In a message dated 5/20/12 1:01:18 AM, [email protected] writes:
> Haha! I used to be a genius too: Amazingly easy at 16. A trivial > challenge > at 22 as a full fellowship student at the Univ. Chicago. After 30 it got > a > little harder and after 40 almost impossible, by which time I was > surrounded by > dozens of 4.0 GPA students and fellow faculty from Ivys but not a single > one of > them was a genius. Naturally, I was surprised to be the only former > genius I > ever knew, except for a pal who, like me, quit school at 16. > > Genuine acuity of intellect and genius requires a huge faculty (your > meaning > intended) for associative thinking... > Oy. A shouting match. One in which you apparently feel the term 'genius' has a "the real meaning". For that reason, I'm not heartened to hear you feel you were a "genius" at 16. Though I'd be interested to hear a description of the notion you have in mind when you use that term. I once took a long aptitude test given to 500,000 G.I.s. I got the highest score, which their arithmetic extrapolated to an IQ score of 193. I was less chuffed than you might assume, for two reasons. First, I was so self-convinced at the time, that I would have been surprised if I did NOT get the highest aptitude score. (I'd had previous experience with such tests - which, I emphasize, were of aptitude, not of achievement. After eyeing my scores, the psychometricians were using me to test new tests.) The second curtailment of delight came from this realization: One can get a zooming high IQ score by simply being pretty good at all the various abilities they try to measure - math, verbal, visual, logic, memory... But consider this: If today you score in the 99th percentile in, say, math, you are one of 3,000,000 people in the U.S. alone. In sum, a high conglomerate score on an IQ test does not imply that you are world class at any particular thing. That insight is properly deflating. In a sense, after my deluding marks in youth, my adult life has been an education in the things I CAN'T do. I don't say this in any Aw-shucks-poor-me way. I've also confirmed to my satisfaction that there are some things I CAN do. Philosophy of language is one of them. ----- Original Message ---- From: Tom McCormack <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Sat, May 19, 2012 6:00:21 PM Subject: Re: On Roy Harris 2 0f 2 On May 19, 2012, at 5:47 PM, William Conger wrote: > It just kills me to have to say, sadly, with deep remorse and downcast eyes > that I wonder why people who have never published in linguistic theory are so > much smarter field than those who have. Maybe it's like sports when the > spectators are always better players and coaches than those actually on the > field playing the game. William -- I wouldn't begin to put myself in a class with Harris about Attic Greek, Indo European, the Zero Copula status of Chinese, Indonesian, etc. That sort of thing is what I have in mind when I say "linguistics". But the Harris topics I've been attacking have all been philosophy of language, of mind and ontology. I was a shallow lout in college, but I did manage to get the first 4.0 GPA in my Ivy League college since before WWII, and I was a philosophy major, so I brought some equipment to the job. And I've now spent a good part of the last ten years reading in the areas of philosophy pertinent to Harris's topics in this discussion. I feel qualified in equipment and "learning" to comment on Harris.
