QUOTES VIII
Quotations about
THE MEASUREMENT OF INTELLIGENCE
Is there really such a thing as intelligence? Does some main
'dimension' of human intellectual differences really 'exist'-or
is any such dimension a human fabrication and an imposition on
mental ability data that actually deserve a more complex analysis?
Is general intelligence (g) readily measurable so as to
distinguish reliably, validly, predictively, sensibly and economically
between individuals? What should be thought of the notorious 'tests'
that issue a person's Mental Age (MA), or Intelligence Quotient
(IQ) [controlling for chronological age (CA), via MA/CA]?
How are other mental abilities-of whatever relative importance-related
to g? These are abiding questions for cognitive, developmental
and differential psychology.
Answers to these questions can be divided into two main types.
(1) On the one hand, there are the traditional claims of the London
School as to g's 'existence' and 'reality'-at least from
a scientific point of view (insisting that g is quite as
'real' as electricity or gravity). The London School involves
a line of intellectual descent running from Francis Galton, Karl
Pearson and Charles Spearman through Cyril Burt and Philip E.
Vernon to Raymond Cattell, Hans Eysenck, Arthur Jensen, Lloyd
Humphreys [with stronger behaviourist and environmentalist leanings],
and even Thurstone's one-time postgraduate student, John B. Carroll
[something of a 'convert' to g- see Carroll, 1993, Human
Cognitive Abilities].
(2) On the other hand, there are diverse, complex and sometimes
ideologically significant misgivings-beginning with the multivariate
preferences of the mighty Godfrey Thomson, Louis Thurstone and
J.P.Guilford. Notable recent opponents of some or all of the London
School's ideas in recent times would be Leon Kamin, S.J.Gould,
Steven Rose, Maurice Schiff, R.C.Lewontin, Howard Gardner, Michael
J. A. Howe and Stephen Ceci. [Attempting to straddle the divide
with his 'triarchic theory is Robert J. Sternberg (e.g. 1985,
Behav. & Brain Sciences).]
Clearly the 'existence' or 'reality' of psychometric g
would be more acceptable if anyone could give an account of g
in psychological or developmental terms. This thought has frequently
occurred to psychologists and led them to accuse their psychometric
forebears of neglecting the matter. (As early as 1922, the young
Harvard genius, and later historian of psychology, E.G.Boring
summarized: 'All we know about intelligence is that it is what
the tests test'. His remark was often to be repeated by psychologists
who would seem unaware of when it was first made.) However, even
without a psychological advance {of the type discussed in QUOTES
IX}, the metaphysical claim that g 'exists' need not be
controversial. There are real, lasting and general differences
between people in handedness, after all, yet no-one feels obliged
to denounce laterality quotients or the concept of handedness
as involving quite improper "reification". Nor is this
because of any triumph of explanatory science. (How skilled a
person is with the right hand, relative to the left, is a continuously
distributed variable allowing of uncontroversial measurement and
prediction: yet at present, despite great interest in the past
thirty years {see QUOTES XIX}, there is no well-established account
of the basis of handedness in genes, training or brain
growth and development - see Annett and others, 1996, Cahiers
de Psychologie Cognitive.)
{Questions about how to explain apparent differences in
g are dealt with in other Sections of Quotations: The Psychological
and Physiological Bases of Intelligence (IX); The Developmental
Origins of Intelligence Differences (X); The Biological and Social
Importance of Intelligence (XI); The Piagetian Approach to Intelligence
(XII); The Cognitive Science Approach to Intelligence (XIII).}
*********************************************************************
For more coverage of the measurement of intelligence,
and why London School psychologists talk of
'general intelligence', see
BRAND, C.R. (1996). The g Factor.
Chichester : Wiley DePublisher.
[The book was first issued, in February, but then withdrawn, in
April, by the 'publisher' because it was deemed to have infringed
modern canons of
'political correctness.']
For a Summary of the book, Newsletters concerning the
de-publication affair, and others' comments
and reviews, see the Internet URL sites:
http://laboratory.psy.ed.ac.uk/DOCS/crb/internet.html
http://www.webcom.com/zurcher/thegfactor/index.html
For Chris Brand's 'Get Real About Race!'-his popular exposition
of his views on race and education in the Black
hip-hop music magazine 'downlow' (Autumn, 1996)-see:
http://www.bhs.mq.edu.au/~tbates/intelligence/Brand_downlow.html
*******************************************************************
INDEX to QUOTES VIII
Page
Introductory history
(i) The positive manifold. 6
Are there substantially positive correlations amongst all reliable
mental ability tests?
(Is there essentially a 'positive manifold'?)
(ii) Factor-analytic g. 11
Does the statistical technique of factor analysis provide
special assistance in revealing the existence and nature
of general intelligence?
(iii) The nature and explanatory value of the g factor.
17 Can psychometric g properly be thought to explain
-or in some non-trivial sense account for-
the covariation between measured mental abilities?
(iv) Testing intelligence. 23
Can intelligence, g and IQ be adequately tested?
{Further remarks 'for' and 'against' psychometric testing
in general will be found in QUOTES XXX. The 'fairness' of
IQ tests to minority groups is considered in QUOTES XXIV.}
(v) 'Group factors'? 29
Are there important aspects or factors of intelligence
beyond the variance attributable to the g factor?
(Are there, at least under some specifiable conditions, what
Burt called 'group factors'-involving mini-constellations of specific
abilities? Are there what Howard Gardner-like Thurstone and
Guilford before him-envisages today to be truly independent
'multiple intelligences'?)
(vi) A compromise proposal: 'differentiation'. 36
(If intelligence 'differentiates' at higher levels of g,
Mental Age and IQ, g factors will be weaker in the higher
part of the intellectual range: different subtests (memory, verbal,
spatial, fluency, etc.) will correlate less well because they
are specialities in their own right, with a greater independence
of g differences; individual differences in them will be
less correlated because g has less influence over all of
them.)
Epilogue
Introduction: 'intelligence' in history
"In treating of the intellect, Aquinas followed Aristotle
in distinguishing passive or potential, and active or actual intellect.
The passive intellect consisted of the store of acquired knowledge;
the active intellect, on the other hand, was 'the power to make
things actually intelligible, by abstracting the species (i.e.
the form) from the material conditions.' Knowledge essentially
consisted in the concordance of the form in the object and the
form in the mind."
L.S.HEARNSHAW, 1987, The Shaping of Modern Psychology.
London : Routledge.
"The concept of intelligence is an ancient concept, which
had its origins in the faculty psychology of Aristotle. 'Understanding'
was one of the 'powers' of the soul; and in Latin this became
'intelligentia'. [According to Cicero] 'Intelligence is the power
which enables the mind to comprehend reality.' [Empiricist rejection
of the term started with Hobbes....] In ignoring topics such as
intelligence, and deriding the study of individual differences,
Wundt, the founding father of modern scientific psychology, was
merely reflecting the general tendencies of his time.... For the
evolutionists, beginning with Spencer, intelligence was both an
outcome of, and a factor in evolutionary development.... It was
Galton's idea to attempt the measurement of these aptitudes in
man...."
L.S.HEARNSHAW, 1987, The Shaping of Modern Psychology.
London : Routledge.
"As Burt frequently pointed out, [the concept, together with
the term 'intelligence'] goes back to Aristotle's nous
and Cicero's intelligentia, and through the Scholastic
philosophers of the Middle Ages it became incorporated into the
languages of modern Europe. It soon began to acquire approximately
its present connotation. As far back as the sixteenth century,
Richard Grafton, the chronicler, had spoken of 'an Englishman
of good intelligence', and the eighteenth- century {Scottish}
philosopher, Thomas Reid, wrote of 'intelligence, wisdom, and
other mental qualities'. Sir William Hamilton in 1846 had noted
that the term 'intelligence' was 'loosely and variously employed
in all our modern languages'..... The evolutionists [merely gave]
the term a new slant, Herbert Spencer conceiving intelligence
as the supreme function concerned with the adjustment of organisms
to their environment, and Galton as the most important of the
ways in which individual differed hereditarily."
L.S.HEARNSHAW, 1979, Cyril Burt: Psychologist.
London : Hodder & Stoughton.
"The first actual measurement of any kind of psychological
individual differences was performed not by a philosopher or a
psychologist, but by a German astronomer, F.W.Bessel (1784-1846),
in 1822. He was fascinated by the discovery, made in 1795 at the
Greenwich Observatory [in London], that individual astronomers
differed systematically in the exact time at which they recorded
the transit of a star across a hairline in the field of a telescope
.... Bessel systematically investigated this phenomenon, estimating
differences in visual reaction times between individuals in milliseconds.
He discovered reliable individual differences in reaction time,
to which he gave the name personal equation...."
A.R.JENSEN, 1987, in J.A.Glover & R.R.Ronning, Historical
Foundations of Educational Psychology. New York : Plenum.
"....in 1905 [Binet] published with Thomas Simon a list of
thirty tests, arranged in an ascending order of difficulty, designed
to separate defective from normal children. The ground upon which
fell the seed of Binet's ideas was exceptionally fertile. Indeed,
the impression is gained that the minds of many people in different
countries and continents were independently moving in the same
direction. Sir Cyril Burt, then working in Oxford, had devised
tests for children of different age groups; the marks gained in
these tests were compared with the assessments of the children's
abilities by their teachers. Lewis M. Terman, working independently
at Worcester, Massachusetts, published in 1906 a comparison of
the performances of seven bright and seven stupid boys on various
tests. Again in 1906, de Sanctis invented six tests for classifying
the feeble-minded. In Germany, Stern and Neumann were working
on similar lines."
C.P.BLACKER, 1952, Eugenics: Galton and After.
London : Duckworth.
"Intelligence as a measurable capacity must at the start
be defined as the capacity to do well in an intelligence test.
Intelligence is what the tests test."
E. BORING, 1923, in New Republic.
(i) The positive manifold
"The best evidence for a conspicuous and central intellective
factor is that if you make a list of stunts, then the inter-stunt
correlations will all be positive."
L.L.THURSTONE, 1934, Psychological Review 41.
"The most outstanding feature of all measures of intellectual
ability in its broadest sense is that they show some degree of
positive co- variation."
A.D.B. & Anne M.CLARKE, 1972, in W.D.Wall & V.P.Varma,
Advances in Educational Psychology. London University Press.
"The intercorrelations of tests in the ability domain [across
a wide range of talent] are overwhelmingly positive in sign and
substantial in size."
L.G.HUMPHREYS, 1985.
"The idea of a hierarchical model of some kind, with general
intelligence at the apogee of the pyramid, has been entrenched
in all theories on intelligence since Thurstone's allegedly independent,
primary mental abilities failed to replicate in population samples."
Sandra SCARR, 1985.
"....psychometricians have often striven to devise mental
tests that would not be correlated with one another. Thurstone
(1935, Vectors of the Mind), for example, devoted years
to trying to produce a number of tests that would yield uncorrelated
measures of what he then regarded as independent factors of ability,
termed primary mental abilities(PMA). No amount of psychometric
refinement of the various PMA tests could eliminate their substantial
inter-correlations....
It has proven impossible to create a number of different mental
tests, each of highly homogeneous items, and with high reliability,
that do not show significant correlations with one another. The
"positive manifold" of test intercorrelations is indeed
a reality, a fundamental fact, that calls for scientific explanation."
A.R.JENSEN, 1987, in R.R.Ronning et al.,
The Influence of Cognitive Psychology on Testing.
Hillsdale, New Jersey : Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
"....Thurstone in fact changed his mind, and admitted the
importance of g as a second-order factor."
H.J.EYSENCK, 1987, Personality & Individual Differences
8.
"If a child is in the top quarter of a class at anything,
you can almost guarantee that the child will be in the top half
at nearly everything."
V.SEREBRIAKOFF, 1988, A Guide to Intelligence and Personality
Testing. Carnforth, Lancashire : Parthenon.
"The IQ tests ignore much in us that is artistic, contemplative
and nonverbal. They were constructed to predict success in the
kinds of schools that have prevailed in Europe and the United
States."
Ruth HUBBARD, 1972, Science 178, p.232.
"....there is certainly evidence against the idea of an all-embracing
g factor. Of some 48,000 correlations between pairs of
tests, about 18% were below 0.10.... Spearman had not carried
his research far enough."
J.P.GUILFORD, 1985, in B.B.Wolman,
Handbook of Human Intelligence. New York : Wiley DePublisher.
"Many scientists are now convinced that there is no single
measure of intellectual ability - no unitary intelligence. Their
suspicion of the concept of general intelligence is based on the
view that various intellectual capacities are not well correlated.
....it is useful to continue to expose the myth of "general
intelligence"."
Philip KITCHER, 1985, Vaulting Ambition: Sociobiology and the
Quest for Human Nature. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
"We have seen that it is not at all difficult to generate
positive manifolds from complete nonsense data. All that is required
is that we form several linear combinations from any given set
of variables, which may well be entirely unrelated, so that the
weights are all non- negative. ....positive manifolds, which have
been hailed as a 'fact of nature' and made the cornerstone of
the claim that g must exist, can frequently be explained
as simple artefacts of test-construction procedures."
P.H.SCHONEMANN, 1987, in S. & Celia Modgil,
Arthur Jensen: Consensus and Controversy. Brighton : Falmer.
"[There is a puzzle about] the positive intercorrelations
of subtests components used to justify treatment of intelligence
as a unitary trait in genetic studies. With rats in an ecologically
valid (maze) test, intelligence entails multiple independent factors
(Harrington 1975, 1984, 1988). Selection for fitness will tend
to not only reduce the genetic components of variance but will
also tend toward negative genetic covariances (Williams, 1957,
Evolution 11)."
G.M.HARRINGTON, 1990, Cahiers de Psychologie Cognitive 10.
"I agree with Roubertoux and Capron's (1990, CPC 10)
criticism and distrust of the heritability index, of model building,
and of the IQ score as a genetic phenotype. IQ is not only a composite
score, it is, from the standpoint of the geneticist, a poorly
defined phenotype. Every psychology text and every teacher of
courses on intelligence must attempt a complicated definition
of intelligence. The variety of definitions is enormous. Behaviour
geneticists studying mental abilities are aware of this, and their
research has focused on specific cognitive abilities....The large
Hawaii Family Study (DeFries et al., 1979, Behav.Genetics 9)
used 15 tests of cognitive abilities, extracting four group factors
by means of factor analysis."
Ruth GUTTMAN, 1990, Cahiers de Psychologie Cognitive 10.
"[The term intelligence] will be used here solely as
a shorthand for "consistent individual differences in cognitive
competence." I will further limit the term by admitting that
consistent can mean consistent over time, but not necessarily
over domains. I, and many other people, can imagine stockbrokers
who are poor mathematicians and vice versa."
E.HUNT, 1994, 'Theoretical models for the study of intelligence.'
In D.K.Detterman, Current Topics in Human Intelligence, Volume
4: Theories of Intelligence. Norwood, NJ : Ablex.
"As Sir Peter Medawar and others have pointed out, the IQ
notion of intelligence as a single dimension along which to judge
children and adults is among the most personally and socially
damaging notions of this century. Fortunately, there are lots
of kinds of intelligence."
Richard GREGORY, 1994, in Jean Khalfa, What is Intelligence?
Cambridge University Press.
"Comprehension, invention, direction and criticism - intelligence
is constrained in these four words."
Alfred BINET.
"Some psychometric researchers (e.g. Kelderman et al.,
Multivar. Behav. Res. 16) have found partial support for
certain aspects of J.P.Guilford's [150-independent-factor, Structure-of-Intellect]
model, but on the whole the psychometric community has regarded
the model as at least highly questionable, if not entirely rejected....
At this point {p.59 of his book} I will only state my conviction
that the model is fundamentally defective.... Guilford's S-o-I
model must....be marked down as a somewhat eccentric aberration
in the history of intelligence models; that so much attention
has been paid to it is disturbing, to the extent that textbooks
and other treatments of it have given the impression that the
model is valid and widely accepted, when clearly it is not."
J.B.CARROLL, 1993, Human Cognitive Abilities.
Cambridge University Press.
"I have found no evidence of any two or more mental abilities
that are consistently uncorrelated or negatively correlated in
a large unrestricted or random sample of the population. The few
observed exceptions to this most important empirical generalization
are entirely explained in terms of measurement error, sampling
error, biased sampling of the population, restriction of the range
of ability in the sample, and inclusion of test items which represent
types of performance that do not meet the essential criteria for
a mental ability {showing consistency, voluntariness, objectivity
and not dependent on testing via particular sensory modalities
or motor mechanisms} . The phenomenon of positive manifold in
mental abilities is one of the most important facts to be explained
by any theory of human mental ability."
A.R.JENSEN, 1994, 'Phlogiston, animal magnetism and intelligence.'
In D.K.Detterman, Current Topics in Human Intelligence 4: Theories
of Intelligence. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
(ii) Factor-analytic g
[Re the statistical technique of factor
analysis itself,
see Appendix to Personality, Biology & Society]
"[g is] the nuclear operational definition of intelligence,....[which]
has stood like a Rock of Gibraltar in psychometrics, defying any
attempt to construct a test of complex problem solving which excludes
it."
A.R.JENSEN, 1969, 'How much can we boost IQ and scholastic
attainment?' In Environment, Heredity and Intelligence.
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Educational Review.
"....in a review of Thurstone's work, Eysenck (1939, Brit.J.Educ.Psychol.
9) factor-analyzed all of the Thurstone tests and found that
a large g factor could be extracted from the inter- correlations.
All but a very few of the tests had larger factor loadings on
g than on the particular primary mental ability factors
that they were specially devised to measure as purely as possible."
A.R.JENSEN, 1987, in R.Ronning et al., The Influence
of Cognitive
Psychology on Testing. Hillsdale, NJ : Lawrence Erlbaum.
"The three factors obtained in the present study [of thousands
of adult subjects, of all ages] explained 58% of the total WAIS-Revised
sub-test variance across the nine age groups (i.e. h2 =
.58, with g = .47, v:ed = .06, and k = .05)."
J.BLAHA & F.H.WALLBROWN, 1982,
Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 50.
"....the g factor scores derived from just the verbal
subtests of the Wechsler Scales are correlated +.80 with the g
factor scores derived from just the nonverbal performance
subtests of the Wechsler."
A.R.JENSEN, 1986, addressing a conference at Blackwood, Virginia.
"Data from the Child Health and Education Study (a longitudinal
study starting in 1960 and testing the cohort every five years)
which recorded the scores of 12,905 children on four of the subtests
of the British Ability Scales, plus a pictorial test of language
comprehension, a test of reading and a test of maths, were factor
analysed in a Principal Components analysis. The Principal Components
Analysis yields a single-factor solution [with only one
of the seven tests loading at less than .70 on the g factor]."
M.ANDERSON, 1987, speaking to the Cognitive Section
of the British Psychological Society.
"Recent Principal Components analysis of the eleven very
different subtests of the WAIS-R (Canavan et al., 1986,
Brit.J.Clin.Psychol. 25) yielded a g factor which
accounted for over 55% of the variance between subjects on the
tests. In this study, no subtest had a loading of less than 0.64
on the first, general factor."
I.J.DEARY, 1988, 'Basic processes in human intelligence',
in H.J.JERISON & I.JERISON, Intelligence and Evolutionary
Biology. Berlin : Springer.
Methodological points
{See also Appendix to the 'Personality, Biology & Society',
re Factor Analysis.}
"An advantage of pursuing g [by factor analysis] is
that we have a specified set of operations on a specified class
of empirical data that dependably yields a phenomenon that we
can study in generally the same analytic manner that science approaches
any other natural phenomenon."
A.R.JENSEN, 1985, addressing the Buros Nebraska Symposium
on Measurement and Testing.
"....orthogonal factor rotation, as is obtained by Kaiser's(1958)
popular Varimax programme, is simply wrong in the abilities domain
- orthogonal factors never approximate simple structure as closely
as oblique factors. If we accept the logic of simple structure,
we must extract oblique factors, and the correlated factors must
then be factor analysed."
A.R.JENSEN, 1986, Journal of Vocational Behaviour 29.
"[I do not accept] that Thurstone's concept of "simple
structure" and g are in opposition. In my view, the
concept of simple structure is basic to g in the factor
analysis of human abilities. A hierarchical g factor is
the logical consequence of maximizing the approximation to simple
structure, which, because of the existence of the positive manifold,
can be achieved in the factor analysis of ability tests only be
means of oblique (i.e. correlated) factors. Factor analysis of
oblique, first-order factors creates a hierarchical factor structure,
at the apex of which is g."
A.R.JENSEN, 1987, Behavioral & Brain Sciences 10.
"I shall never forget....the impression that [1904 paper
of Spearman's] made on me, ....the dogmatic tone of the author,
the finality with which he disposed of everyone else, and his
one-hundred- per-cent faith in the verdict of his mathematical
formulae. I read them through several times, or all that I could
understand of them, and I was left in a suspended state of judgment.
The author's logic appeared to be waterproof, but the conclusion
to which it led....seemed to me as absurd then as it does now."
L.TERMAN, 1932.
"The chimerical nature of g is the rotten core of
Jensen's edifice, and of the entire hereditarian school. ....no
concrete tie has ever been confirmed between any neurological
object and a factor axis."
S.J.GOULD, 1981, The Mismeasure of Man. New York : Norton.
"S.J.Gould's analysis of the work of Jensen and others demonstrates
that the cult of unilinear, inherited intelligence and its provision
of a 'scientific' base for social prejudices is still very much
with us. Gould's splendid book contributes much of sanity to our
troubled arguments by exposing the injustice of denying people
"an opportunity to strive or even to hope" by a limit
imposed from without, but falsely identified as lying within."
Don BANNISTER, 1982, Psychology News.
"....the use of factor analysis in investigating differences
in thought processes is like the use of a paint spray as a pen."
P.N.JOHNSON-LAIRD, 1983,
Mental Models. Cambridge University Press.
"The whole notion of a 'general, global intelligence factor'
is largely rejected by psychologists seeking to operationalize
intelligent behaviour. The intelligence test is a social construct,
comprising a set of items selected to normally distribute individuals
on a continuum, in terms of some dimension which bears a relationship
to future school attainment."
Carole AUBREY, 1983, Bulletin of the British Psychological
Society.
"The factor model implies underlying 'latent traits' generating
the various abilities the tests measure. Nothing is implied or
said about the way [in which the] various abilities might [causally]
influence each other. The [factor] model draws one inevitably
towards the conception of cognitive ability as a relatively fixed
characteristic present from birth in the terms that such writers
as Jensen describe it."
J.M.BYNNER & D.M.ROMNEY, 1986, 'Intelligence, fact or artefact:
alternative structures for cognitive abilities',
British Journal of Educational Psychology 56.
"Used with appropriate caution....correlational data can
be a rich source of insights into causal mechanisms operating
among variables and for evaluating the relative merits of different
theoretical propositions about them. Used blindly, as in the traditional
factor analysis approach, they will keep theory firmly locked
into the kind of straight-jacket that has dominated individual
differences in psychology since its inception."
J.BYNNER, 1986, 'Factor analysis and the construct indicator relationship'.
Milton Keynes : The Open University.
"....the use of unrotated first factors can cast a veil over
possibly interesting, detailed structures of variables."
J.B.CARROLL, 1987, in S. & Celia Modgil, Arthur Jensen:
Consensus and Controversy. Brighton : Falmer.
"Factors arise completely out of individual differences....
Because of their exclusive dependence on variance, therefore,
factors do not necessarily represent the operating principles
of the mind. Processes that were so essential to individual survival
in the course of human evolution as to be left with little or
no genetic variance would not show up as factors."
A.R.JENSEN, 1987, in R.Ronning et al., The Influence
of Cognitive Psychology on Testing. Hillsdale, New Jersey
: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
"....a masterpiece of propaganda."
S.BLINKHORN, 1982, reviewing S.J.Gould, The Mismeasure of Man,
Nature, 8 iv.
"....what Gould has mistaken for "reification"
is neither more nor less than the common practice in every science
of hypothesizing explanatory models to account for the observed
relationships within a given domain. Well known examples include
the heliocentric theory of planetary motion, the Bohr atom, the
electromagnetic field, the kinetic theory of gases, gravitation,
quarks, Mendelian genes, mass, velocity, etc. None of these
constructs exists as a palpable entity occupying physical space."
A.R.JENSEN, 1982, reviewing The Mismeasure of Man,
Contemporary Education Review.
"Of course, it is a truth universally recognised by the distributors
of statistical software and the overworked referees of learned
journals that the majority of users of factor analytic techniques
know little of their theoretical underpinnings, care less, and
are refractory to preaching and instruction."
Steve BLINKHORN, 1987,
British Journal of Mathematical & Statistical Psychology
39.
"Nearly everyone prefers to be told that unpleasant news
or contrary evidence is only a product of false reification: that
is, that the evidence behind the news is simply an abstraction
being treated as if it had concrete substance. In science the
important issue, however, is whether an abstraction has "construct
validity" (Cronbach & Meehl, 1955, Psychol.Bull.52),
not "concrete substance." And construct validity depends
on clear operationalization of reliable measurements, on meaningful
relations with other concepts, on differentiation from or mergence
with possibly related concepts with other names, and on success
in predicting outcomes not yet observed. ....we can [analyze]
more than one set of subtests, each set quite different from the
others in types of item employed....Each would have an abstract
but calculable general factor. But it turns out empirically that
any two such general factors are largely one and the same, because
they correlate highly with each other (Jensen, Thorndike 1986,
J.Voc.B.29; Jensen, 1993, Annals N.Y.Acad.Sci.702).
....[Again, if] single tests are inserted into various batteries
of tests as probes, the size of their loadings remains relatively
invariant from battery to battery. This indicates that the g
loading of a test "is to a considerable extent determined
by the characteristics of the test itself, rather than the context
in which it appears" (Thorndike, 1987, Person.& Indiv.Diffs.8)."
R.A.GORDON, 1995, Planning for Higher Education 23.
"After applying the particular factor-analytic method that
prevented g from emerging, [psychometric critics of g]
had nowhere to take the results. If they labeled their independent
factors as distinct mental skills and developed a research agenda
based on them, they got crushed by critics who could demonstrate
that their results were more elegantly explained by g.
Indeed, g not only explained more variance than any other
factor, it typically explained three times as much variance as
all other factors combined.... The big unreported story about
the study of intelligence in the last decade is the remarkable
resilience and importance of g."
C.MURRAY, 1995, 'The Bell Curve and its critics.'
Commentary 99, v, 23-30.
(iii) The nature and explanatory value of g
"One of the most striking aspects of highly g-loaded
items is their infinite variety."
A.R.JENSEN, 1977.
"The evidence is very strong that there is a "general"
factor of intelligence that is involved in a great variety of
cognitive tasks. It is probable that this is the same factor that
Charles Spearman called g, and it is difficult to go very
far beyond Spearman in his elucidation of the fundamental nature
of this factor as involving what he called the "eduction
of correlates and relations". Whenever a task requires noticing
similarities and differences among elements, inferring correspondences,
rules, and generalities, following a line of reasoning, and predicting
consequences, that task is likely to involve this general factor
of intelligence - particularly as the elements of the task become
more numerous and complex."
John B. CARROLL, 1986, in R.J.Sternberg & D.K.Detterman,
What is Intelligence? Norwood, New Jersey : Ablex.
"It is well-nigh impossible....to account for the correlations
between vocabulary, block designs and backward digit span in terms
of common [surface] features of the tests."
A.R.JENSEN, 1987, in R.R.Ronning et al.,
The Influence of Cognitive Psychology on Testing.
Hillsdale, New Jersey : Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
"The degree to which various psychometric tests, such as
the Wechsler subscales, are correlated with certain non-psychometric
variables is found to be directly related to the tests' g
loadings. This relationship has been found for:
the heritability of various tests;
the spouse correlations and other kinship correlations
on various
tests;
the degree of inbreeding depression of scores on various
tests, and
its converse, hybrid vigor (variables which, in genetic
theory, have
important implications concerning the evolution of g);
evoked potentials of the brain;
the size of the average black-white difference; and
reaction time (averaging less than one second) on very
simple
tasks that require no knowledge or acquired specific skills. Therefore,
g is no mere artefact of psychometrics or factor analysis,
as some psychologists have mistakenly believed, but it is a real
phenomenon, a variable which links psychology to biology and evolution."
A.R.JENSEN, 1987, Editorial, Intelligence 11.
"In fact, g has some application even across species.
Human children can be given certain of the performance tests designed
for animals, and this reveals that g-loaded tasks put apes
ahead of monkeys, monkeys ahead of dogs, and dogs ahead of chickens.
Gould (1981, The Mismeasure of Man) expresses horror: speaking
as a paleontologist, he accuses Jensen of ranking all animal species,
each of which possesses its own solution to its own environmental
niche, according to human standards. Surely that is the whole
point: human beings rank animals using a distinctively human concept
of intelligence, the primitive concept found in everyday life,
and these rankings correlate with g."
J.R.FLYNN, 1987, 'The ontology of intelligence'.
"Against the argument that all ability tests correlate and
therefore measure the same ability, one can point out that height
and weight also correlate, and rather substantially, yet we consider
them to be separate characteristics."
S.G.VANDENBERG & G.P.VOGLER, 1986, in B.B.Wolman,
A Handbook of Intelligence. New York : Wiley DePublisher.
"We do not deny that g exists; instead, we question
its explanatory importance outside the relatively narrow environment
of formal schooling. For example, evidence for g is provided
almost entirely by tests of linguistic or logical intelligence....
If reliable tests could be constructed for different intelligences,
and these tests did not rely solely on short answers, often through
pencil-and-paper presentations, but instead used the materials
of the domain being measured, we believe that the correlations
responsible for g would greatly diminish."
J.M.WALTERS & H.GARDNER, 1986, in R.J.Sternberg & R.K.Wagner,
Practical Intelligence. Cambridge University Press.
"The whole notion of a 'general, global intelligence factor'
is largely rejected by psychologists seeking to operationalize
intelligent behaviour. The intelligence test is a social construct,
comprising a set of items selected to normally distribute individuals
on a continuum, in terms of some dimension which bears a relationship
to future school attainment."
Carol AUBREY, 1983, Bulletin of the British Psychological Society
36.
"In spite of the prevalence of belief in general intelligence,
in spite of the emotional intensity with which this belief is
held, and despite the fact that this belief is proclaimed as true
by some of the high priests of our science, the belief should
be cast out."
J.L.HORN, 1984, addressing the Gatlinburg Conference on
Theory and Research in Mental Retardation.
"Measured intelligence is thought to be an aggregate of a
number of [Thurstone's] primary abilities: verbal, spatial, number,
reasoning, word fluency and memory."
K.J.CONNOLLY, 1987, in R.Gregory, The Oxford Companion
to the Mind. Oxford University Press.
"....intelligence is a complex phenomenon that needs to be
understood complexly."
R.J.STERNBERG, 1987, in S. & Celia Modgil,
Arthur Jensen: Consensus and Controversy. Brighton : Falmer.
"I do not believe that there is a single general talent,
whether it be called intelligence, creativity or 'g'. I
do not locate talents completely within the human skull, preferring
to construe all accomplishments as an interaction between cognitive
potentials on the one hand, and the resources and opportunities
provided by the surrounding culture on the other....All intellectual
and creative work takes place within some kind of social discipline,
craft, or organized activity, termed a domain. Accordingly,
there is no sense in which one can speak about a person as being
intelligent, or creative, in general."
Howard GARDNER {?} in CIBA SYMPOSIUM re Giftedness, 1994.
"The nub of the anti-IQ argument is that g is a statistical
artefact and nothing more. It is easy to generate positive correlations
from nonsensical data, as Peter Schönemann shows.... His
imaginary example is that of a Great Society, in which Greatness
is worshipped in all its forms-'large families, high income, big
houses, long names, tall stature, large shoe sizes'. ....Arthur
Jensen rejects this satirical allegory as 'sophistry'."
Marek KOHN, 1995, The Race Gallery: the Return of Racial Science.
London : Jonathan Cape.
"[g is] ostensibly some innate scalar brain force....
....[However] ability is a folk concept and not amenable to scientific
analysis."
J. MARKS (Dept Anthropology, Yale University),
1995, Nature, 9 xi, 143-144.
"For Binet....intelligence was merely the average of a number
of disparate and probably unrelated mental abilities, and indeed
it might be said that he was illogical in talking about intelligence
at all, as he did not really believe in its existence."
H.J.EYSENCK & P.BARRATT, 1984, in C.R.Reynolds & V.Wilson,
Methodological and Statistical Advances in the Study of
Individual Differences. New York : Plenum.
"I suspect that there may be a "componential fallacy"
rapidly developing in cognitive psychology. This is the belief
that an impressionistic breakdown of an activity into smaller
and smaller steps is characterising processes actually occurring
in nature (in this case in the human brain)."
K.RICHARDSON, 1986, Behavioral & Brain Sciences 9.
"We are frequently warned of the danger of reifying g,
but it is never made very clear just what this might mean. Is
there a danger of reifying the physicist's concept of energy,
which is also an abstract theoretical construct? One and the same
energy is assumed to be manifested in various forms, such as 'kinetic',
'chemical', and 'potential' energy....
Factor analysts and intelligence theorists have always viewed
g as a theoretical construct. The status of factors as
theoretical constructs has been so thoroughly by Burt (1940) in
the chapter on 'The metaphysical status of factors' in his famous
book The Factors of the Mind as to leave hardly anything
more that could reasonably be said on this topic."
A.R.JENSEN, 1987, in R.Ronning et al., The Influence
of Cognitive
Psychology on Testing. Hillsdale, NJ : Lawrence Erlbaum.
"Heat, like intelligence, shows itself in many different
ways: it gives the feeling of warmth, it melts solids and vaporizes
liquids, it accelerates chemical reactions, it comes from the
sun or the fireplace, and so on. Where would thermodynamics be
if everyone had accepted the pervasive but pleiomorphic manifestations
of heat as proof that the theoretical problem of its nature was
insoluble?"
H.B.BARLOW, 1987, in R.Gregory, Oxford Companion
to the Mind. Oxford University Press.
"The very generality of ability, which seems to be
a distinguishing feature of Homo sapiens, may be an important
product of the evolutionary process, serving to safeguard the
behavioural capacities of the species from being too much at the
mercy of any particular environmental happenstances."
A.R.JENSEN, 1987, in S. & Celia Modgil,
Arthur Jensen: Consensus and Controversy. Brighton : Falmer.
"In my view, it makes no sense to be concerned with whether
factors represent reifications, as some have claimed (e.g.
Gould, 1981). Dictionaries define reification as the treatment
of an abstraction or idea as if it had material existence. Consider,
for example, the factor of Static Strength that has been identified
in numerous studies of physical abilities. It would seem absurd
to claim that this factor is simply a reification of an abstract
idea; rather, the factor reflects differences in the ability of
individuals to perform certain tasks requiring physical strength.
These differences undoubtedly have an underlying physiological
source in characteristics of groups of muscles and their innervation.
Analagously, it is absurd to claim that factors of cognitive abilities
are reifications, because they reflect observable differences
in individuals' performances of certain classes of tasks. The
fact that it is difficult to specify the precise physiological
sources of such differences does not make the corresponding factors
any less real."
J.B.CARROLL, 1993, Human Cognitive Abilities.
Cambridge University Press.
"The public are, in general, very ready to adopt the opinion
that he who has pleased them in one peculiar mode of composition
is, by means of that very talent, rendered incapable of venturing
upon other subjects.... There is some justice in this opinion,
as there always is in such as attain general currency.... But
much more frequently the same capacity which carries a man to
popularity in one department will obtain for him success in another."
Sir Walter SCOTT, Introduction to Ivanhoe.
"Sir, the man who has vigour may walk to the North as well
as to the South, to the East as well as to the West."
Doctor JOHNSON.
"....Keating (1984) has argued that those who believe in
the usefulness of the concept of intelligence appear to assume
"that it is a thing that exists in the head of a person".
....[This writer regards it as] a scientific concept, analogous
to such concepts as gravitation, humidity, society, or atoms.
Scientific concepts like these do not carry an implication of
existence; neither does intelligence. ....There obviously is no
such thing as "society"....."
H.J.EYSENCK (1993). The Biological Basis of Intelligence.
In P.A.Vernon, Biological Approaches to the Study of Human
Intelligence. Norwood, NJ : Ablex.
"....Gould's (1981, The Mismeasure of Man) strawman
issue of the reification of g was dealt with satisfactorily
by the pioneers of factor analysis, including Spearman (1927),
Burt (1940) and Thurstone (1947).....From Spearman to Meehl (1991,
History of Philosophy & Psychology Bulletin), the consensus
of experts is that g need not be a "thing"....The
g factor is a construct. Its status as such is comparable
to other constructs in science: mass, force, gravitation, potential
energy, magnetic field, Mendelian genes, and evolution, to name
a few."
` A.R.JENSEN & Li-Jen WENG, 1994, 'What is a good g?'
Intelligence 18.
"The term intelligence shares many of the same scientifically
unsatisfactory characteristics of phlogiston and animal magnetism....
How much more evidence do we still need that psychologists are
unable to reach agreement on the meaning of intelligence after
nearly a century of trying.... The hopelessly muddled concept
of intelligence is at best useless and at worst a hindrance to
efforts by behavioral and brain scientists.... Abandoning the
fruitless quest for intelligence in no way negates the actual
phenomena of interest {viz. the g factor}, any more than
scrapping phlogiston negated the phenomena of combustion."
A.R.JENSEN, 1994, 'Phlogiston, animal magnetism and intelligence.'
In D.K.Detterman, Current Topics in Human Intelligence 4.
Norwood, NJ : Ablex.
"Much is frequently made of the fact that psychologists seem
not to agree on a definition of intelligence. ....[But when] a
representative cross-section of mental tests experts is sampled,
and they are all required to address the same list of questions,
much convergence becomes evident (Snyderman & Rothman, 1988).
Over 95 per cent agree, for example, that intelligence tests measure
"abstract reasoning", "problem solving ability"
and "capacity to acquire knowledge."
R.A.GORDON, 1995, Planning for Higher Education 23.
"....well-known psychologists (Sternberg & Wagner, 1986)
still define intelligence in terms other than dispositional; the
notion of 'practical intelligence' they advocate is in terms of
achievement.... The Sternberg-Wagner thesis is in fact a revival
of the discredited view originally presented by McClelland (1973)
advocating 'testing for competence' rather than intelligence."
H.J.EYSENCK, 1995, Genius: the Natural History of Creativity.
Cambridge University Press.
(iv) Testing intelligence
"Sir Cyril [Burt] noticed, in 1913, that prosperous districts
[of London] had seventy scholarships per ten thousand, compared
with two in poor districts. Sir Cyril proposed intelligence tests
to correct the unfair conditions which handicapped children who
came from poor and sometimes semi-literate homes. He saw the intelligence
test as a means to reduce the disadvantage: 'So far from the new
test questions favouring the educated middle class type of parent,
as critics allege, the demonstrable effect was to reduce the disproportionate
number of scholarships going to the privileged few. Thus, in the
sample borough in which our most intensive surveys were carried
out, the number of scholarship winners coming from working class
homes rose from 1.8% to 3.5%'"
V.SEREBRIAKOFF, 1988, A Guide to Intelligence and Personality
and
Intelligence Testing. Carnforth, Lancs. : Parthenon.
"Tests do not create social problems, they merely quantify
them."
H.J.EYSENCK, 1979.
"IQ at age five-and-a-half accounts for 50% of the variance
in Mathematics scores at sixteen-and-a-half years of age. This
is a sobering finding for those educational advisers who have
been abandoning the use of tests of general intelligence over
the past few years."
W.YULE, R.D.GOLD & Carol BUSCH, 1982,
Personality & Individual Differences 3.
"A committee of the National Research Council has concluded
that standardized ability tests - the subject of a whole decade
of controversy and litigation - are, on the whole, valid."
Constance HOLDEN, 1982, Science, 19 ii.
"No serious challenge now remains to the proposition that,
with few and unimportant exceptions, mental tests are not biased
against social and ethnic minority groups as a necessary consequence
of their methods of construction."
S.BLINKHORN, 1985, Nature, 24 i.
"There is no evidence of cultural bias against blacks in
the major standardized tests of mental ability, and mental tests
predict performance in school and on the job equally well for
blacks and whites."
Linda S. GOTTFREDSON, 1986, Journal of Vocational Behaviour
29.
"....twelve WISC-R subtests were factor analyzed along with
the thirteen subtests of the Kaufman Assessment Battery for Children
(K- ABC), a mental ability test designed with the hope of being
quite different from the WISC-R. ....the two g factors
were practically identical [r = c. .95], even across
different samples and different collections of tests."
A.R.JENSEN, 1987, in R.Ronning et al., The Influence
of Cognitive
Psychology on Testing. Hillsdale, NJ : Lawrence Erlbaum.
"Jensen grants that other cultures may value certain skills
more than we do: for example, hunters may put a higher value on
speed and motor co-ordination than on abstract problem-solving.
However, the individuals they call intelligent tend to exhibit
g. The Kalahari Bushmen of Africa call some of their tribe
the 'clever ones' and these tend to score better than average
on performance IQ tests."
James FLYNN, 1987, 'The ontology of intelligence.'
"....Husen (1951) found a Pearson correlation of 0.72 between
the [IQ] test scores of 613 third-grade [i.e. eight-year-old]
schoolboys and their scores ten years later on induction to military
service. Harnqvist (1968) reported a correlation of 0.78 between
tests administered at ages 13 and 18 to over 4.500 young men."
J.P.RUSHTON, H.G.MURRAY & S.ERDLE, 1987,
Personality & Individual Differences 8.
"Tests....can be but the beginning, never the end, of the
examination of the child. To take a young mind as it is, and delicately
one by one to sound its notes and stops, to detect the smaller
discords and appreciate the subtler harmonies, is more of an art
than a science....
If a child fails in a test of intelligence, that does not necessarily
prove that he lacks intelligence."
Cyril BURT, 1921/1975.
"In a book edited by Vernon (1957)....psychologists claimed
a high accuracy for selection [by IQ tests] but indicated that
there is an inevitable inaccuracy for some children. No less than
thirty-one recommendations were offered to improve the situation.
In an important earlier paper, Vernon (1955) had calculated that
over a five-year period, 17% of children would be likely to show
a rise or fall in IQ by 15 or more points, and nearly 1% by 30
points either way. The effects of test coaching were also revealed
during this period."
A.M. & A.D.B. CLARKE, 1986,
Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry.
"....the IQ test was 'validated' by selecting the items
so that they would predict 'success' in college - [and thus] it
is 100% a statistical artefact of this method of validation."
H.PUTNAM, 1973, Cognition 2.
"....there is no possibility of any 'intelligence' test not
being culturally biassed.... cultural experience permeates everything
human beings perceive and do."
P.BOHANNAN, 1973, Science 182.
"If a child fails in a test of intelligence, that does not
necessarily prove that he lacks intelligence."
Sir Cyril BURT, 1975 (in a posthumously published paper).
"Most items in an IQ test are far removed from the practical
business of living: they are highly abstract, and to answer them
one has to enter into the spirit of the game." N.S.SUTHERLAND,
1980, Times Literary Supplement, 9 v.
"....there is no justification at all for the psychometricians'
claims to have established the scientific measurement of individual
differences."
B.EVANS & B.WAITES, 1981.
"At best, most intelligence tests tap only logico-mathematical,
linguistic, and some spatial skills...."
Helen WEINREICH-HASTE, 1984, New Society, No. 1413.
"I don't believe that a single index of intelligence is likely
to be very useful."
R.J.STERNBERG, 1984.
"....the claim that IQ tests can be freed of education and
other biases by suitable choice of tasks seems ill-founded."
R.L.GREGORY, 1984, Mind in Science. Harmondsworth : Penguin.
"This much is certain: because of the obsolescence and sampling
problems [with IQ tests such as the Wechsler Scales], there is
at present no coherent criterion of mental retardation."
J.R.FLYNN, 1985, American Journal of Mental Deficiency 90.
"In our opinion, as long as it is White middle-class people
who decide who is intelligent and who is not, any outcome of that
decision is a priori suspect."
M.SCHIFF, Julia SCHULZ and Josue FEINGOLD, 1986,
in M.Schiff & R.Lewontin, Education and Class:
the Irrelevance of IQ Genetic Studies. Oxford : Clarendon.
"As psychologists, we should admit that we do not know in
any absolute or a priori sense what intelligence is in
other cultures, and until we do, we should not use our construct
[of intelligence] to describe their cognitive competencies, nor
our tests to measure them. ....the "fast analytic" flavour
of our current notion of intelligence is not universal; even on
the basis of our limited current knowledge, there is evidence
for a "paced, deliberate, social" conception and practice
which is highly valued and widely accepted in other societies."
J.W.BERRY, 1986, in R.J.Sternberg & D.K.Detterman,
What is Intelligence? Norwood, New Jersey : Ablex.
"....test scores usually reflect and perpetuate the social
order. They tend to consist of behaviour judged to be intelligent
by a dominant social group whose members are likely to have had
the greater practice in learning the behaviours and the display
rules."
Jacqueline J. GOODNOW, 1986, in R.J.Sternberg & D.K.Detterman,
What is Intelligence? Norwood, NJ : Ablex.
"One of the few impressive achievements of the mental tester
is to have succeeded in talking the general public into believing
that it is possible to "measure intelligence" without
being able to define it."
P.H.SCHONEMANN, 1987, in S. & Celia Modgil,
Arthur Jensen: Consensus and Controversy. Brighton : Falmer.
"The facts are these: when IQ tests rank people at a given
place and time, the results make sense in terms of relative intelligence;
when IQ tests rank generations over time, they give nonsense results.
....generational differences threaten the Spearman-Jensen theory
just so long as they signal massive g gains unaccompanied
by achievement gains. ....The proponents of the Spearman-Jensen
theory can legitimately ask for a breathing space to re-think
their position. However, such a period should not be too prolonged.
[Jensen himself] points out the extraordinary difficulty of finding
a factor that will explain away between-group differences [whether
between races or between generations] and not also explain away
within-group differences. ....Huge g gains from one generation
to another show that it is highly sensitive to environmental factors,
and some of these may be cultural factors such as learned strategies
of problem- solving picked up at school, or at home, or elsewhere."
J.R.FLYNN, 1987, 'The ontology of intelligence'.
"Tests measure what is. If they misrepresented what
is, they would be considered biased; but tests are not expected
to estimate what might have been under different circumstances
of schooling or early development."
Lorrie SHEPARD, 1987, in S. & Celia Modgil,
Arthur Jensen: Consensus and Controversy. Brighton : Falmer.
"....arrogance, ignorance and prejudice have been fellow-travellers
of the mental tester ever since Galton...."
P.H.SCHONEMANN, 1987, in S. & Celia Modgil,
Arthur Jensen: Consensus and Controversy. Brighton : Falmer.
"Since 1960, we have become aware of cultural and ethnic
biases in the social sciences-in intellectual tests, surveys,
questionnaires and the like."
Georgina WARNKE, 1988, New Society, 22 i.
"The IQ-as concept and as score-has long ceased to be a useful
scientific construct for organizing and describing our increasingly
complex and sensitive behavioural observations."
Muriel D. LEZAK, 1988,
Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology 10.
"....there are no strong grounds for believing that identification
of someone's measured intelligence justifies any kind of meaningful
statement about that individual's qualities, achievements or attributes,
or even detailed predictions except in narrowly circumscribed
circumstances. In short, a report of a person's level of tested
intelligence provides rather little information about that individual,
and considerably less than many writers who use the term in psychological
literature appear to believe. One of few general statements that
can be made about the different mental skills of a single person
is that they are independent of one another to a very considerable
extent."
M.J.A.HOWE, 1988, British Journal of Psychology 79.
"....the score gains on the numerical [intelligence] test,
Numerical Aptitude Test, resulting from the training programme
are more or less equivalent to a standard deviation....These results....contradict
the recent claim of Kline (1991, Intelligence: the Psychometric
View), who refers to the early Vernon view (1960) that effects
of coaching are small."
H.T.Van der MOLEN et al., 1995, European Journal of
Personality 9.
"Intelligence as measured by IQ tests is a well-established
dimension of individual differences. It is, however, quite different
from the set of characteristics that lead to lay perceptions (including
self-perceptions) of being "smart.""
P.T.COSTA Jr, 1995, address to International Society for the Study
of Individual Differences, meeting in Warsaw.
"As for bias, the evidence in The Bell Curve [R.J.Herrnstein
& C.M.Murray, 1994] deserves careful examination. The IQ difference
between blacks and whites, the authors say, is greater on test
items that appear culturally neutral than on those that appear
culturally loaded. Moreover, although black IQ scores get higher
with higher socioeconomic status, the difference between blacks
and whites of the same higher socioeconomic status does not shrink.
Also, is it not odd that IQ tests are never accused of being sexist?
Men and women have nearly identical mean IQs. But if IQ tests
are deliberately constructed so as to put certain groups down,
why were women not put down too? Perhaps there is something more
objective lurking in these tests that cannot so easily be manipulated
to satisfy the whims of the white males who invented them."
James TOOLEY, 1995, Times Higher Educational Supplement,
7 vii.
(v) 'Group factors'
[originally meaning: particular groups of tests showing
covariation even after the influence of the general, g
factor had been partialled out of the test inter-correlations]
"Of music, either vocal, for which my voice is very inept,
or instrumental, they never succeeded in teaching me anything.
At dancing, tennis, wrestling, I have never been able to acquire
any but very slight and ordinary ability; at swimming, fencing,
vaulting, and jumping, none at all. My hands are so clumsy that
I cannot even write so that I can read it; so that I would rather
do over what I have scribbled than give myself the trouble of
unscrambling it. And I hardly read any better. I feel that I weigh
upon my listeners. Otherwise a good scholar, I cannot close a
letter the right way, nor could I ever cut a pen, or carve at
table worth a rap, or saddle a horse, or properly carry a bird
and release it, or talk to dogs, birds, or horses."
M. de MONTAIGNE, 'Of Presumption'. In D.M.Frame, The Complete
Works of Montaigne. Stanford University Press.
"There are persons who have a pretty high grade of general
intelligence, but who manifest it much better in critical than
in synthetic work; again, there are persons in whom the receptive
activities of the intelligence (apprehending and understanding)
are superior to the more spontaneous activities, and so on."
W.STERN (originator of the concept of 'IQ'), 1914, The Psychol-
ogical Methods of Intelligence Testing. Baltimore : Warwick
& York.
"[Bertrand] Russell was a titan of modern philosophy and
arguably the most intelligent man of the twentieth century, but
[Paul] Johnson (1988, Intellectuals) notes that he was
totally detached from physical reality. He could not make his
hearing aid work, and he never learned how to make a pot of tea.
His wife kept leaving him detailed instructions, for example,
"Pour water from kettle into teapot"-but he never got
the hang of it."
Daniel SELIGMAN, 1992, A Question of Intelligence:
the IQ Debate in America. New York : Carol (Birch Lane).
"I remain to be convinced....that there are but a few basic
processes underlying individual differences in learning, and that
the interactions of specific task characteristics with highly
specific individual propensities are not the basis of the enormous
individual differences which everyone finds in most learning tasks."
C.N.COFER, 1967.
"Surely the error the psychometrists have made lies in the
assumption that intelligence as conceived by the ordinary man,
even though multifactorial, is basically a unitary concept. This
is brought out in the rejection of factors, suspected of being
components of intelligence, that are proved on investigation not
to correlate with the other accepted factors."
D.H.WILLIAMS, 1967, The Mensa Journal.
"[The eminent psychometrician, Philip E.] Vernon recommended
that a battery of tests should measure in particular the capacities
for comprehension of words, induction, numerical calculation,
and recognition of spatial relations."
J. R. BAKER, 1974, Race. Oxford University Press.
"Intelligence, as we know, is multidimensional."
R.GREEN, 1982, Bulletin of the British Psychological Society
35.
"The unitary notion of intelligence implied by IQ tests
appears to be a simple mistake and to have had unfortunate consequences."
R.L.GREGORY, 1984, Mind in Science. Harmondsworth : Penguin.
"On Mr Gardner's metric, people are neither more nor less
'intelligent' than one another, just more or less talented in
a number of specific areas. It sounds, I know, like common sense,
but how refreshing to see it justified in scholarly terms."
J.NAUGHTON, 1984, reviewing H.Gardner, Frames of Mind.
` The Observer.
"For anybody to replace IQ would be a huge deal; nobody's
going to do it by himself. But my feeling is that, no matter how
many people write books about how silly IQ is, unless somebody
provides an alternative model, we're going to be stuck with the
same ideas, the same tests, the same terms.....I have challenged
two dogmas of educational psychology: (1) the belief that intelligence
is (and should be) a property closely linked to skills that lead
to success in a modern secular school setting; (2) the belief
that intelligence, however defined, should be susceptible to assessment
in terms of a certain kind of measure, pioneered by Binet nearly
a century ago and now enshrined by the instruments produced at
the Educational Testing Service [New Jersey] and elsewhere. Instead,
I have proposed a new definition of an intelligence: a set of
abilities to solve problems, or to fashion products, which are
valued within a culture."
Howard GARDNER (author of Frames of Mind), 1985,
New Ideas in Psychology.
"Intelligence is not the whole of mental ability; besides
g there is some indefinite number of primary or group factors
independent of g. Hence the construct of intelligence can
be most precisely distinguished from other abilities by means
of factor analysis and should not be a label for just any
kind of ability in which we can observe individual differences."
A.R.JENSEN, 1986, Journal of Vocational Behavior 29.
"There is now good agreement on some 20 - 30 factors of intelligence,
additional to the omnipresent g."
H.J.EYSENCK, 1986, Personality & Individual Differences
7.
"Idiot-savant artists can reproduce images from memory as
well as or better than artistically gifted children of normal
IQ [O'Connor & Hermelin, 1987, Brit.J.Psychol.]. ....The
researchers interpreted their results as suggesting an intelligence-independent
system of graphic representation in the brain which can evoke
appropriate motor programmes."
Psychology News 2, 1, p.18.
"[Harriet, a musical prodigy,] was an autistic child, abusive
and destructive, with an IQ of 73. She did not talk until she
was nine. ....Each [idiot savant] casts an intensely focused
but perplexing spotlight on the many varied aspects of human intelligence.
There is a calendar calculator, with a range of 7,000 years, who
can't count to thirty."
James LE FANU, 1989, reviewing D.A.Treffert,
Extraordinary People. Sunday Telegraph, 2 iv.
"To me now [especially after reading Howard Gardner's Frames
of Mind], it is an article of faith that everyone is equally
intelligent in his or her own way."
Professor Charles HANLEY (giving the religious broadcast,
'Thought for the Day'), 1989, BBC IV UK, 2 iii.
"The overall impression from Intelligence and Cognition
(eds S.H.Irvine & S.E.Newstead) is that the factors of intelligence
have been pretty well established. They consist of Spearman's
all-embracing general factor and even seven major group or second-order
factors including reasoning, verbal, visuo-spatial, auditory perception,
speed, fluency, and memory."
R.LYNN, 1989, European Journal of Personality 3.
"....culling information from a wide range of sources....I
discerned at least seven separate mental faculties, which I dubbed
the intelligences....Under ideal conditions, one would assess
the intelligence of a young child by observing her at play (and
at work) in a children's museum, rather than sitting the child
down in a room and firing a set of short-answer questions or minute-long
problems in her direction. When we have employed this procedure
with young children, we have in fact been able to uncover a broader
range of capacities, with most children exhibiting both characteristic
strengths and weaknesses (Gardner and Hatch, 1989, Educational
Researcher 18)."
Howard GARDNER, 1993{?}, In R.Solso & D.Massaro, Science
of the Mind. New York : Oxford University Press.
"Waterhouse (1988, in L.K.Ohler & D.Fein, The Exceptional
Brain) makes the interesting suggestion that "special
cognitive talents or abilities are different in source from human
intelligence in general." She hypothesizes that "special
cognitive abilities are based on a set of skills that involve
the acutely accurate and extremely extensive representation of
visual images and sounds, and the rapid recognition and facile
manipulation of patterns involving those visual and auditory representations."
In terms of brain morphology, these talents would be found in
specialized visual and auditory processing systems."
J.B.CARROLL, 1993, Human Cognitive Abilities.
Cambridge University Press.
"In labeling multiple intelligences a theory, I have
always taken care to note that it is less a set of hypotheses
and predictions than it is an organized framework for configuring
an ensemble of data about human cognition in different cultures.
Still, I bristle at the notion that educational work in the vein
should grind to a halt while some kind of decisive scientific
test is carried out."
Howard M. GARDNER, 1994, Teachers College Record 95.
"I and my colleagues have been exploring various theoretical
frameworks that might serve as the foundation for a next-generation
intelligence testing system. Our current system, the Cognitive
Abilities Measurement (CAM) framework is a kind of componential
approach based on the idea that there are six major processing
sources, and three or more major domain sources of individual
differences in intelligence. The processing sources are:
working memory capacity,
information-processing speed,
breadth of declarative and procedural knowledge, and
rate of declarative and procedural learning.
The domain sources are verbal, quantitative, spatial, motor, and
temporal, the latter two being tentative categories (not yet empirically
verified). ....CAM is guided by a consensus information processing
model, emerging from research conducted within the experimental
cognitive psychology tradition."
P.C.KYLLONEN, 1995, from the abstract of an address to International
Society for the Study of Individual Differences, meeting in Warsaw.
"People lay too much stress on specialities, thinking that,
because a man is devoted to some special pursuit, he could not
have succeeded in anything else. They might just as well say that
because a youth has fallen desperately in love with a brunette
he could not possibly have fallen in love with a blonde."
Francis GALTON, 1869, Hereditary Genius. London : Macmillan.
"Although separate note is taken of [those major intellectual
qualities which are important in school progress - logical reasoning,
memory, imagination, perceptual power and attention], the fact
must not be overlooked that these are not in any way separately
functioning aspects of mental power. It is in fact difficult to
determine in some instances, for example in reasoning, how the
specific process differs from the manifestation of general intelligence.
Nor should these specific intellectual capacities be regarded
in the same light as the old "faculties". ....No modern
psychologist believes that there is any specifically functioning
mental power such as reasoning or memory."
Fred J. SCHONELL, 1948, Backwardness in Basic Subjects.
4th edition. Edinburgh : Oliver & Boyd.
"[P.E.Vernon (1961, The Structure of Human Abilities,
2nd edn) depicts the London School higher-order factor] v:ed
as dominating verbal, numerical facility, logical reasoning, attention,
and fluency factors, while k:m dominates educational grade
factors in drawing, handwork, psychomotor co-ordination, reaction
times, and even athletic ability. Still, Vernon states his belief
that "most of the variance in human abilities in daily life
is due to g" - perhaps 40 per cent; the major and
minor group factors contribute 10 per cent, and "the remaining
40 per cent would consist of very narrow group factors and unreliability"
(p. 27)."
J.B.CARROLL, 1993, Human Cognitive Abilities.
Cambridge University Press.
"....one can use the vast accumulation of data on the validity
of the Psychological Corporation's Differential Aptitude Test
[which supposedly measures several distinct, occupationally relevant
abilities] to show that better predictions are possible via
old- fashioned general intelligence tests."
Q.McNEMAR, 1964.
"[Liam Hudson] fails, I think, to understand the logic underlying
simpler statistical methods, e.g. the effect of selection on correlation....
Dr Hudson selected boys from the upper levels of general ability
and, probably because of this....dimensions of the group factor
variety stand out - namely a bias towards either verbal or non-verbal
success in the intelligence test, and a bias toward divergent
or convergent thinking in the tests of creativity."
Charlotte BANKS, 1967, reviewing Contrary Imaginations,
British Journal of Mathematical & Statistical Psychology
20.
"H.Gardner {see above} does little to explain why, if [his]
different faculties are completely independent, there should be
such a high correlation between tests that ostensibly draw on
several of them."
N.S.SUTHERLAND, 1984, Nature, 26 iv.
"The implicit theme of this book [H.Gardner's Frames of
Mind] is that some socially significant talents are not sufficiently
recognized and rewarded; ergo, call them intelligence,
and everyone will salute the flag. One senses the Red Queen speaking
in Alice in Wonderland when one reads Gardner's proposal
to call movement, musical talent, and interpersonal skills 'intelligence'....[Gardner's]
list of intelligences is also less than I want, if I am
to play his game. Gardner forgot some evolutionarily important
kinds of knowledge or intelligence, if you wish, many of which
pertain particularly to women.... When to pinch a snapdragon,
fertilize tomatoes, replant lettuce; when to discipline a child,
permit what kinds of independence, encourage achievement, or nurture
personality; what season to snare geese, shoot ducks, breed chickens;
which goats to select for breeding? ....How about attracting mates
with Style: gracefulness, cool dress, carriage, swagger, coquettishness?...
For liberals, the elitism implied by intellectual assessment,
which results in some pigs being appraised more highly than others,
evokes guilt about their own lofty achievements. Perhaps, if the
standards of achievement by which they have been judged were not
so narrow, so ethnocentric, then others would deserve similar
recognition. Such liberals of distinction are inclined to throw
sops to the other pigs. Gardner seems susceptible to this form
of intellectual noblesse oblige."
Sandra SCARR, 1985, reviewing Frames of Mind in
New Ideas in Psychology.
"The study of abilities, throughout most of its history,
has shown an obsession with independence.... The desire for real
components that are uncorrelated has been the philosopher's stone
of psychometrics; it seems to be a philosophic position, not one
dictated by scientific necessity. Since psychologists have not
succeeded in devising psychometric tests that are uncorrelated,
the search for this presumably desirable condition has moved on
to the measurement of elementary cognitive processes. By measuring
smaller and smaller components of performance on cognitive tasks,
presumably, correlations between them, and hence g, will
vanish. But it might well turn out that positive correlations
between any measurable components of ability will vanish only
at the point where correlation becomes impossible, that is, where
there no true variance in one (or both) of the correlated components."
A.R.JENSEN, 1985.
"R.B.Cattell [e.g. J.Educ.Psychol. 54] discovered
that, when various tests with contents reflecting past learning
experiences, cultural acquisition, and scholastic knowledge and
verbal and numerical skills are factor analyzed along with tests
involving novel problem solving and forms of reasoning based on
analogies, series, and matrices all consisting of abstract or
non-representational figures, there emerges at the second level
of a hierarchical analysis two factors which Cattell has labelled
fluid and crystallized G, or Gf and Gc. Fluid ability, Gf, can
be described as relation eduction, abstraction, and reasoning
in novel problems. Crystallized ability, Gc, reflects the acquisition
of specific and transferable skills and knowledge made available
by the individual's culture, education, and experience. Gf much
more nearly corresponds to Spearman's concept of g than
does Gc. [However,] Gf and Gc are correlated, and usually highly
correlated [except amongst the elderly]. ....[And] an increasing
amount of Gf can be "distilled" out of typical Gc tests
as they are sampled more broadly, because the only factor common
to all the highly varied measures of crystallized abilities will
be fluid ability, Gf."
A.R.JENSEN, 1987, in R.Ronning et al., The Influence
of Cognitive
Psychology on Testing. Hillsdale, NJ : Lawrence Erlbaum.
"{For 171 undergraduates of California State University}
correlational and factorial analysis indicated that although social
and academic intelligence may be conceptually distinct, there
is considerable measurement overlap between the constructs."
R.E.RIGGIO et al., 1991, 'Social and academic intelligence.'
Personality & Individual Differences 12.
"....the case for practical intelligence is heavily
centered on the presumed shortcomings and artificiality of IQ-based
intelligence, the kind you use in school. The case seems intuitively
very plausible. All of us can think of children who seemed like
stars in school but somehow never amounted to much in later life....
But if proponents of 'street smarts' are to make their case convincingly,
they must at some point get beyond criticizing IQ tests. It is
not enough for them to keep saying that practical intelligence
isn't academic intelligence. At some point, they need to
state crisply just what it is. On the evidence of [R.J.Sternberg
& R.K.Wagner's (1986) Practical Intelligence] and some
others I have looked at-especially Practical Intelligence:
Working Smarter in Business and the Professions, by Roger
Peters (1987)-this is the point at which they become less convincing."
Daniel SELIGMAN, 1992, A Question of Intelligence:
the IQ Debate in America. New York : Carol (Birch Lane).
"[H.Gardner (1993, Multiple Intelligences: the Theory
in Practice)] gives an account of....wide-ranging tests that
he has developed {over ten years} to measure [his] seven intelligences....But
the data, only sketchily described in this book, are....very preliminary.
They come from no more than a handful of children.... [and] Gardner's
research team has not so far shown how well the tests predict
children's achievements outside the testing situation."
P.E.BRYANT, 1994, Nature 367, 27 ii.
"Although [John Carroll's (1994, Human Cognitive Abilities,
CUP] major point is that intelligence or cognitive ability is
essentially a hybrid combination of general mental ability (Spearman's
g) and [about thirty] specialized abilities, the importance
of a general factor in the structure of human abilities is one
that cannot be taken too {seriously}. The evidence, as Carroll
points out, is overwhelming. ....what really hits home is how
well Spearman's theory has held up over time. ....Carroll's assessment
of Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences is bleak at best."
Kevin LAMB, 1994, Mankind Quarterly 24.
(vi) A compromise? - 'Differentiation.'
"The unitary ability which differentiates [into subclasses
- e.g. presentative, representative] [Herbert Spencer (1870, Principles
of Psychology II )] terms intelligence. [Spencer compared
groups of mental phenomena to "a tree, each branch
of which bears secondary and tertiary branches, with a continual
divergence and re-divergence of the branches.""
E.M.MOURSY, 1952, 'The hierarchical organization of cognitive
levels.'
British Journal of Mathematical & Statistical Psychology
5.
"We are of the opinion that the most valuable applications
of our scale will not be for the normal subject, but instead for
the inferior degrees of intelligence."
Alfred BINET, 1908. Cited by R.E.Fancher, The Intelligence
Men.
New York : Norton.
"Comprehension, invention, direction and criticism-intelligence
is constrained in these four words."
Alfred BINET, 1911.
"With very young children [in a series of researches in London
schools] it was difficult to demonstrate anything besides the
general factor; with older children, special abilities, which
mature at different ages, became increasingly prominent, as one
might expect from Spencer's hypothesis of 'progressive differentiation'.....
Eventually the dust of the prolonged controversy seemed to settle.
The concept of a 'general ability' was accepted by practically
all its earlier opponents - Brown, Thomson, Thorndike, and Thurstone
(with certain qualifications). And Spearman, a little reluctantly,
acknowledged the existence of 'broad group factors' in addition
to the unique or 'specific factors' peculiar to each test."
Sir Cyril BURT, circa 1970, in C.James, Modern Concepts
of Intelligence. 94, Chatsworth Road, Croydon : R.S.Reid.
"....it has often appeared that there are more distinguishable
ability factors amongst subjects of relatively high levels of
general intelligence. While, in subjects of average intelligence,
intended measures of 'creativity' and 'field-independence' have
seemed to be as much measures of g as of any more specific
ability, amongst more intelligent subjects these same measures
often make interesting distinctions that prove to be unrelated
to g and to be sensibly related to other special abilities
and to occupational and recreational interests (D.J.Hargreaves
& N.Bolton, 1972, Brit.J.Psychol.; P.E.Vernon, 1972,
J.Personality)."
C.R.BRAND, 1984, in C.J.Turner & H.B.Miles, The Biology
of Human
Intelligence. Nafferton, North Humberside : Nafferton Books.
"....the reliability of an intelligence test is inversely
related to level of intelligence."
H.H.SPITZ, 1986, The Raising of Intelligence.
Hillsdale, New Jersey : Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
"....intelligence seems to be neither a unity, as....Spearman
(1923) would have it; nor a specifiable number of modules, as
Fodor (1983), Gardner (1983) or Guilford (1967) would have it.
....One major fact is that tests and persons routinely show not
only positive manifold and a g factor, but also an inverse
Guttman Radex structure around the central g factor (Snow
et al., 1984, J.Educ.Psychol.76)."
R.E.SNOW, 1986, in R.J.Sternberg & D.K.Detterman,
What is Intelligence? Norwood, New Jersey : Ablex.
"g is present, to be sure, but other important factors
are present as well. Any theory which ignores these other factors
is too simple to explain what is known."
L.STANKOV, 1987, in S.& C. Modgil,
Arthur Jensen: Consensus and Controversy. Brighton : Falmer.
"[My theory] has the consequence of making 'e' [a 'basic
processing mechanism'] the dominant factor in intelligence. However,
the larger 'e' is, the less the constraint it imposes on the [more]
specific processors. Thus at higher levels of 'e' (higher intelligence)
more of the variation in cognitive ability will be due to variation
in the specific processors than at low 'e'. In accordance with
this hypothesis, [Anderson's analysis of data from 12,905 children]
{see above, in (ii)} found greater differentiation of abilities
amongst higher-IQ children."
M.ANDERSON, 1987, addressing the Cognitive Psychology Section
of
the British Psychological Society.
"Sure, there's more than g."
A.R.JENSEN, 1987, in S. & C. Modgil,
Arthur Jensen: Consensus and Controversy. Brighton : Falmer.
"Britain's Mike Anderson....has been known to compare g
to a computer's 'interpreter' system that - so long as it functions
well - is able to 'read' a number of 'specific' languages [cf.
ALGOL, PASCAL, BASIC, FORTRAN] in which solutions to different
types of problem (numerical, clerical, spatial, verbal, divergent,
etc.) are written. At lower g-levels, however, all these
languages are interpreted less than perfectly by the g-mechanism,
and individual differences in performance then consist primarily
of g variance - i.e. in how good (or bad) that translation
is, with little regard for the well-hidden excellence (or otherwise)
of the specific problem-solving programmes themselves. In short,
the problems of people of low and mediocre levels of intelligence
require an understanding that a naive componentialist vision is
unlikely to provide. ...."What is intelligence?" - Many
different things, doubtless, so long as one has enough of it!"
C.R.BRAND, 1988, reviewing R.J.Sternberg & D.K.Detterman,
What is
Intelligence? Journal of Social & Biological Structures
11.
"The factors of the Munich Model of Giftedness (intelligence,
creativity, psychomotor ability / practical intelligence, social
competence, musical ability) have been proven to be independent
dimensions of giftedness [in N = 1,800 gifted children]. ....Multiply
or many-sided gifted were found relatively seldom in the sample
studied."
K.A.HELLER, 1988, to 24th International Congress of Psychology.
"Positive manifold among mental tests is one of the most
reliable, replicable and important empirical findings concerning
individual differences in human ability. ....[However] it has
been assumed that the correlations among mental tests would be
about the same in a group of low-IQ subjects as it would be in
a group of high-IQ subjects (assuming both groups represent similar
ranges of ability and, therefore, have equal standard deviations).
We report data showing this assumption to be incorrect....
According to [a theory of mental retardation presented by Detterman,
1987, Amer. J. Mental Deficiency] mental retardation is
caused by deficits in central processes, meaning processes which
most heavily affect all other processes in the [human cognitive]
system. If these central processes are deficient, they limit the
efficiency of all other processes in the system.... So all processes
in subjects in subjects with [central] deficits tend to operate
at the same uniform level.... ....data from the WAIS-Revised
and WISC-Revised provide strong support for the contention
that magnitude of correlations among mental tests varies inversely
as a function of ability level. Correlations among subtests are
higher for lower-ability subjects [being around 0.60 for testees
having IQs below 90] and lower for higher-ability subjects [being
around 0.35 for testees having IQs above 110]."
D.K.DETTERMAN & M.H.DANIEL, 1989, 'Correlations of mental
tests
with each other and with cognitive variables are highest for
low-IQ groups'. Intelligence.
"[To examine Detterman and Daniels' effect {above}] 1,369
socially representative Scottish children [were examined with
the WISC-R] battery of six verbal tests and five performance tests.
....I divided the sample into five ability groups of approximately
equal numbers on the basis of the subjects' vocabulary scores.
I then calculated the average intercorrelations of the subtests
in the five groups. The resulting correlations, from low- to high-ability
groups, were .44. .38, .17, .14, and .20. ....The general significance
of the results appears to be that they suggest the operation of
some depressant acting on all cognitive abilities among low-ability
groups. Such a depressant (e.g. suboptimal nutrition) would tend
to bring all abilities into positive correlation or to increase
the values of the intercorrelations."
R.LYNN, 1990, Journal of Genetic Psychology 153.
"We (Detterman & Daniel, 1989, Intelligence 13;
Detterman, 1991, Intelligence 15) have found that the correlation
among subtests for IQ tests and cognitive ability is higher for
low ability subjects than for high ability subjects. These results
have been replicated for the Kaufman-ABC (Detterman & Persanyi,
1990), an intelligence test widely used in the USA {on which subtest
r's averaged .33 at IQ76-90 and .27 at IQ 111-125}....
The differences in correlation across IQ level are consistent
with the systems theory of intelligence (Detterman, 1987, Amer.J.Ment.Defic.92).
In this theory, lower IQs result from deficits in important cognitive
processes. Because these processes are part of a system, they
affect the functioning of other parts of the system. If these
important processes are deficient, the parts dependent upon them
will also be impaired. Essentially, a deficit in an important
process will put an upper ceiling or limit on the efficiency of
the operation of other parts of the system. That means that all
parts of the system will be more similar if there is a deficiency
in an important process. This forced similarity in abilities is
what causes a higher correlation among IQ subtests for low IQ
subjects. Higher IQ subjects show more variability in abilities
because their abilities are not limited by an artificial ceiling
imposed by a deficit."
D.K.DETTERMAN, 1993, in Ciba Symposium 178, The Origins and
Development of High Ability. Chichester : Wiley-Interscience.
"If [my analysis] has validity, what counts in intelligence
in one culture is not identical to intelligence in other cultures,
nor is intelligence (or creativity) in school the same as intelligence
(or creativity) at home, at the workplace, or in other institutions
ranging from museums to church."
Howard GARDNER, 1993{?}, in R.Solso & D.Massaro, Science
of Mind. New York : Oxford University Press.
"At least in the language domain, it can be expected that
abilities tend to become differentiated with age, as was first
suggested by Garrett (1938, Psychol. Record 2)."
J.B.CARROLL, 1993, Human Cognitive Abilities.
Cambridge University Press.
"....when groups [were] selected on the basis of verbal,
numerical or spatial ability, the below-average ability groups
had a more pervasive g factor, confirming the differentiation
hypothesis."
I.J.DEARY, 1995, 'Intelligence and the differentiation hypothesis.'
Keynote address to International Society for the Study of Individual
Differences, meeting in Warsaw.
Epilogue
"Finding the best simple test of physical fitness
has been like looking for the holy grail."
T.K.CURETON, 1947, Physical Fitness and Guidance.
London : Henry Kimpton.
"Originally [Howard Gardner] proposed seven "intelligences":
linguistic, logical-mathematical, musical, spatial, kinaesthetic,
interpersonal and intrapersonal. Now he talks of one more-the
naturalist intelligence-and "is flirting with" a ninth,
possibly to be labelled spiritual/existential, so it is not a
rigid classification....It was wrong {however} to think that he
was proposing seven kinds of tests for seven kinds of capacity.
"The theory is not of a piece with psychometrics," he
declared....Psychometrics is like a game-a parascience. All the
most committed psychometricians like Hans Eysenck, they love all
the things you can do with those numbers. They do not ask what
the numbers refer to, or whether they are only paying attention
to the things we happen to be able to count."
J.DAVIES, 1996, interviewing H.Gardner, Times Higher, 19
i.
FINIS
(Compiled by Chris Brand, Department of Psychology,
University of Edinburgh.)
For more coverage of intelligence and why differential psychologists
talk of general intelligence, see:
BRAND, C.R. (1996) The g Factor.
Chichester : Wiley DePublisher.
"The nature and measurement of intelligence is a political
hot potato. But Brand in this extremely readable, wide-ranging
and up-to-date
book is not afraid to slaughter the shibboleths of modern "educationalists".
This short book provides a great deal for thought
and debate."
Professor Adrian Furnham, University College London.
The book was first issued, in February, but then withdrawn, in
April, by the 'publisher' because it was deemed to have infringed
modern canons of
'political correctness.'
It received a perfectly favourable review in Nature (May
2, 1996, p. 33).
For a Summary of the book, Newsletters concerning the
de-publication affair, details of how to see the book for scholarly
purposes, and others' comments and reviews,
see the Internet URL sites:
http://laboratory.psy.ed.ac.uk/DOCS/crb/internet.html
http://www.webcom.com/zurcher/thegfactor/index.html
For Chris Brand's 'Get Real About Race!'-his popular exposition
of his views on race and education in the Black
hip-hop music magazine 'downlow' (Autumn, 1996)-see:
http://www.bhs.mq.edu.au/~tbates/intelligence/Brand_downlow.html
A reminder of what is available in other Sections of
'P, B & S.'
Summary Index for PERSONALITY, BIOLOGY
& SOCIETY
(This resource manual of quotations about individual and group
differences, compiled by
Mr C. R. Brand, is kept on the Internet and in Edinburgh University
Psychology Department Library.)
Pages of Introduction
3 - 11 Full Index, indicating key questions in each Section.
12 - 14 Preface. - Why quotations? - Explanations and apologies.
15 - 51 Introduction: Questions, Arguments and Agreements in
the study of Personality.
-Some history, and a discussion of 'realism vs 'idealism.'
52 - 57 Introductory Quotes about the study of personality.
Sections
General problems
1 'Situational' vs 'personological' approaches to human
variation.
2 'Nomothetic' vs 'idiographic', 'subjective' and relativistic
approaches.
3 Personality dimensions - by factor analysis and otherwise.
4 'Superstructure' and 'infrastructure' - the 'mind/body problem'.
5 Nature vs Nurture? - Or Nature via Nurture?
6 The role of consciousness in personality and 'multiple personality'.
7 The 'folk psychology' of personality components.
Intelligence
8 The measurement of intelligence. - Does g exist?
9 The bases of intelligence. - What is the psychology
of g?
10 The developmental origins of g differences. - The nature
and nurture of g.
11 The importance of intelligence. - The psychotelics of
g.
12 Piagetianism: Kant's last stand?
13 Cognitivism: 'The Emperor's New Mind?'
Propensities
14 Neurosis, emotion and Neuroticism.
15 Psychosis, psychopathy and Psychoticism.
16 Crime and criminality.
17 Genius and creativity.
Popular proposals - psychoanalytic, phrenological and prophylactic
18 Psychoanalysis: 'Decline and Fall of the Freudian Empire'?
19 Hemispherology: a twentieth-century phrenology?
20 Psycho-social Engineering: therapy, training or transformation?
Group differences
21 Age and ageing - especially, the role of g in 'life-span
development'.
22 Psychological sex differences. - Do they exist? Must they exist?
23 Social class. - Does it matter any longer?
24 Racial and ethnic differences. - Their role in 'lifestyles'
and cultural attainments.
Ideological issues
25 The psychology of politics and ideological extremism.
26 The politics of psychologists and allied co-workers.
27 Equality and Community: the 'utopian' package of political
aims.
28 Freedom and Responsibility: the 'legitimist' package of political
aims.
Pragmatic questions
29 Carry on differentializing?
30 Carry on psycho-testing?
Appendix: Factor analysis. - 'Garbage in, garbage out'?
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