One of the highlights of today was Michael Sokal’s talk about whether James McKeen Cattell had a “disability” that prevented him being able to introspect like most people do, and the effect this might have had on the style of research that he conducted and advocated (which was virtually behavioristic, though many years before that term came into popular usage). Cattell was the founder and editor of many journals in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including Psychological Bulletin and Science. He was Wilhelm Wundt’s first laboratory assistant, and founded psychological laboratories at U. Penn and Columbia U. Sokal was the founding editor of History of Psychology, and is a past president of the History of Science Society.

The day concluded with the conference banquet at which, among other things, “yours truly” proposed a toast to William Gosset (aka “Student”), who invented the ubiquitous t-test while living in Dublin and working at the Guinness brewery.