Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- Preface
- Acknowledgement
- 1 The great intelligence debate: science or ideology?
- 2 Origins
- 3 The end of IQ?
- 4 First steps to g
- 5 Secons steps to g
- 6 Extracting g
- 7 Factor analysis or principal components analysis?
- 8 One intelligence or many?
- 9 The Bell Curve: facts, fallacies and speculations
- 10 What is g?
- 11 Are some groups more intelligent than others?
- 12 Is intelligence inherited?
- 13 Facts and fallacies
- Notes
- References
- Index
8 - One intelligence or many?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- Preface
- Acknowledgement
- 1 The great intelligence debate: science or ideology?
- 2 Origins
- 3 The end of IQ?
- 4 First steps to g
- 5 Secons steps to g
- 6 Extracting g
- 7 Factor analysis or principal components analysis?
- 8 One intelligence or many?
- 9 The Bell Curve: facts, fallacies and speculations
- 10 What is g?
- 11 Are some groups more intelligent than others?
- 12 Is intelligence inherited?
- 13 Facts and fallacies
- Notes
- References
- Index
Summary
The background
One obvious way to take the heat out of much of the debate on intelligence is to recognise that intelligence, as commonly understood, is a complex concept that cannot be captured by a single number. Hardly anyone disputes this. The question is, rather, whether any salient aspect of this many-sided thing can be reduced to numbers, preferably only one.
The attempt to liberate thinking in this field from the seeming straightjacket imposed by the psychometric approach has taken many forms. One has been to identify different sorts of intelligence. So-called ‘emotional intelligence’ has had a great vogue. This finds its origin in the fact that success in life depends on more than the skills tested by conventional IQ tests. ‘Spiritual intelligence’ has been floated though, so far, without quite the same appeal. The advocates of such ‘new’ intelligences often seem to successfully convey the idea that theirs is subtly superior to the more mundane version. There may well, of course, be good reasons for introducing new measures of human characteristics on these lines. If there are, they will need to be explored with the same rigour and thoroughness as has been devoted to the mental ability which is the subject of this book. If this happens, it is highly likely the new indices will encounter precisely the same problems and criticisms.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Measuring IntelligenceFacts and Fallacies, pp. 74 - 84Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004