Chapter 4 INTELLIGENCE, REGRESSES, AND EMPIRICISM discusses the prospects for a view that reduces intelligence to skillfulness—the Skill View of Intelligence. Though the view comes with many perks, I argue that it does not fit well with an independently motivated empiricism and that, on these bases, we ought to reject it. Nonetheless, many of its perks can be retained on a weaker understanding of the relation between skill and intelligence, one on which intelligence is a bundle of capacities—to acquire, to maintain, to exercise a cluster of skills in a variety of domains (general intelligence) or in specific domains (domain-specific intelligence).

After an introduction to the general notion of relativism in philosophy, the chapter considers an approach to the study of scientific inquiry that is explicit in its commitment to relativism: the strong program in the sociology of knowledge. According to the strong program, which purports to give a social scientific account of science, scientific knowledge is not so much discovered as constructed by social dynamics that produce scientific consensus. The limits of such an account are explored by discussing both sociological and anthropological approaches. The social constructionist account has been applied to Robert Boyle’s experiments with an air-pump and the criticisms directed against them. Applying similar ideas to physicists’ attempts to detect gravity waves has led to the formulation of a problem known as the experimenters’ regress. Through such cases, the chapter sees how defenders of social constructionist accounts draw upon both history and social scientific investigations of current science. The chapter then surveys philosophical and historical criticisms of this approach.

Since India had been controlled by the British, it regressed to a lower stage. Poverty had been a lived reality for Indians, including for some of the Indian economists, since the late seventeenth century. International trade networks were disrupted by economic crisis and wars. Meanwhile, the Indian subcontinent was experiencing some of the most severe famines in its history. The Indian economists felt these crises sweeping their cities and villages. In particular, Dadabhai Naoroji and Romesh Chunder Dutt would spend most of their adult lives examining the regress that they saw in India. They would explore how it could be measured, how it varied from region to region, and its causes.

The second version in the text of Part I of the Parmenides of the Third Man regress against the theory of Forms has often been read in its critical thrust as essentially identical with the original version. That interpretation fails to do sufficient justice to the regress’s focus specifically on the Form of Likeness. Such a Form has to be posited once the application of the predicate like inherent in the original–copy model of participation in Forms is itself explained on that model. Are Platonists then trapped? Part II of the dialogue supplies indications to the contrary. Like figures in many of its arguments, where it is often construed as being qualified in the same way. What readers effectively come to recognise is that like is a second-order predicate: ‘is like’ means ‘share the same first-order predicate’, not ‘participates in the Form Likeness’. Part II of the Parmenides therefore supplies materials for resisting the regress; and the presentation of likeness as a theme which we are invited to pursue through both parts alerts us to the fact that they are available, and are pertinent to the business of evaluating Parmenides’ critique of Socrates.