Carl Stumpf and Control Groups

In the secondary literature, the notion of control group has so far been traced to two important moments in history of the life sciences: thinking in populations and applying statistics to these. This chapter proposes an additional lineage in the reduction of variation among the members of two paired groups in philosopher Carl Stumpf’s experimental psychology. His method of comparing the conditions of judgment in these groups is traced to three stages, the earliest being his research with individuals that do or do not have musical ability, followed by the stage of being confronted with non-European music, to the final stage of reaching a fully controlled and technically supported setting in which individuals are put in the position to judge either with or without previous knowledge about chosen sounds under scrutiny. The chapter uses Stumpf’s own notion of “practical epistemology” to align his experimental practice with his parallel elaborations of Brentanian logic.