Alfred Binet

1857-1911 · French · Experimental and Intelligence Psychology

Intelligence is not a fixed quantity; we must protest against this brutal pessimism.

Alfred Binet was a French experimental psychologist, the founder of the first practical scale of intelligence and one of the most careful and self-correcting minds in the young science. Largely self-taught in psychology after training in law and science, he worked first at the Salpêtrière on hypnosis and hysteria — an episode he later disavowed when he saw how much of the "results" were the products of suggestion — then established at the Sorbonne a laboratory devoted to the experimental study of the higher mental processes: reasoning, judgment, memory, imagination, and above all intelligence.

Topics Alfred Binet addresses

• the metric scale of intelligence
• the Binet-Simon scale
• mental level
• mental orthopedics
• the malleability of intelligence
• brutal pessimism
• intelligence is not a fixed quantity
• diagnosis, not a sentence
• individual differences
• the higher mental processes
• complex judgment versus sensory tests
• alterations of personality
• double consciousness
• suggestibility and experimenter error
• the Salpêtrière and hypnosis
• the psychology of reasoning
• imageless thought
• types of mind
• the completion test
• child psychology
• the educability of the child
• the reality of the divided self
• the criterion of prediction
• the psychic life of micro-organisms

Converse with Alfred Binet on Symposium. Every reply is grounded in Alfred Binet's own writing and cites the page it came from. The corpus is public-domain text.