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 still real and can still be defined in different 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 statement about intelligence, while real and definable, are contingent on the specific tests used to measure it.
rational_lib@lemmy.world 2 months ago
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 sports than others, or that some body types may lead to being better at sports related tasks, 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 at all? You get the idea.
azi@mander.xyz 1 month ago
Yeah sure buddy, sportness is all made up by —let me guess— Big Sportness? Clearly you’re just mad that you’re not very sportnant.
oo1@lemmings.world 2 months ago
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.
MarcomachtKuchen@feddit.org 2 months ago
That’s a great example.
MarxMadness@lemmygrad.ml 1 month ago
I like the comparison to measuring physical attributes, but I think a better analogy for IQ testing would be “trying to measure athleticism by trying to measure who’s best at playing basketball.”
Defining “athleticism” itself is hard. It might include reaction time, coordination, strength, speed, flexibility, etc. There are some naturally occurring differences in those attributes, but to a degree they are also changeable. Any bottom-line, all-in measure is going to include some arbitrary decisions about the relative value of each attribute.
Trying to measure athleticism by who’s best at basketball adds another layer of problems. Basketball (analogous to test taking, cultural context, etc.) involves skills that are separate from whatever you’re calling athleticism. It’s also a game where a big factor in success – height – is also probably something a lot of people would consider separate from athleticism.