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Friday, June 15, 2007
There Is No Such Thing As Intelligence
(x-posted to The Kugelmass Episodes)
The abstract personal definition of “intelligence,” reified in our minds thanks to IQ tests and their derivatives, is a source of social ills and should be abandoned. It impedes and confuses pedagogy, underwrites racism and sexism, inhibits culture, and trivializes political debate.
We’ll have to start out by getting a bit technical. The adjectival form, “intelligent” (or “brilliant” or “smart” or etc.), has its uses. Intelligence, as we use the word, refers to the ability to do a good job at complex tasks that require a high degree of abstraction. Thus, a given piece of work can be intelligent if it successfully addresses a complex problem.
To claim that intelligence exists as a phenomenon, but not as an inherent personal quality, is the same as arguing that race or gender exist as social phenomena but not as simple, natural facts. For a long time now, intellectuals have been chipping away at the mythology of race and gender, while leaving the mythical quality of intelligence relatively untouched because they have too much invested in the hierarchies it produces.
I. Memory, speed reading, and vocabulary
Vocabulary is a sub-category of memory: how many words one can remember and use. Memory is a talent with a strange, ambivalent reception. On the one hand, people with good memories are considered blessed and provably intelligent. Professors who can cite difficult works of philosophy from memory are celebrated for doing so; undoubtedly, part of the reason Harold Bloom rarely bothers to cite his quotations is that doing so would undermine his claim to have it all memorized. The phenomenon of memory is often linked to speed reading, as it is with Bloom: Bill Clinton was also renowned for his ability to read enormous quantities of books each day and remember everything, while still fulfilling his Presidential duties. Popular culture attributes far more to memory than it could ever enable. In the television show Heroes, a waitress with a photographic memory learns to speak flawless, unaccented Japanese by glancing at a phrasebook.
These mythic versions of the consumption of knowledge make it very difficult to remember that memory and reading speed both wax or wane according to the use we make of them. Every child who grows up in a culture with a strong oral tradition will have more “text” memorized than an average American child; Erasmus memorized more than professors do today; the Greeks knew Homer by heart. Reading speed depends on reading frequently, and reading for pleasure—a recent study found that people who habitually read for pleasure also read other texts faster. We may not even need to memorize text the way we did before, now that we live in an era of easily accessible archives, which means that the shape of memory itself will change to reflect a different cultural landscape. Unfortunately, there will be nobody there to track this shift, because we will continue to assume either an overall cultural decline, or the presence/absence of an inborn talent, reified by “geniuses” like Clinton and Bloom.
Whether or not we should be concerned about losing mnemotechnics is still in question. In the meantime, the cult of genius also produces a cult of mediocrity. In academia, a tradition that stretches back at least to Montaigne, and arguably to Plato’s Dialogues, valorizes the thinker with a fuzzy memory, who has to work hard and earnestly to make sense of texts that others find suspiciously easy. Rousseau calls his ideal pupil Emile mediocre, and separates him from the race of geniuses. Within the academy, this has produced excruciating overloads of citation (a serious problem throughout Montaigne’s Essays), and encouraged numbingly slow readings of such thinkers as Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida. Derrida’s bizarre institutional authority is largely constituted by the odd couple of academics who respect him, but don’t consider themselves smart enough to read him (thus letting themselves off the hook), and academics who read him, and feel that his brilliance makes it impossible to ever stop, or even pause, the process of doing so.
Outside the academy, the proud inability to remember has had its most contemptible exemplars in Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, both of whom have used it as a way of evading political responsibility, justifying smoke-and-mirrors systems of favoritism and delegation, and communicating folksiness.
The link between vocabulary and intelligence produces all kinds of cognitive dissonance. I’m not suggesting that a large vocabulary is bad—it is plainly a useful tool. However, nobody nowadays would assert that F. Scott Fitzgerald was a more intelligent writer than Ernest Hemingway, despite the fact that Fitzgerald clearly has a larger vocabulary. Hemingway compensated for this impoverishment by using rhythm and repetition to create complex effects with simple materials. The difference between them was a difference of privilege: Hemingway had not gone to Princeton. Privilege is a good word for the triptych of erudition, vocabulary, and standardized usage that is treated as synonymous with complexity; in an earlier post at The Kugelmass Episodes, I argued for the complexity and sense of valley girl talk, hip-hop, and the “broken” speech of anxiety. The more that critics develop ways of reading silences, stutters, inversions, fragmented words, slang, abject or undignified erudition, and so on—all of which, by no coincidence, one needs in order to read Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, or Langston Hughes—the better they’ll be at breaking down linguistic privilege, at which point “intelligence” will suddenly be visible everywhere, not just in the golden hallways of genius, and not just as a vague democratic assumption.
II. Cash Versus Context
It’s worth remembering that one of the most famous prodigies in Western Civilization, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, was born into a culture well-prepared to celebrate genius as a species of the grotesque. Mozart’s youth was shaped by the experience of performing his prodigy in order to make his father money, and that continues to be the role of intelligence today. It is a commodified form of intellectual labor, and as such we have come to believe that it can be exchanged anywhere, just like the sweat of one’s brow: if a student does well on standardized tests, then we assume they will succeed in the adult world of skilled labor.
The effects of this belief in abstracted “intelligence” have been so widespread and pernicious that one hardly knows where to begin. Ironically, “intelligence” has made it harder to evaluate whether or not given pieces of work are in fact intelligent in context, and has contributed greatly to dehumanization. The problem of dehumanization is the insoluble problem of realizing one’s intelligence; the problem of judging the intelligence of a work is a problem of the desire for intelligence to inhere in an author.
To begin with realizing intelligence: everybody knows that an intelligent person will get nowhere unless they’re also willing to work hard. In Woody Allen’s film Match Point, Chris Wilton announces that, of course, “hard work is mandatory,” before going on to call privilege a matter of luck. Mandatory is the right word, since every employee and student knows that one must not only work hard, but also appear to be doing so. In fact, it is quite possible to have an easy time fulfilling one’s duties, at least on a given day, but ease is insulting.
Still, let’s grant that a lot of effort is usually required to produce excellent work, regardless of the field. Then we run into the problem of wasted effort: the person who works furiously, but produces mediocre or frankly awful work. In these cases, a supposed lack of intelligence or talent is frequently the alibi for the work ethic itself. How many of these casualties of effort fail precisely because of over-work and fatigue? How many fail because the drudgery of innumerable small and laborious acts, on which another person might discreetly renege, prevents them from doing synthetic and innovative thinking? In business, one tries to compensate by encouraging a “culture of innovation,” but this is fraught with danger. It undermines espirit de corps, and it actually heightens alienation, since one’s ideas tend to become other people’s property.
The relationship between innovation, which requires independence of thought, and manageability, which requires conformism and respect for authority, is not a dialectical relationship. The two modes do not immanently “contain” one another; they sit together uncomfortably, each sapping the other’s strength, with “intelligence + hard work” as the magic formula that is supposed to reconcile them.
To borrow Derrida’s phrase about clinical madness, there is a “terribly trivial” sense in which a given person may not be able to master a given situation: brain damage, developmental disability, physical disability. I call this trivial because all of the most progressive advances in our approach to these impairments and disabilities have involved abandoning assumptions about intelligence. Until very recently, autistic persons were classed as mental deficients. Only recently has it become clear the extent to which developmentally disabled persons can be integrated into “normal” classrooms, hired for paying jobs, and generally accomodated on an individual basis rather than marginalized by evaluations of “intelligence.”
And what of personality? Introversion and extroversion produce different kinds of intelligence. Intelligence is molded by persistent anxiety or its absence, and by tendencies toward manic/depression, schizophrenia, or autism (i.e. Asperger’s). As a result, some of the best critiques of psychiatry and socialization have been made in the name of genius. Sadly, this is a trap. It accepts that difference has to immediately prove, via intelligence and “genius,” measurable social utility, and thus re-affirms the total domination of the social over the individual. It also opens the door for correcting difference whenever it “goes too far”—that is, when a given asocial or abnormal state stops being immediately profitable. Lastly, as little as the defense of introversion has done for actual introverts, it has helped sustain the myth of superficial extroversion. That means fashion, socializing—the extroverted feminine, which lacks the right to create hierarchies of intelligence, except under the ban of severe moral judgement (as cunning, for example).
Standardized tests, IQ tests, and their ilk have been subject to criticism for a long time now. It’s reached the point where every schoolchild knows that the SAT only measures “how good you are at taking tests,” and yet nobody really challenges the role of SAT tests in college admissions. In fact, the SAT isn’t that simplistically useless, but the fact that standardized testing is on the rise (thanks to No Child Left Behind), despite the popular wisdom about such tests, should alert us to the fact that “teaching to the test” is not a side effect of standardized testing, but its real mission. The cynicism of test-takers, like the cynicism of consumers, reinforces the system it seems to oppose. It is fundamentally shallow cynicism, overmatched by an awe of the test through which all the old myths survive. In the film Spellbound, the family members and teachers of the children competing in the National Spelling Bee ascribe their charges’ success to—depending on the child—their own love of puns, meditation, the love of Jesus Christ, the child’s well-rounded existence ("He’s not like those other kids, he has a life,” one sister says), ethnicity, and/or the greatness of America. In other words, the adults are eager to cash in on this success for an affirmation of certain values, while the children focus on the basically mechanical task at hand, with a devastating awareness that all but one of them will lose.
The most famous response to the traditional theory of intelligence, Howard Gardner’s “multiple intelligences,” creates more problems than it solves. I’ve already implied that Gardner’s distinction between “interpersonal” and “intrapersonal” intelligences reverses cause and effect, by ascribing to an inborn talent what could just as easily be founded in inherited affects or the long practice of certain habits (e.g. solitary reading). Since so many professions involve ludicrous, specialty-coffee-like “blends” of intelligences (let’s see, a poet has some musical intelligence and some linguistic intelligence...), and since the distinctions between intelligences are quite tenuous (e.g. the difference between musical and mathematical intelligence), Gardner is mostly useful as an example of two things: our unified theory of intelligence beginning to unravel upon closer consideration, and our confusion between talent and right. Gardner clearly wants intelligences to be recognized and respected, in order to give children greater freedom to utilize their talents. One wonders why those talents should be codified into an awkward and inadequate sevenfold system that has, in fact, already been supplemented by the laughable category of “nature intelligence,” possessed by gardeners and Charles Darwin.
III. The Problem of Premises
In the previous section, I alluded to the stereotype of the hard worker who accomplishes nothing, a problem we usually attribute to an inherent “unfittedness” or lack of talent. From there, I discussed the problems of innovation and independence, which opens a whole field for the investigation of passivity, resentment, timidity, socialization (particularly in its nastiest forms as silencing or dogma) and despair as contingent conditions that become naturalized in terms of a lack of aptitude. We might describe this as a substitution of the scale of intelligence for the social and psychological problem of freedom. Harold Bloom himself, in the face of his own failure to produce literature, wrote a classic study of psychological obstruction in The Anxiety of Influence.
The problem of innovation also gets at the problem of false premises, which may be the strongest argument for an attack on the cult of intelligence. For dedicated opponents of psychoanalysis, and the legacy of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, it is simply impossible for a psychoanalytic argument to be valid: the writer is spinning his wheels, and that is all. No matter how elegantly scientific citations, anecdotes, literary examples, and so on are woven together, the premise is wrong. In many cases, the very elegance and density of a piece becomes a reason to suspect that the author has filtered out reality and built castles in the air. Over at Sour Duck, Melinda Casino raised this very point with regard to blogging: earnest and awkward can work better as a style.
Nonetheless, even as they are charming us with a Socratic/Rousseauean show of plainness, we expect our authors to be brilliant, which is why most people still have such trouble comprehending the truisms about punk. The punks were not, all the way down the line, brilliant or geniuses. This was true by accident (Sid Vicious) and also by design. If you thought of yourself as a genius, you ended up like the people the punks hated, because being a musical genius meant thinking of music in terms of composition, rather than in terms of reception. The insular premise of virtuoso rock produced insular, useless music: noodling.
Noodling is a good word for the final casualty of false premises: the theory of intelligence as it is applied to political and philosophical debate. I discussed this topic at some length during the Valve book event on Michael Bérubé’s What’s Liberal About The Liberal Arts?. As long as false premises create opportunities for displays of intelligence, and as long as those displays are worth money, we will never be rid of the falsehoods themselves: we’re just too grateful for them. That’s why liberalism that prides itself on the simple desire for intelligence accomplishes nothing besides staged debates with conservatives. It’s also why “anti-philosophers” turn into philosophers who mix critiques of Kant with paeans to his intelligence.
***
Intelligence, like all essentialism, is a technology of power. It reinforces privilege and hierarchizes speech. It cuts art and language off from its inspirations, aping capital by circulating language through a series of useless oppositions (e.g. debate shows like Counterpoint, choreographed academic debates between “schools of thought") and non-signifying refinements of craft (e.g. a certain kind of technical proficiency in music). It obscures the alternation between “innovating” and “doing one’s task well,” an alternation grounded in the contradictions of the modern economy, and one that produces real casualties on both sides: burnouts, drudges, exploited inventors, unemployed iconoclasts. It encourages irrational responses to radical work, by simultaneously putting authors on pedestals and, with a wistful “if I had more time...”, ignoring them. It condescends to madness, puts it to work without further questions, and warns it to walk a fine line. It subtly justifies anti-intellectualism, and creates its own set of simulacra—for example, the simulation of genius in the movies—which are preferable to the real thing, in part because the shrill protests of mediocrity always get a turn. It commodifies young learners and encourages complacent cynicism towards standardized tests. The concept of “intelligence” doesn’t help us accommodate disability, but rather encourages us to speculate wrongly about what a given disability really forecloses.
Once we recover from the genteel, congratulatory paralysis of brilliance, we’ll be able to see what tasks really summon us, and what darker obstacles lie behind the antagonism of Mozart and Salieri—his likeness—his brother!
Comments
Um, err, are you noodling here, Joseph?
Hey Joe. I’m glad you’re considering this issue, and in particular I’m glad you made mention of Howard Gardner’s “Multiple Intelligences” paradigm. I can’t tell you how many papers I’ve been forced to pen on Gardner without recourse to consideration of his work as I actually see it: as a dissociation from actuality or as an overextension of the mutability of the admitted flexibility of Technical Terms.
(I should also mention that, in addition to the ridiculous “natural intelligence” supplement, Gardner has expanded the paradigm to include a ninth form of intelligence [a rather interesting cultural artifact, actually], namely, that of “Existential Intelligence”.)
What I take from your apparent ease in dismissing Gardner’s paradigm (upon his expansion of intelligences to include naturalistic intelligence) is the implied goal of aligning the terms by which the world (both socio-constructed and ontic-actual) is defined or limited and the way in which things actually (or even efficaciously) can be said to be. That said, I’m notorious in my own mind for gleaning implied assertions toward the reification of the referentiality of language in almost any essay that I read, so I could be easily misreading your meaning here.
My first understanding of whatever might follow from use of the word “intelligence” is that, whatever else the word might mean, it should specifically not be an essential notion. By this I mean that the word intelligence, though it is often used to imply the existence of some kind of essential quality in whomever possesses it, is at root not more than a social construct (despite whatever biological basis there may be for notions of intelligence). But because the word intelligence is etiologically not rooted in any actual essentiality, does not mean that the word cannot be used with a great deal of efficaciousness. An example that comes to mind are the tests in which primatologists assess the ‘intelligence’ of various species of ape. Though these scientists are working within the context of Western values and not primate values (whatever they might be), it does not follow from that that there is no efficaciousness in the tests and the conclusions of the tests or that the greater intelligence of one species of apes over another is immaterial.
In that I’m unwilling to cut myself loose from belief in the existence of subjects and the ability for subjects to make value judgments, I can’t see that the word ‘intelligence’ has no use. Despite my own probable investment in the hierarchy of intelligence, I don’t think that a psychological explanation of the sacrosanctness of intelligence-as-descriptor or the socio-historical arbitrariness of the way in which the term intelligence has been deployed (in conjunction with relatively unhelpful IQ tests and association of the word intelligence with the ludicrous appellations of the word ‘genius’ to works and authors) can justify leaving behind any idea of intelligence (as implied in the title of the post), either in terms of college admissions or in the general efficaciousness of use of the word. Even if the SAT were to be replaced (as it has been at many smaller academic institutions) in toto, other ways of assessing the value of applicants would, I think, immediately come into usage. Is that what is ultimately problematic for you?
Primary to my critique here is in the obfuscation within use of words such as “brilliant” and “genius” as opposed to the more comprehensible/practical “intelligence.” I don’t see Mozart’s biography as problematic in terms of use of the word intelligence as might be applied to him; instead, I’d see characterization of Mozart as Genius or Prodigy as the real problem here; Salieri would have been quite correct to note that Mozart was a more talented composer than he, but instead, by attributing to Mozart some kind of superpower, that of Genius, he failed to understand their mutual brotherhood.
I guess at the end of it, the clarification I’d like to point to is that intelligence is part-and-parcel of value judgments, and can’t be jettisoned in the same way that ideas of genius can be dispensed with in terms of referentiality. What referentiality am I referring to? Well, I am relatively comfortable with ascribing to a definition of intelligence something along the lines of “a facile handling of abstraction”. Limited in this way, I don’t see how this adjectival description would necessarily imply “substitution of the scale of intelligence for the social and psychological problem of freedom”—especially if one requires care in their application of concepts. The problem lies, as I see it, in those who see intelligence as essential or “naturalized” de facto (whether in Gardner’s model, as he essentializes each of his nine intelligences, or in the traditional definition of intelligence as it is essentialized by insecure mothers and their Jr. High Honor Roll bumper stickers). To these essentializations I hold opposed the view that facile abstraction in subjects and works can be seen as etiologically rooted in social mechanisms working in concert with biological mechanisms, and not indicative of anything necessary or natural.
All the same, I’m not sure that this stance would cure all of the social ills that you see as lateral to intelligence as it is construed popularly. But, I don’t know that those problems are attributable to a fetishism of intelligence per say or if their existence cannot be attributed to the existence of discourses of power and/or of value judgment, in themselves.
Gardner is mostly useful as an example of two things: our unified theory of intelligence beginning to unravel upon closer consideration, and our confusion between talent and right.
Nice work (quoting this and below not because I didn’t like the other stuff, but because these bits really struck me).
It accepts that difference has to immediately prove, via intelligence and “genius,” measurable social utility, and thus re-affirms the total domination of the social over the individual. It also opens the door for correcting difference whenever it “goes too far”—that is, when a given asocial or abnormal state stops being immediately profitable.
Nice work. It’s struck me for a while that the regime of (re)productivity is a regime of assimilation; what gets us past that, I think, is pleasure: I’m doing this because I like doing this.
Some questions:
Intelligence, as we use the word, refers to the ability to do a good job at complex tasks that require a high degree of abstraction. Thus, a given piece of work can be intelligent if it successfully addresses a complex problem
The ‘thus’ isn’t clear to me here: how do we get from the agent to the product? Or does the product itself have agency?
On memory: one more for your list of examples of prodigious memories produced by oral cultures: Xian monks, at least ideally, know the Psalms by heart. Now it’d be facile to call monastic spiritually an oral spiritually: they’re reciting, but they’re reciting with the text before them. Nonetheless, they should have it memorized. You may wish to look at Michael Clanchy’s From Memory to Written Record and Mary Carruther’s two masterpieces on medieval mnemotechnic.
Wouldn’t you want to think with Derrida a bit more where you implicitly critique memory as presence? Likewise with/against punk as presence? The problem of authenticity (G. G. Allin purportedly more authentic than Television).
The relationship between innovation, which requires independence of thought, and manageability, which requires conformism and respect for authority, is not a dialectical relationship.
God help me, I’m reading Zizek’s Parallax View, and here we go: “From a Hegelian standpoint...this logic continues to rely on the two externally opposed poles--the fact that each of the opposites, in its abstraction from the other (that is, brought to the extreme at which it no longer needs the other as its opposite), falls into this other, merely demonstrates their mutual reliance. What we need to do is to take a step further from this external opposition (or mutual reliance) into direct internalized overlapping, which means: not only does one pole, when abstracted from the other and thus brought to the extreme, coincide with its opposite, but there is no ‘primordial’ duality of poles in the first place, only the inherent gap of the One“ (36, original emphasis of course)
I’m not sure Joseph will be quite happy if I say it, but this is an intelligent article. “Car si l’intelligence ne mérite pas la couronne suprême, c’est elle seule qui est capable de la décerner. Et si elle n’a dans l’hiérarchie des vertus que la seconde place, il n’y a qu’elle qui soit capable de proclamer que l’instinct doit occuper la première.” (Marcel Proust, “Contre Sainte-Beuve")
"Outside the academy, the proud inability to remember has had its most contemptible exemplars in Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, both of whom have used it as a way of evading political responsibility, justifying smoke-and-mirrors systems of favoritism and delegation, and communicating folksiness.”
But neither Reagan nor Bush are/were either thought of as particularly intelligent, or want/wanted to be thought of that way--indeed, they each mounted pretty successful political careers on defining their folksiness against abstract intelligence, which they defined as elitism and obfuscation. In other words, this seems to be on an entirely different track from the cult of intelligence: it is, in fact, the cult of anti-intelligence, which I think has done much, much more harm than its opposite.
To put it another way, Clinton was not a good president by virtue of being able to read more books in a day than ordinary people. However, valorizing this skill valorizes what lies behind it, which did make Clinton a good president (or, at least, better than the next one): the knowledge that, in order to perform such a taxing job, he would need to acquire a great deal of knowledge, constantly. Similarly, while the short-term impact of Bush’s disengagement--exemplified by the NY Times story in which he not only thought that Sweden was “the one without an army,” but also contradicted the advisor who told him that he was thinking of Switzerland--is almost nil, but it reflects something deeply troubling, which is the feeling that he knows all he needs to already, damn it.
As a mere schoolteacher, I am suspicious of standardized tests. But there’s nothing in the essence of the standardized test that makes them an inaccurate measure of student talents. The New York State Regents Exams, while not perfect, do provide a decent evaluation of student writing and interpreting abilities.
Likewise, it’s wrong to say that the SAT only tests one’s ability to take the SAT. Sure, one can practice “how to take the SAT,” and one can definitely raise one’s scores through Kaplan tutoring. (Christ, they guarantee something like a 200 point increase or your money back.)
But the SAT does test basic literacy and math skills, and it does so in a fairly rigorous fashion. You have to know word meanings. You have to know grammar (although some of their correctness testing is based on outmoded grammar and style ideas). You have to know math through to advanced algebra, geometry, and trig.
What the SAT doesn’t test is a student’s ability to actually *use* these basic skills to solve anything like a real problem. The SAT is like *Karate Kid* if Mr. Miyagi focused only on the waxing and polishing and painting, and never showed Daniel-san how to put those basic physical skills to use in self-defense.
It’s also wrong to associate the SAT with IQ tests. The SAT is about learned content. A dumb 12th grader will probably do better than a really smart 4th grader. An IQ test is *not* about testing acquired skills. IQ tests supposedly measure our innate ability to learn. This is why Charles Murray recently wrote a series of *Wall Street Journal* editorials on why we should stick to IQ tests to determine early in childhood who is worth academic training and who should be shipped off for vocational training. Murray remains convinced that we can know by the 4th grade whether a child has the capacity to learn beyond a certain degree. And he’s not talking about learning disabilities or cognitive disorders. He argues that IQ tests tell us what range of learning any child will be capable of. The 4th grader with the 80 IQ can supposedly only ever, at best, go up to about 90. So Murray says, send that child to Vo-Tech in the 5th grade. Murray is a scary dude.
Where “genius” fits in to this binary between basic skills testing and “innate learning ability” testing is unclear to me. It seems that the genius might be a high-IQ, low basic skills sort of person, someone for whom mechanical skills are often too boring to learn but who can intuit at a young age what it would take others years of study to master. Then there’s the idiot savant, who is low-IQ, high basic skills: the bagboy at my grocery store who could tell you your total before my cash register could, but who I couldn’t teach to actually run the cash register.
Being right and being clever are entirely different things, but an individual requires a certain level of intellectual functioning to be aware of many issues and even whole sciences and arts. For example, I expect that most people who have every taught an elementary logic course have encountered willing students who apparently don’t recognize the concept of validity any more than a stroke patient can recognize the absence of sensation in a paralyzed arm. More time or better teaching might overcome such inabilities, of course; but it’s a fact that for the time being logic doesn’t exist for many of these folks any more than category theory exists for me.
Speaking about the salience of intelligence in the context of genius and hyperliteracy probably misses what might be sociologically and politically important about differences in mental functioning at levels much closer to the mean. You don’t have to think that intelligence has an essence or largely inherited to use IQ tests and other instruments to investigate the natural history of human intelligence. You don’t even have to be a right-winger. The French Marxists used to be very interested in questions such as “Does the population of a modern society sort into groups with similar abilities and knowledge and how do these groups match up with groupings such as class? What can working class people understand, as they live in the here and now? Some of the old lefties were classically educated and remembered a couple of relevant lines from the Odyssey:
If you make a man a slave, that very day
Far-sounding Zeus takes half his wits away
For my part, I’d like to know how smart people of normal intelligence are, i.e., as a matter of fact, what sorts of things are statistically average people aware of and what kinds of arguments can they hear? It seems to me that the existing distribution of mental abilities is highly relevant to many public policy issues; but since the IQ test is graded on the curve, it doesn’t address this question directly and I don’t want to know who’s supposed to be smarter than who: I want to know what smart means on the hoof.
In the absence of serious and difficult research, it is very hard to judge the intelligence of the public, not only because of ideological posturing but also because of a built-in accident of sampling. College educated people just don’t have much contact with the fat part of the bell curve except, perhaps, on jury duty. The people who appear on television or in the movies are unlikely to be statistically normal either. For that matter, though it may sound like a cheap paradoc, even bloggers have above-average verbal skill. Reliable information on the mental life of the public is pretty much as unavailable as reliable information on human sexuality.
You’re just begging for someone to link to this post, saying, “The Valve continues its full frontal assault on intelligence.”
Adam, it’s all you.
Bill—of course some of what I say here is meant to be subject to eventual revision, but I’m not just kidding around. Despite the obvious differences in intelligence between human beings and other animal species, the way the term is used within our society is deeply troubling to me, and comparable to the way that gender is used above and beyond any biological fact. I’d be interested to hear your take, given the work you’ve done on neuroscience.
I. Eaton—Rather than thinking of college admissions as indicators of intelligence, we should move toward a model where they indicate fitness for that particular intellectual program. For example, when I was interviewing at Stanford, I was told that the admissions officers were looking for “glue,” which was their idiotic term for extroverts (who could prove it in their applications). So right away, you had the inscription (invisible to most people) of extroversion into a process that supposedly judges the intellectual worth of an applicant.
Now, most people know that things like “extracurriculars” are important for college admissions, and it is perfectly possible to ground admissions in a vision of a certain undergraduate community. But that would mean understanding the differences between colleges in a far less hierarchical way; that’s the payoff of changing a criterion like “intelligence” to something contingent like “relative fitness for this community.”
Birgit, Karl, thanks!
Karl—Certainly, as I continue to think through this issue, I want to be using Derrida’s Archive Fever as a way of thinking about the archive and the lamented “decline” of memory. (Unfortunately, I am currently away from home and don’t have the book at my fingertips.) How else would thinking with Derrida proceed? How do you understand presence/absence working here?
The text (or artifact) certainly has agency—a piece of avant-garde art doesn’t need to be explicable by its creator, or even attributable to anyone, to create an effect. You brought up my (too brief) discussion of punk—the only way to understand punk as something other than regressive stupidity is to ask about its agency (along the lines, say, of situationism).
Tomemos, I completely agree with you about Bush and Reagan. My point is that the kind of folksy not-knowing practiced by Reagan and again by Bush is partly achieved by a staged reaction against the “eggheads,” of whom Clinton is a charming example, and Gore (during his campaign) a noxious one. Clinton is a sort of wunderkind in the popular imagination; if he was actually an ideal, then it would be impossible for some of the same people to turn around and vote for Bush. We never heard how he experienced the books he read, how he thought about or applied each of them—we were just told that he consumed them, which doesn’t raise the general level of discourse. Meanwhile, Bush doesn’t get his European countries right because he’s not that kind of guy, and that’s the problem with essentializing intelligence (or separating intelligence from plain-folks ordinariness).
Returning to I. Eaton for a moment, that’s what I meant about Mozart and Salieri. The way Mozart is presented to us makes us sympathetic to Salieri, a phenomenon dramatized so well in Amadeus. Bush plays Ben Affleck to Clinton’s Will Hunting, albeit not as a friend.
Luther—It’s fair to distinguish between SAT tests and IQ tests. In response, I’d point out that the myth of the “1600” (I guess the “2400” now) is still a myth about supreme intelligence, as opposed to privilege and preparedness. I teach SAT Prep every summer, and I agree with you that it does more than test students on its own protocols (hence the disclaimer in the original post). That said, you’re also right that students have all kinds of trouble applying their SAT skills to other situations. For example, they can learn to identify grammar errors while continuing to produce those same errors in their writing.
Most of the score improvement that Kaplan promises has to do with test-taking skills: for example, eliminating answers, guessing answers, and leaving unknowns blank. Much of it involves “gaming” the makers of the test, who then respond, prompting another response from the test prep companies, and so on; as teachers, we have every reason to be concerned about teaching students, as a supplement to every piece of knowledge, the form “understand your superiors’ expectations and find a way to appear to satisfy those expectations.” I emphasize appearance here because of, among other things, the multiple choice format, and the role of sentimental moralizing in the timed essays (because the test authors consider moral questions most universally applicable).
The difference between the genius and savant that you describe I would characterize as the difference between synthetic and mechanical thought. However, I worry about certain associations. I worry about thinking of savants as bag boys, and geniuses as disinterested/arrogant/bored (and therefore low-skilled). In my post, I suggested that a lot of social obstacles to synthetic thinking exist besides scarcity of intelligence, even though we claim to value it highly, and it always cleans up in the self-help section. Also, the two often become hard to tell apart: for example, unsympathetic readers of Joyce find his inclusiveness mechanical, whereas sympathetic readers describe it as wonderfully synthetic.
Jim—There’s a fascinating contradiction in your desire to know “how smart normally intelligent people are.” They’re normally smart, of course—but your point really has to do with how educated they are (including self-educated), and what is foregrounded in their world. I would argue that these are objectively researchable questions precisely because they don’t involve assumptions about intelligence: am I aware of F. Scott Fitzgerald due to my own smarts, or am I aware of him because of the way literature was valued in my family, community, and education? I would argue that the latter position is not only more democratic, it’s also the only verifiable position. If we take that wonderful quote from Homer to mean that “intelligence” is affected by social standing, we’re making a claim about the society rather than about inherent ability and potential.
Finally, I’d note that any kind of research about sexuality is going to be subject to intense scrutiny from feminist thinkers for indications of bias, and this is as it should be; the scientific community has not always been sufficiently aware of its own failures to remain objective about gender. My post is indebted to Stephen Jay Gould’s book The Mismeasure of Man, which was an indictment of The Bell Curve. Aside from Gould, and the fall of phrenology into disrepute, not nearly enough has been done to tie together the science, vocabulary, popular mythology, and so on of intelligence in the same way as gender and sexuality.
At the end of his History of Sexuality, Foucault argues for abandoning the discourse of “sexuality” in favor of “bodies and pleasures;” one might argue similarly for abandoning or localizing the discourses of “intelligence.”
I’m not particularly interested in finding out how knowledgeable or ignorant people are. I’m interested in what their (difficult to alter) abilities to learn, understand, and reason are at a given time and place—not whether you ever heard of F. Scott Fitzgerald but whether you could read one of his novels this week and get into it. IQ tests are culture bound in important ways, but that doesn’t mean that what they measure is simply education. It is, after all, no great trick to find rather dull people with elaborate and expensive educations and, for that matter, people eager to educate themselves who labor in vain. And plenty of unlettered people are obviously very intelligent and do well in tests and real world problem solving.
Because IQ tests are renormed from time to time, the same score reflects very different levels of performance depending on the vintage of the test version. What a score of 100 means is simply that your performance was average relative to the population used to norm a particular form. There is therefore nothing paradoxical about asking how smart normally intelligent people are because “normally smart” doesn’t have a fixed meaning. Indeed, somebody who would have scored 100 on an IQ test from 1900 would probably come across as rather deficient now, at least on visual reasoning, because people do much better on that part of the test than they used to (the Flynn effect). What accounts for such changes or, for that matter, what accounts for why some people have high IQs and others low IQs is not my initial concern. I want to explore the natural history of intelligence—that which is to be explained—before looking for the neurobiology or sociology of its explanation. IQ tests are not well-adapted to my purposes; they’re just what’s available.
The text (or artifact) certainly has agency—a piece of avant-garde art doesn’t need to be explicable by its creator, or even attributable to anyone, to create an effect.
Agreed. It’s the ‘thus’ in the bit I quoted above that’s causing me problems
Per rec. Derrida: well, I’m not exactly Joe Derrida, but the discussions on writing and memory from Of Grammatology came to mind, if indeed my mind remembered correctly.
What’s peculiar is that memory, which is more aligned with the oral (presence) than the textual (mediation, Fall), becomes suspect as inauthenticity in certain discourses. Why? Probably because a good memory indicates disassociation from the present and hence mediation and hence inauthenticity. Something like that.
More to come later (?), but a hefty bunch of editing calls today.
I know you’re serious about this, Joseph, but it reads like noodling to me. There is the commonsense notion of “intelligence,” which seems to be what you’re working from, along with a galaxy of associated commonsense terms, e.g. memory, brilliance, genius, etc. That commonsense term won’t support a serious discussion of human abilities. One could; however, certainly investigate the history and use of these terms—which may part of your project. That’s one kind of exercise.
But if you’re interested in seriously addressing human ability --that’s my problem. I don’t think you’re interested in doing that. In your long reply, for example, you make a distinction between synthetic and mechanical thought. This is supposed to be a serious idea? You toss out Howard Gardner, but you offer this distinction as a serious idea. No doubt you can explain what you mean, and I have no trouble imagining what you might mean by that distinction. But this is salon chit-chat, noodling. I tend to think that Gardner’s various kinds of intelligence are somewhat arbitrary, but at least he’s read and synthesized a large literature in various disciplines and done quite a bit of empirical work.
As far as I can tell you’ve decided to toss out the worlds of psychometrics and cognitive and perceptual and neuropsychology. So how are we going to talk about human ability? Noodling?
Joe:
My point is that the kind of folksy not-knowing practiced by Reagan and again by Bush is partly achieved by a staged reaction against the “eggheads"…
Yeah, of course. But the presence of a negative reaction doesn’t mean that the thing being reacted to is the problem. Using Reagan and Bush as examples of the problems with essentializing intelligence overlooks the fact that they’re the ones who are doing the essentializing, in order to score political points. The “ivory tower intellectual” is a populist/conservative straw man more than anything else. I don’t think that the answer is to de-idealize intelligence or ability--that is, to a large extent, what Bush and his handlers want..
For thousands of years intellectuals have been attacking themselves for their own vanity and superficiality. Suspicion of intelligence isn’t just a part of the revolt of the masses or right-wing populism. Educated people inflict it on themselves. You already run into the theme in Plato where the Socrates shows up the trendy sophists, but the Church fathers really got the ball rolling by promoting self-hatred among people with a lot of cultural capital, first and foremost, themselves. Writers like Augustine sound like leftist intellectuals of the 30s as they confessed that they were a bunch of privileged phonies in contrast to the real people of God who don’t bother to make sense of their faith with philosophical explanations and speak a crude, but heartfelt language—sermo humilis. I suppose the proles of yesterday and today really did resent articulate, educated people, perhaps with some jsutice; but it seems to me that hostility to intelligence is largely an elitist neurosis if not strategy.
Jim—in response to your two comments, I would say that the account you give of normativity in IQ testing is a great point, and my post is much in the same spirit. It’s not that such tests don’t test anything, or that they can’t be productively normed—it’s that they can’t be essentialized or abstracted any more (or less) than other kinds of skills.
As for what somebody does with F. Scott Fitzgerald, whether and how far you could get into it seems obviously to depend on your culture, rather than on your inherited brainpower. Furthermore, the fact that I can and do love Fitzgerald says nothing about my knowledge for or curiosity about physics, math, or even disciplines within the humanities like philosophy or law. It retains much of its specificity.
What do you mean by “natural history”?
Tomemos—I’m in favor of idealizing performance, rather than idealizing intelligence. Bush didn’t have the knowledge he needed to run the country effectively, and his approach to immensely complicated problems was neither informed nor logically consistent. We might not be disagreeing here—Bush tried to pass off his unsuitedness as an accident of birth or culture.
The Clinton example matters here too. As far as I’m concerned, Clinton left behind almost no progressive political legacy. Welfare reform, GATT, and NAFTA are not left-wing policies; domestic priorities (like the health care plan) were defeated. Given that kind of inefficacy and compromise, what purpose did his Rhodes scholarship and reading list serve, except to link intelligence with a demonstrably ineffective centrism?
Now of course, if we were so inclined, we could push intelligence further left, and declare that all intelligent people support Obama, or Che Guevara, or who knows. But then it’s obvious that we’re talking about having informed political beliefs, and not about reasoning skills.
Bill writes:
You toss out Howard Gardner, but you offer this distinction as a serious idea. No doubt you can explain what you mean, and I have no trouble imagining what you might mean by that distinction. But this is salon chit-chat, noodling.
It’s fair enough to point out that the post covers far, far too much ground, is merely a sketch, and does not have the citations or range to really confront Gardner’s lifelong study of intelligence. I would like to incorporate much more scientific evidence, research on cognition, and so on, if and when I expand this into something larger.
Still, calling what I wrote “salon chit-chat” is overly dismissive, especially since the dismissal appears to be based on a total separation of empirical scientific work and commonly held beliefs.
First of all, that distinction (science vs. popular opinion) has been successfully challenged over and over again by academics who study race and gender, as I noted in the original post. It would be one thing if “intelligence” had a spotless history. On the contrary—it has a horribly checkered past that overlaps with phrenology, eugenics, and all the pseudo-scientific alibis of oppression, created by people who thought they were doing legitimate scientific work. Continuing the analogy to gender, scientists have never been very good at recognizing the ongoing rhetorical positions of supposedly objective research papers and summaries (see, for example, Emily Martin’s work on the language of reproductive science).
As for the distinction between “mechanical” and “synthetic” thought—it’s possible that those terms would have to be defined or revised, but your point is that even as you imagine how they might be defined, you’re annoyed at the prospect of seeing it done. That raises several concerns for me. First of all, though once again I recognize the integrity of Gardner’s scholarship, the way you describe his reading does tend to repeat the “quantity as quality” problem that I discussed in the first part of the post. Freud was at least as well-read as Gardner, probably much more so, and yet I would not expect to be hissed for taking issue with him, almost regardless of the forum.
The distinction between “synthetic” and “mechanical” thought is not that different from Hegel’s distinction between the Reason and the Understanding; again, I could write a whole post on Hegelian Reason and Understanding without losing face, because of the genteel condescension that allows us to play around with Hegel without bothering to consider whether he’s really talking about thinking in the same passionate and consequential way as Daniel Dennett or etc. In other words, we act as though Reason and Understanding were characters in some Hegelian novel, which is not how they were intended at all.
Leaving aside, for right now, philosophical counter-attacks against science and specifically against neuroscience (Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, for example), I would be distressed to find neuroscience and empirical psychology trying to replace philosophy as the foundational discipline of thought—as the only discipline allowed to stake a claim on the involuntary Real, instead of being confined to the voluntary playground of speculation and fiction.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Martin Heidegger, and Albert Camus would have been horrified to think that “existentialism” would become essentialized as “existential intelligence,” especially since Sartre himself wrote that “existence precedes essence.” Is science to be allowed to borrow whatever it likes from philosophy, in a one-way conversation that permits no response? Just as Sartre and Camus imagined existentialism to be a universally accessible mode of philosophical thought, Emerson and Wordsworth imagined nature to be acccessible to everyone. What does it mean to claim that some people have “naturalistic intelligence” when that may compromise the very projects that have helped us conceive our relationship to nature, and when (again) reading these writers never gives us the right to talk about thought as it really is?
When I try to get clarity about one single issue, via the most up-to-date scientific research available through my university library, I get nothing but muddle. As a graduate student who likes coffee, I wanted to find out how caffeine affects cognition. The results were useless. For example, I can’t seem to find much beyond the claim that the effect of caffeine on cognitive performance depends on whether the subject is “introverted” or “extroverted.” As far as I know, those terms were first rigorously defined by Carl Jung, a Freudian scion who is controversial (or sometimes merely laughable) today. If I can challenge Jung without arousing protest, am I barred from challenging modern scientists who have somehow purified Jung and made him “objective”?
The science matters, there’s no question about that. But if empiricism, seriousness, authority, and objectivity are defined along disciplinary lines, the effect is a scientism that is more a matter of faith than reason.
We’re in agreement about those presidents; I just think you’re throwing the baby (the idea of intelligence) out with the bathwater (the ideal of intelligence for its own sake). Because while I agree that the wish for Intelligent Conservatives (to have Good Healthy Disagreements with) is asinine, the fact remains that there have been a number of intelligent conservative thinkers and politicians who were or are preferable to the less intelligent ones--preferable not just because they’re more fun to read, but because their approach to the world is more realistic and thoughtful. George Bush Senior was certainly a bad president, but his son makes him look good by adding disengagement and incompetence to his father’s bad policies. It’s true that their performance is what matters, but the problem with performance is that you only know after the fact, and intelligence is a pretty good predictor of performance. The way we identified W. as bad news in advance--his record in Texas wasn’t heavily blemished, and he was pretending that his values were centrist--was that he clearly lacked not only knowledge about the world he wanted to lead but also the ability to attain that knowledge.
This applies on the left, too, and consequently I have no interest in defining intelligence as left-wing. Dennis Kucinich is plenty left-wing, but there’s no way in hell.
As for the distinction between “mechanical” and “synthetic” thought—it’s possible that those terms would have to be defined or revised, but your point is that even as you imagine how they might be defined, you’re annoyed at the prospect of seeing it done.
No, I’m annoyed that you seem to think the distinction somehow superior in kind to Gardner’s seven- or eight- or N-fold way.
When I try to get clarity about one single issue, via the most up-to-date scientific research available through my university library, I get nothing but muddle. As a graduate student who likes coffee, I wanted to find out how caffeine affects cognition. The results were useless.
What can I say? First I’m glad that you’ve done this. One thing that bothered me about your post is that it didn’t seem that you’ve actually confronted the messiness of empirical psychology and neuroscience at the level of the primary literature. As for the muddle you found when you went there, that’s how it is. We don’t know.
A couple of years ago I spent some time getting a feel for the literature on ADHD—from epidemeology to testing and brain scans and genetics—and concluded that we don’t know what’s going on. I also had the feeling that I was reading Aesop on the grasshopper and the ant time after time. And somewhere in there I read a few people observing that school kids don’t get as much time for recess as they did 30 or 40 years ago and maybe that makes it more difficult to pay attention in class. I take that as a serious suggestion.
I would be distressed to find neuroscience and empirical psychology trying to replace philosophy as the foundational discipline of thought . . .
Maybe we don’t have any usable foundational discipline of thought at all. Maybe we’re stuck with muddling through.
Cosma Shalizi has written a dialog on the heritability of IQ.
Science magazine has published a study of 250,000 Norwegian military conscripts in which it is found that first-borns tend to score slightly higher (3 points) on IQ tests than their later born siblings. The authors conclude that this difference is caused through the dynamics of family interaction. The New York Times <A HREF="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/22/science/22sibling.html?ei=5087
&em=&en=2626b70848cfcf10&ex=1182657600&pagewanted=all” TARGET="nyt">has reported</A> on this finding.
"the SAT only measures “how good you are at taking tests””
Bullshit. People who get high math SAT scores (including 7th and 8th graders) turn out to be good at not just taking tests, but also learning math. It’s easy to test this. How well do students admitted with lower SAT scores do in school? The average SAT score of African Americans admitted to MIT is about 200 points lower than students admitted normally. Do they perform exactly the same as the students who had better SAT scores?
By the way this is the Kaplan guarantee:
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And if for any reason you don’t raise your overall score, you can study with us again for free or get your money back.
“standardized testing is on the rise (thanks to No Child Left Behind”
If there really were no such thing as intelligence, then NCLB would be the correct policy. But IQ is real, so NCLB isn’t working.
The average SAT score of African Americans admitted to MIT is about 200 points lower than students admitted normally. Do they perform exactly the same as the students who had better SAT scores?
Bad question.
Where are you getting your data?
If there really were no such thing as intelligence, then NCLB would be the correct policy.
Huh? What particular aspects of NCLB do you have in mind?
Tomemos,
For now, until I have more time to think this out, that’s a satisfying conclusion—not trying to abstract intelligence into a thing-in-itself, while retaining it in context as a way of predicting competence.
Bill,
That makes sense to me. As above with tomemos—at this point, the best thing for me is to do more research and then report back, and I appreciate the included links. On the one hand, the sibling IQ study suggests nurture over nature, which is useful; on the other hand, it’s possible that it doesn’t account enough for nurture, since it’s unclear whether older siblings are actually smarter, or just better at the IQ test kind of smart.
Leron,
Nobody is arguing what you think we’re arguing; I agree with Luther (and, I guess, you) that the SAT does test a number of skills, and wouldn’t teach it if I thought otherwise. That said, except at the very highest levels of mathematical ability, where the score maxes out at or around 800, SAT test-taking skills are indispensable, and cannot be separated from the student’s “base” math skills.
I was not able to scan your data about black students at MIT. Like Karl, I wondered about your sources. I also wondered how you (or anyone) would go about answering your question about subsequent performance.
I guess your point was that standardized testing is faulty because intelligence really exists, but doesn’t get measured accurately. There is no reason why the same results couldn’t be produced by a diversity of skills, not all of which would overlap with the skills required to succeed on a standardized test.
I’m just rejoining this discussion—I thought the thread was dead and hadn’t looked at it for several days.
J.K. asked me what I meant by the natural history of intelligence. What I have in mind is nothing fancy, just an inventory of what sorts of problem solving and thinking occur and how the ability to engage in these activities is distributed in the population. I’m not getting phenomenological on you. It just seems to me reasonable to have some descriptive information on hand before you make theories up about what accounts for the facts, just as it would be mighty helpful, to medical researchers, for example, if we knew at least as much about the sexual behavior of our species as ornithologists know about the love life of the crested grebe.
Everybody makes continuous, if largely unconscious, judgments about the intelligence of the people with whom they interact because of the rules of pragmatics. It’s impolite and counterproductive to talk down to people but talking over their heads is also problematic. My guess is that the class of people most likely to care about issues involving intelligence have a systematic tendency to overestimate how well their listeners can understand them, but maybe I’m wrong about that and my perception that students learn rather little from their teachers is the real error. Thing is, I don’t know, because information on how smart normal people are is very hard to come by.
"SAT test-taking skills are indispensable, and cannot be separated from the student’s “base” math skills.”
No, the advantages of better test taking skills have been wildly exaggerated by companies that sell expensive test preparation courses.
Have you ever worked at any jobs that don’t involve cognitive skills? I’ve noticed the only people who claim “intelligence doesn’t exist” are people who are never exposed to the left half of the Bell Curve.
I overstated the MIT gap. But a sizeable gap exists. In 2000, for example, only 746 African Americans scored above 700 on the math SAT. Typically at MIT at least <a href=” http://web.mit.edu/ir/cds/2005/c.html">80%</a> of incoming freshmen do.
Karl: If all children had equal IQ’s, NCLB would work, and demanding schools close the preformance gaps between groups of students would be the right thing to do, both as policy and morally. Of course they don’t, so it’s not.
"I overstated the MIT gap. But a sizeable gap exists. In 2000, for example, only 746 African Americans scored above 700 on the math SAT. Typically at MIT at least 80% of incoming freshmen do.”
Leron, you’re begging the question. Earlier, you asked “Do [African-Americans at MIT] perform exactly the same as the students who had better SAT scores?"--the implication being that they don’t. That’s what you have to support, not whether or not the scores are lower. If African-American MIT students do perform as well as their better-testing colleagues (and I agree with Kugelmass--what standard would we use to determine this?), then the whole concept of the SAT as an accurate predictor of collegiate success goes out the window. Your capitalization of “Bell Curve” tends to confirm my suspicion that you’re wearing that time-honored set of blinders designed by Charles Murray and his merry men, so your use of circular reasoning isn’t particularly surprising.
Joseph—You might want to blitz through the Wikipedia entry on Intelligence Quotient. I’m pretty much a novice on the subject so I can’t vouch for its accuracy, but I found it useful. In particular, it referenced the work of a young Dutch methodologist, Denny Borsboom, who has some interesting methodological observations, though his papers are all quite technical. His paper on “Why g is not an adaptation: A comment on Kanazawa” (PDF) is worth slogging through.
And then there is Arthur Jensen’s review of Gould’s Mismeasure that says Gould did a hatchet job. As Jensen is one of the major figures in intelligence research it is perhaps not surprising that he’d be skeptical about Gould. But if you’re going to get serious about this, then you need to deal with criticisms of Gould’s book by experts, even biased ones. What’s particularly interesting, however, is that there are a number of quotations in the left-margain of that web-page, and one of them is from a more recent paper by Jensen. Here’s what Jensen says:
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.
That makes a great deal of sense to me, not the least because I’ve come to believe that many terms for mental processes — such as reason, emotion, feeling, memory — are like “phlogiston” and “animal magnetism” in that they no longer serve us very well. And perhaps you were arguing something like that in your original post. Were you?
Tomemos: thanks.
NCLB: strikes me that one of its many problems is underfunding. Leave that out, you’re leaving out key information. Its emphasis on multiple choice testing, its implicit encouragement of forcing at risk students to drop out, and that that gains in math scores, for example, in the 1990s, prior to NCLB, have stalled, all lead me to believe that you either haven’t done your research or that you’re trying to slip one by us. I suspect the latter.
Bill,
What a great quote! I probably have greater interest in common usages than Jensen—being closer to sociology and anthropology than neuroscience in my academic work—and I am likely to be more skeptical about the ability to purify scientific terminology.
Nonetheless, his statement, particularly the line “Abandoning the fruitless quest for intelligence in no way negates the actual phenomena of interest,” is very much in the spirit of the post, and refreshingly concise. Some of these phenomena are of great interest to me, and I would never want, for example, to deny the existence of fetal alcohol syndrome. I will seek out the rest of that article.
Leron,
No, the advantages of better test taking skills have been wildly exaggerated by companies that sell expensive test preparation courses.
Not true. For example, I was a very good writer who initially did poorly on the “Writing” section because I was unused to writing short timed essays on moral subjects.
Have you ever worked at any jobs that don’t involve cognitive skills? I’ve noticed the only people who claim “intelligence doesn’t exist” are people who are never exposed to the left half of the Bell Curve.
Yes, I have worked menial jobs. I’ve also noticed that teachers who walk into their class thinking that half the students are less intelligent by birth play favorites and underestimate the rest.
If all children had equal IQ’s, NCLB would work, and demanding schools close the preformance gaps between groups of students would be the right thing to do, both as policy and morally. Of course they don’t, so it’s not.
Karl nailed this point. In the hypothetical never-never land of this example, all the representing schools are equally funded, all the children have equally privileged backgrounds, all the teachers are equally effective, and the tests are accurate judges of both IQ and skill.
Joseph—Note that the “purification of scientific terminology” is not a one-time deal that is accomplished through even the most careful of definitions. Terms in scientific thought are given meaning through the ongoing research program; definition is only part of the process. By all means, investigate common usage of “intelligence,” but keep some distance between that and what the most scrupulous investigators are up to. Of course, one of the problems we’ve got is that psychologists may often fail to maintain the distinction, especially in an area like this where the science is being used to justify public and/or corporate policy and procedure.
* * * * *
Two more specific things.
Borsboom has a 2006 methodological article where one of his examples is between-group comparisons of IQ test results (Charles Murray is one of his examples). On the basis of some specific methodological work done in the late 1990s he argues the those comparisons are unsound. I don’t really understand his argument—it assumes sophisticated understanding of psychometrics—so I can’t vouch for it. But you might want to contact him directly (he’s got a website).
The other thing is genius — which you talked about in your original post — and its relationship to intelligence and IQ. The thing about IQ tests is that they’re not constructed to make meaningful distinctions at the upper and lower ends of the distribution. You can get into Mensa by scoring in the top 2% on an IQ test; but how many Mensa members are or have been geniuses in the common meaning of the term? Very few I’d guess. Perhaps genius involves a degree of “intelligence” too high to be captured in a standardized test, or perhaps it involves something besides intelligence, perhaps both.
Mark Liberman over at the Language Log weighs in with a comment on the statistical analysis of the Norwegian study of birth order and IQ. In particular, he comments on whether or not that 3% difference was very consequential. My untutored intuition suggested to me that it was not, and thus I thought that both the NYTimes piece and Sulloway’s Science commentary were a bit misleading. Liberman ran a number of simulations and arrives at the same conclusion, but with evidence for it:
Now, the Norwegian study was large and careful and serious, and it found an apparently genuine effect of birth order, and (most important) it was able to look at the effects of birth order and “social order” (what happens when an eldest child dies young) separately, so as to disentangle possible biological effects of first vs. subsequent preganancies. But the birth-order effect, though real, is pretty small, and a responsible science journalist would do more to help readers to understand what an effect of this size does and doesn’t mean.
While reading this thread, especially the Bill Benzon posts ("muddling"), I can’t stop thinking Rorty. “Intelligence” is just another word we use to express ourselves and get by. We’ll probably never know how essential/contingent these things are. If you want to change the vocabulary, or the use of the vocabulary, for social/political change, be my guest. But even the latter endeavor strikes me as pathetically feeble. Our langauge, like our world, remains impossible. Consider me a Rorty without the social hope.