- Intelligence, figuring what it might be, and categorizing it, and
measuring it... I like the topics, so I have to post more.
On Thu, 05 Apr 2001 22:09:33 +0100, Colin Cooper
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
> Rich Ulrich <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> > I liked Gould's book. I know that he offended people by pointing to
> > gross evidence of racism and sexism in 'scientific reports.' But he
> > has (I think) offended Carroll in a more subtle way. Gould is
> > certainly partial to ideas that Carroll is not receptive to; I think
> > that is what underlies this critique.
> >
> > ===snip
>
> I've several problems with Gould's book.
>
> (1) Sure - some of the original applications of intelligence testing
> (screening immigrants who were ignorant of the language using tests
> which were grossly unfair to them) were unfair, immoral and wrong. But
> why impugn the whole area as 'suspect' because of the
> politically-dubious activities of some researchers a century ago? It
I think Gould to "impugned" more than just one area. The message,
as I read it, was, "Be leery of social scientists who provide
self-congratulatory and self-serving, simplistic conclusions."
In recent decades, I imagine that economists have been bigger
at that than psychologists. Historians have quite a bit of 20th
century history-writing to live down, too.
> seems to me to be exceptionally surprising to find that ALL abilities -
> musical, aesthetic, abstract-reasoning, spatial, verbal, memory etc.
> correlate not just significantly but substantially.
Here is one URL for references to Howard Gardner, who has
shown some facets of independence of abilities (and who you
mention, below).
http://www.newhorizons.org/trm_gardner.html
> (2) Gould's implication is that since Spearman found one factor
> (general ability) whilst Thurstone fornd about 9 identifiable factors,
> then factor analysis is a method of dubious use, since it seems to
> generate contradictory models. There are several crucial differences
- I read Gould as being more subtle than that.
> between the work of Spearman and Thurstone that may account for these
> differences. For example, (a) Spearman (stupidly) designed tests
> containing a broad spectrum of abilities: his 'numerical' test, for
> example, comprised various sorts of problems - addition, fractions, etc.
> Thurstone used separate tests for each: so Thurstone's factors
> essentially corresponded to Spearman's tests. (b) Thurstone's work was
> with students where the limited range of abilities would reduce the
> magnitude of correlations between tests. (c) More recent work (e.g.,
> Gustafsson, 1981; Carroll, 1993) using exploratory factoring and CFA
> finds good evidence for a three-stratum model of abilities: 20+
> first-order factors, half a dozen second-order factors, or a single
> 3rd-order factor.
>
> (3) Interestingly, Gardner's recent work has come to almost exactly the
> same conclusions from a very different starting point. Gardner
> identiied groups of abilities which, according to the literature, tended
> to covary - for example, which tend to develop at the same age, all
> change following drugs or brain injury, which interfere with each other
> in 'dual-task' experiments and so on. His list of abilities derived in
> this was is very similar to the factors identified by Gustaffson,
> Carroll and others.
- but Gardner has "groups of abilities" that are, therefore, distinct
from each other. And also, only a couple of abilities are usually
rewarded (or even measured) in our educational system. When I read
his book, I thought Gardner was being overly "scholastic" in his
leaning, and restrictive in his data, too.
> I have a feeling that we're going to get on to the issue of whether
> factors are merely arbitrary representations of sets of data or whether
> some solutions are more are more meaningful than others - the rotational
> indeterminacy problem - but I'm off to bed!
Well, how much data can you load into one factor analysis?
How much virtue can you assign to one 'central ability'?
- I see the problem as philosophical instead of numeric.
What you will *identify* as a single factor (by techniques
of today) will be more trivial than you want.
Daniel Dennett, in "Consciousness Explained," does a clever
job of defining consciousness. And trivializing it; what I was
interested in (I reflect to myself) was something much grander,
something more meaningful. But intelligence and self-awareness
are separate topics, and big ones. Julian Jaynes's book was
more useful on the bigger picture -- setting a framework, so to
speak, and establishing the size of the problem.
--
Rich Ulrich, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.pitt.edu/~wpilib/index.html
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