Terminology

The debates on intelligence have been long and fierce. It sometimes seems that the longer they continue the farther we get from any resolution. Some objections, like many of those aired in the wake of the publication of The Bell Curve, were little more than the predictable rantings of those whose ideological toes had been trodden on, but others are more serious and need to be addressed. Early objections were raised to IQ measures on the grounds that extraneous and irrelevant factors like fatigue and ‘training’ could distort the measure. Such problems are more to do with bias and reliability and can, to some extent, be controlled. Much more serious are those that challenge the very foundations of the enterprise. Often these objections are expressed by questioning the truth of statements which have wide currency, and seem to be taken for granted by the advocates of intelligence testing. In coming to the end of our journey we must attempt to separate the facts from the fallacies.

A convenient way to do this is to focus, principally, on two writers who have obligingly drawn attention to the rocks on which they think the good ship founders. First among these is Gould, who repeatedly claimed that intelligence is not a single, innate, heritable and measurable ‘thing’. This runs like a refrain through The Mismeasure of Man and its five elements cover most of the significant objections that have been raised to intelligence testing.