Dear Loet, You have opened up what may be an important box, and we need to see if it is Pandora's or Sophia's! Does not your note imply the following questions:
1. Intelligence is a well-defined subject of studies in psychology, but is it a well-defined subject? 2. If intelligence is a well-defined subject of studies, should not this be part of the solution, rather than the problem? 3. Are we to conclude that all we non-psychologists can know is that, with due respect to your wife, psychologists know better what intelligence "is"? Is there a process view of intelligence in psychology? 4. Since we have more or less agreed that consciousness, information and knowledge are all critical to the understanding of intelligence, do we conclude that psychologists also have appropriate, adequately complex notions of these that we can learn from or contribute to? 5. Thus, are you saying that if "we" are using an inappropriate paradigm for studying intelligence, psychology is the appropriate one? 6. If so, that is, if psychology is the most appropriate paradigm, what support does it have or require from other disciplines that are relative to point 4 above, especially information? Shall we see where this track might lead? Best wishes, Joseph ----- Original Message ----- From: Loet Leydesdorff To: 'Joseph Brenner' ; 'fis' Sent: Sunday, November 21, 2010 10:39 PM Subject: RE: [Fis] Fw: INTELLIGENCE & INFORMATION: A Charicature Dear Joseph, It seems to me that part of the problem is that “intelligence” is a well-defined subject of studies within psychology. (I happen to be married with a psychologist.) Perhaps, this is an example of scholars discussing a subject using an inappropriate paradigm. J Best wishes, Loet ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Loet Leydesdorff Professor, University of Amsterdam Amsterdam School of Communications Research (ASCoR), Kloveniersburgwal 48, 1012 CX Amsterdam. Tel.: +31-20- 525 6598; fax: +31-842239111 l...@leydesdorff.net ; http://www.leydesdorff.net/ From: fis-boun...@listas.unizar.es [mailto:fis-boun...@listas.unizar.es] On Behalf Of Joseph Brenner Sent: Sunday, November 21, 2010 9:36 PM To: fis Subject: Re: [Fis] Fw: INTELLIGENCE & INFORMATION: A Charicature Dear Colleagues, I have just gone back over the discussion of Intelligence and Information to try to extract the major new thoughts and my conclusion is one of frustration. The introduction of the other thread of the fis digest confused me further, since I could not follow its intention or objective. I have thus charicatured the situation as follows: 1. Intelligence has something to do with information, but it is not clear which constitutes the other. 2. It might be possible to measure intelligence, but no-one knows how, or whether it is necessary or desirable. 3. Some lower level biological structures could be considered as displaying intelligence, but the term adds little to the observation of their behavior. 4. Similarly, human beings appear to have multiple capacities that can be characterized as intelligences, but again the term has no explanatory power over and above the biological or cognitive capacities themselves. Perhaps the first conclusion from the above is that all approaches that tend to reify intelligence, to make it a "thing" rather than a pattern or process should be thrown out at once. We would then agree that intelligence is polysemic, and try to explain how the conceptions differ. For example, a basic question to be answered before looking for the mechanism for the growth of intelligence is if and how intelligence or intelligences change, increase or decrease. Another: what is the relation of intelligence to the process of acquiring knowledge (rather than to knowledge itself) and then, how is this to be differentiated from learning? If someone can produce a real synthesis of the discussion that would completely deconstruct the above I would be the first to applaud it. Sincerely, Joseph
_______________________________________________ fis mailing list fis@listas.unizar.es https://webmail.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis
