From: Darin Sunley (rsunley@escape.ca)
Date: Wed Aug 11 1999 - 14:38:59 MDT
John Clark wrote:
[snip]
> The best definition of intelligence that I can think of is " the sort of thing
> that Richard Feynman did"
With all respect, that definition is simply not good enough for a science of the mind. If
"intelligence" can only be defined in such fuzzy words, then people involved in psychology
shouldn't be using it at all. You don't see quantum physicists referring casually to
"particles" without having a very solid idea of exactly what the word means.
Words are spoken symbols for concepts. Debating which concepts the symbol describes is not
science, it is mediocre philosophy. The common usage of the word is irrelevant. I know
that I mean a very different thing when I say "particle" then when Enrico Fermi did. His
concept of "particle" is solid, complex, well defined, and completely non intuitive. My
concept of particle is "a little billiard ball type thing containing quarks that sometimes
(most of the time?) behaves like a wave. Just as I would fervently hope that Enrico Fermi
wouldn't give two bits what I think a particle is, I would hope that psychologists
wouldn't care two bits what the popular definition of "intelligence" is. Unfortunately,
this seems not to be the case.
When words are thrown around casually and regularly redefined, you don't have science. You
don't even have a rigorous description. All you have is impressive sounding mouth noises.
[And don't get me started on the tendency in psychological theories to divide human
behavior into arbitrary, well defined "stages", either. These people aren't doing science.
Don't get me wrong. Many psychologists ARE doing real science, but the not wannabe
philosophers who write some of this stuff.]
Anders, It IS entirely possible that my perceptions on psychology were badly warped by the
intro class I took in it. Everything the professor taught, and everything the text said
(and I studied it very carefully) painted a fairly complete picture of theoretical
psychology as a bizarre form of philosophy. The text gave lip service to cognitive science
and biology, but didn't seem to take them too seriously.
I guess the moral is never trust a "science" taught by the Faculty of Arts :)]
Mr. Badger, my psychology textbook was Psychology: Themes and Variations, Fourth Edition,
by Wayne Weiten. It concentrates a lot on the above mentioned arbitrary "stages"
psychological models, and has a large section on "intelligence" testing and models of
intelligence. One of the major problems I have with psychology as presented by this text
is that absolutely no effort is made to "ground" psychological theories in neural
structures and matter. Alleged "psychology" that does not ground in neural structures is,
in my humble opinion, not science, but a branch of philosophy. It's what Aristotle was
doing, pure description with only the vaguest attempts made at explanation or
verification. Frankly, I expected better.
Darin Sunley
rsunley@escape.ca
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