachers to the task, producing 14,000 profiles that no one could do anything with. Hall designed a questionnaire for children’s anger. He demanded of the teacher-reporters that they be ‘ ‘photographically objective, exact, minute and copious in detail” and then asked for “ any notes, however incomplete, upon any aspect of the subject.” The next generation of students didn’t care for this. “Empirical philistinism,” said Hugo Münsterberg at Harvard. In 1890 Catell gave the first American mental tests; in the next decade a statistical methodology was to emerge that has ever since characterized American em­pirical psychology. Hall’s search for an account of the typical child was usurped by the rule that only statistical data would count. As British statistical techniques crossed the Atlantic, the normal, as statistical rather than typical, became dominant.

This is not to say that the typical disappeared. Piaget’s developmental studies are the most famous of those that relied on a few favored children. There is still a very interesting tension in that field. This is to be expected. If one is investigating fundamental cognitive laws of the human mind, sta­tistics should not matter. In an enquiry into human nature, rather than normal people (in this case, children), statistics should be irrelevant; it is the type that counts. Yet at the same time there might be a distribution of rates of development of children sorted along some lines or other, social, educational, familial, geographical, ethnic, racial, birth order, rural/urban, who knows what. What are the relevant types? Our colleges teach the solution: use sta­tistics!

Human kinds

Now I briefly return to my starting point, human kinds. By human kinds I mean kinds of people and their behavior, about which we hope to have knowledge and we think fit the needs for scientific enquiry. A few of these kinds are denoted by old words, such as “ child.” More are denoted by amalgams and extensions: There have been five-year-olds forever, but “ five- year-old” is a neologism. Most human kinds are denoted by new words or words with new meanings: “ autistic” for children (devised by Leo Kanner, publishing in 1943), “ gifted,” “ moron” (invented by Η. H. Goddard, one of the early testers of intelligence). Even “ genius” in its present sense is a new word. The endless array of terms remodeled, retooled, or simply invented for the scientific study of human beings is unlike the comparable array prop­agated in the natural sciences. For we apply these terms to people and their behavior. Sometimes those who are described take the names upon them­selves; others, such as the autistic child, are too weak with respect to the namers to use the names themselves. But the lives of the named are

arranged to fit the categories into which they are fitted. Those who accept the names see themselves anew and have new descriptions under which they may act. A new human kind leaves little in place. Where microphysics has its principle of indeterminacy, according to which measurement affects the measured, the human sciences have the phenomenon of looping, whereby classifying affects members of the class, who change or mold themselves accordingly. Or, resentfully, the classified may elevate their class, escaping from their classifiers (gay pride, black power). Or they may change them­selves so as no longer to fit the criteria. In any event the very features of the class into which they were classified change, and so the classifiers must go back to work, reclassifying, redefining, recharacterizing.

The metaconcept of normalcy gives an extra spin within the looping. For we not only have a class, but also a distribution of a characteristic within a class, centering on the normal. Broussaisian medical-normal is good, healthy. We want to make members of the class normal and invent all sorts of nor­malizing techniques. Members of the class who hear what’s normal want to be healthy and normal and do their best to conform, thereby changing, to say the least, the statistical distribution. But then there is Galtonian mediocre- normal. The ambitious don’t want to be that, and so they change and hence change distributions. Such a phenomenon is played out annually across the United States with the Standard Achievement Tests, the Graduate Record Examinations, and the like. These are cunningly designed to be completely neutral for American white middle-class students, whatever their background. But all those white middle-class children who are fairly mediocre but have ambitions or are prodded by family, teachers, or peers go to SAT courses or work through an SAT book “ guaranteed to increase your score by at least 30 points.” Few human kinds are as regimented as those devised by edu­cators or better known to those who are sorted, namely, the students. Hence nowhere else is there so much self-conscious looping in valiant attempts to work the system of classification to advantage. This is merely an extreme, a mockery of the normal, but in almost every case, I venture, in which a human kind becomes susceptible to the metaconcept of normalcy, there is an increase in the interaction between the classification and the people or behaviors that are classed. There are two different styles of interaction depending upon whether the medical or the mediocre type of normalcy is in play. Since, on occasion, both may be in play at once in connection with the same classifi­cation, there may be a wrenching tension, and hence the two types of nor­malcy interfere analogously to the way in which different optical wavelengths can interfere to produce diffraction patterns.

I do not regard this as the end of the story, but it is a good point at which to close this discussion. This volume derives from a workshop held under the auspices of the Ontario Institute for the Study of Education. Many well- informed educators, education researchers, and administrators have nagging worries about the idea of normal children, abilities, development. By enlarg­ing the panorama, I hope they may be better able to grasp and formulate those worries. For it is part of the ideology of normality that it is neutral, objective, a way of assessing what is. And so it is. But simultaneously two

NORMAL PEOPLE 71

other things are true of normalcy. First, it is a powerful instrument for saying what ought to be, for such is the magic of “ normal” that it spans is/ought. Second, unlike the descriptors of the natural sciences, it leaves nothing in its place; by saying what is, it at once sets going changes in the status quo. To exaggerate: As soon as you’ve said what’s normal, it isn’t

References

Austin, J. L. (1962). Sense and Sensibilia, reconstructed from the manuscript notes by G. J. Wamock. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.

Canguilhem, Georges (1978). The Normal and the Pathological, C. R. Fawcett, trans.Dordrecht and Boston: Reidel.

Comte, August (1851). Systeme du politique positive. Paris: Algave.Connolly, William E. (1987). Politics and Ambiguity, Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin

Press.Gigerenzer, Gerd, et al. (1989). The Empire o f Chance: How Probability Changed

Science and Everyday Life. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press.Hacking, Ian (1990). The Taming o f Chance. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press.

(1995). “The Looping Effects of Human Kinds,” in Causal Cognition: A Multi­disciplinary Approach, D. Sperber et al., eds. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, pp. 351-383.

Wong, James (1993). The Very Idea of the Normal Child, Ph.D. thesis. University of Toronto.