Testing knowledge: validation and regulation in the health and human sciences

This essay offers an overview of the importance of testing for forming objects of knowledge and decision making since the late nineteenth century, focusing on applications in the health and human sciences. We argue that scientific reductionism and bureaucratic priorities – as well as ideas of fairness, feasibility, and marketability – have shaped the development and institutionalization of standardized tests. Against this background, we zoom in on a key socio-epistemological question that has guided our collection: how do experts, patients and regulatory decision makers know that tests and their data are trustworthy? In the twentieth century, ‘validation’ became the term of art to discuss processes of showing that a test actually measures what it is intended to measure, and for certifying the reliability of test data for assessment and regulation. In this introduction, we draw on this issue’s articles and further literature to offer a scaffold of three historical phases of validating tests and highlight some overarching themes that cut across this chronology: testing for equivalence; the politics of statistical validation; and the contestation of validity by users, regulators and critics.