The left side is the position that definitions of intelligence are all arbitrary, and that psychologists just make up tests and call what it measures “intelligence.”
The middle is the position that there is a real thing that can be called “intelligence,” which can be defined in different (meaningful) ways, and that intelligence tests are objective ways to measure it.
The right side is the position that intelligence is probably still real and can probably still be defined in different (meaningful) ways, but that we can never directly measure intelligence and instead observe it indirectly through observable indicators like someone’s performance on an intelligence test. This means that any practical statement about intelligence, while probably real and definable, are contingent on the specific test used to measure it.
The average person (and to be fair, most psychologists) thinks of intelligence as the innate, fundamental characteristic of a person to think across all cognitive areas. However, this concept is not easily falsifiable and therefore arguably exists outside the realm of science.
For example, say I wanted to come up with a concept called “sportsness” which is the ability to be good at sports. I could test a bunch of people in a battery of sports-related tasks, and I’d probably get a nice bell curve where some people have high sportsness across all tasks and others have low sportsness across all tasks.
But does that prove the existence of sportsness? Or did I just measure a spurious correlation caused by the fact that some people are just more likely to be playing many different sports than others, or that some body types may lead to being better at sports related tasks, or some people are just better at handling the pressure of athletic performance tests, or some combination thereof? Of course most would say the latter, but then maybe some would defend the concept of sportsness by saying sportsness is just an emergent property of those things or something like that. But then is sportsness useful as a concept at all? You get the idea.
That’s why scientists ( I assume they’re supposed to be the right hand side) claiming to measure “intelligence” should pick a more specific term for what they’re measuring.
If they use the word “intelligence” I’d be extremely suspicious about why they’ve chosen that word. I would assume they have a decent understanding of how the word is likely be interpreted by the other 97.5%, if not they need to get out and do some fieldwork.
Left side is saying that intelligence is an objective thing that can be measured with the test.
Right side is saying the test is the objective thing that defines what we think of as intelligence. “If you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree…”
I don’t get it? I’m still in the middle of the graph.
The left side is the position that definitions of intelligence are all arbitrary, and that psychologists just make up tests and call what it measures “intelligence.”
The middle is the position that there is a real thing that can be called “intelligence,” which can be defined in different (meaningful) ways, and that intelligence tests are objective ways to measure it.
The right side is the position that intelligence is probably still real and can probably still be defined in different (meaningful) ways, but that we can never directly measure intelligence and instead observe it indirectly through observable indicators like someone’s performance on an intelligence test. This means that any practical statement about intelligence, while probably real and definable, are contingent on the specific test used to measure it.
The average person (and to be fair, most psychologists) thinks of intelligence as the innate, fundamental characteristic of a person to think across all cognitive areas. However, this concept is not easily falsifiable and therefore arguably exists outside the realm of science.
For example, say I wanted to come up with a concept called “sportsness” which is the ability to be good at sports. I could test a bunch of people in a battery of sports-related tasks, and I’d probably get a nice bell curve where some people have high sportsness across all tasks and others have low sportsness across all tasks.
But does that prove the existence of sportsness? Or did I just measure a spurious correlation caused by the fact that some people are just more likely to be playing many different sports than others, or that some body types may lead to being better at sports related tasks, or some people are just better at handling the pressure of athletic performance tests, or some combination thereof? Of course most would say the latter, but then maybe some would defend the concept of sportsness by saying sportsness is just an emergent property of those things or something like that. But then is sportsness useful as a concept at all? You get the idea.
That’s why scientists ( I assume they’re supposed to be the right hand side) claiming to measure “intelligence” should pick a more specific term for what they’re measuring.
If they use the word “intelligence” I’d be extremely suspicious about why they’ve chosen that word. I would assume they have a decent understanding of how the word is likely be interpreted by the other 97.5%, if not they need to get out and do some fieldwork.
That’s a great example.
Left side is saying that intelligence is an objective thing that can be measured with the test.
Right side is saying the test is the objective thing that defines what we think of as intelligence. “If you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree…”
Tying intelligence to IQ seems like the left side to me. I’m still in the middle 🤔
Edit: or maybe the left