THE CONSTRUCTION OF COLORIMETRY BY COMMITTEE

This paper explores the confrontation of physical and contextual facto rs involved in the emergence of the subject of color measurement, whic h stabilized in essentially its present form during the interwar perio d. The contentions surrounding the specialty had both a national and a disciplinary dimension. German dominance was curtailed by American an d British contributions after World War I. Particularly in America, co mmunities of physicists and psychologists had different commitments to divergent views of nature and human perception. They therefore had to negotiate a compromise between their desire for a quantitative system of description and the perceived complexity and human-centeredness of color judgment. These debates were played out not in the laboratory b ut rather in institutionalized encounters on standards committees. Suc h groups constitute a relatively unexplored historiographic and social site of investigation. The heterogeneity of such committees, and thei r products, highlight the problems of identifying and following such e phemeral historical ''actors.''