Restless Pioneer: The Achievements of Alfred Binet

Alfred Binet is best known today as the inventor of the intelligence test that bears his name. Arguably one of the most important instruments in psychological and educational history, the intelligence test invited controversy from its inception. But many of the earliest controversies involved the uses and interpretations of Binet’s scale by British and American psychologists than anything Binet himself had envisioned. Although this new social technology would revolutionize the practice of psychological evaluation and assessment, much of the wisdom Binet gained in its pursuit was lost in the urgency to apply his remarkably applicable scale to a wide range of institutional contexts. Binet was a man of his time and engaged with colleagues in the anthropometric and physiological study of human difference characteristic of late nineteenth-century European sciences. But he also maintained a rigorously empirical and self-reflective disposition, willing to embrace or abandon theoretical assumptions as new evidence emerged. While the publication of his first scale in 1905 had a lackluster reception, the 1908 revision made Binet an international sensation. Largely ignored in France, the Binet-Simon scales generated tremendous enthusiasm in the United States and Britain and throughout Europe. However, Binet displayed a temperamental caution not shared by many of his early British and American successors in mental testing. His insistence that qualitative, deeply contextualized observations of individual behavior were necessary prerequisites to interpreting test scores and diagnosing learning disability exhibited a rare and prescient sophistication about psychological measurement.