Rebecca Jackson

Rebecca L. Jackson is a historian and philosopher of measurement and methodology. In July 2023, she received her PhD in History and Philosophy of Science and Medicine from Indiana University Bloomington. Her dissertation, Measuring “Well”: Clinical Measuring Practices and Philosophy of Measurement, examined cases of non-standard, patient-centric measuring practices in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As a Visiting Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Research Group “Practices of Validation in the Biomedical Sciences” at the MPIWG, Rebecca will focus on the development of idiographic (individualized) indexes for measuring health-related quality of life. Her current research traces the intertwined lineage of boundary-work and methodological debates on whether “clinimetrics” (the development of clinical indexes) deserves to be treated as a distinct discipline from, rather than an application of, psychometrics.

Previously, Rebecca has held predoctoral fellowships at the Science History Institute and the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia. Her work on the failure of standardized instruments for measuring the cervix during labor has been featured in Studies in History and Philosophy of Science (2022) and in a symposium, which received the Interdisciplinary Organized Session Prize from the International Society for the History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Biology (ISHPSSB) in 2021. Her research on the “drop” as a nonstandard fluid unit in nineteenth-century Anglo-American medicine was featured in Perspectives on Science (2021) and received the Maurice Daumas Prize from the International Committee for the History of Technology (ICOHTEC) in 2023. Her upcoming coauthored work (with Claudia Cristalli) on reconstructing a psychophysical experiment conducted by C.S. Peirce and Joseph Jastrow in 1885 will appear in Nuncius in November 2023.