IQ tests and their brethren at best single out a very few children as "special" which allows the educational status quo to continue on the basis that the bulk of the children in it can be treated as economic cannon fodder. This allows the elites to preserve their undeserved privilege by giving the impression to everyone that they too could join in and enjoy some of their bounty if only they were "special" enough. Of course, the trick of the elite is to brush the fact under the carpet that not everyone can enjoy the bounty in a system mired in privilege.
Think about it for a little longer than a minute, and you might realise this is true.
And the people that I have encountered (personally and through reading) that have been "hostile to" - by which I presume you mean vocally skeptical about - IQ testing have not been elites looking to preserve their undeserved privilege - Gould and Chomsky come to mind on the literary front, several Trotskiest acquaintances of mine on the personal - quite the opposite. Who exactly do you have in mind as an example of a privileged elitist giving arguments against the use of IQ tests?

Otherwise I'm going to assume you were referring to the scientific definition

What scientific definition? As far as I'm aware there is no settled scientific definition and if you just mean "intelligence is what IQ tests measure" then the charge of circularity remains meet. As for my definition of intelligence, my whole point is that intelligence is not a concept that can be defined in the way you want it defined.

How else do you explain the 6 point difference between Asians (of the far eastern variety) and Europeans?

Well according to a pretty detailed comment on the
blog here, the way to account for it is to dispell its relevance on the grounds that the sample sizes for most of the studies were small and there were no control groups. But whether that's a viable response would depend on the studies you are referring to, if they are published online would you provide the links?

IQ tests measure one thing, and only one thing, uncontroversially: the ability to take an IQ test. — MetaphysicsNow


Sure, though that doesn't mean that the result doesn't say anything about intelligence. Since we don't have any better means to measure intelligence, that is what we use.

But that's to assume that intelligence is something that can be measured, and simply to say that it is because we measure it with IQ tests is a petitio principii.

Are you saying that these things are not measurable or that they're not a measure of human intelligence or both?

Both - I see it as the same category mistake as the overarching category mistake concerning intelligence in general. Sure, one can try breaking down intelligence into parts, but those parts you mention are complex concepts in themselves - after all, what is abstract reasoning, for instance? We can probably all give examples of abstract reasoning - playing chess, proving mathematical theorems, constructing an argument for metaphysical idealism, planning a holiday.... - but that does not entail that they all have some feature in common that comes in amounts and can be measured. It's tempting to say "well, we canincrease our ability to reason abstractly, so it must come in amounts that can be measured" - but here "increase" arguably just means "improve" and the same problem arises, what counts as improving abstract reasoning, and what makes one believe that it is just one ability in any case? I can become a better chess player by, amongst other things, learning a few more chess openings, understanding a little more about endgame scenarios and how to manipulate towards them from a middlegame.... Compare that with how I would become better at giving arguments for metaphysical idealism - probably not a great deal in common. There may be some analogies that can be made (knowledge of chess opening theory = knowldege of previous attempts to prove idealism) but the crucial thing here to remember about analogies is that things which are analagous are precisely not one and the same thing. It begins to look a little forced to insist that there must be one measurable ability underlying all this, and what is the motiviation for doing so?

Of course, if you are some kind of mind-brain physicalist you might be able to argue that, on the basis of physicalism, all aspects of mentality must in principle be measurable. But then to defend IQ tests on that basis, you would need already to have established that physicalism is true and have gone further and actually identified the (presumably neurophysiological) mechanisms underlying these identifiable abilities you mention. So, even if one is a mind-brain physicalist, as things currently stand one is a long way from being able to say that IQ tests measure anything beyond an ability to take IQ tests.

@Posty McPostface @Srap Tasmaner @mcdoodle
How about we proceed like this:
We take a smallish chunk at a time - let's say e.g. we start with propositions 1 and 2 and their sub-propositions. My attitude towards philosophical texts is generally negative, so I could start things off by listing the problems I see in it and then others can come in and tell me why I'm wrong/how I've misunderstood? I'm not thin skinned so I can take the pain and will hopefully gain in the process.
I'll do a skim read of the whole thing this weekend and come back next week with a more detailed plan of splitting it up into chunks (which of course we can modify as we go along) if people are okay with that idea.

But it isn't testing that condemns children to mediocrity, it's the aim of education In the present society.

I am in complete agreement, but I see the ethos of IQ testing as part of supporting and maintaining exactly those aims, and it is those aims and the support system with it that need to be challenged, and that involves challenging piecemeal the individual supporting elements, such as the idea that IQ tests actually measure anything more than an ability to take an IQ test. Given your other posts on other threads, I am certain you need no lessons in history from me, but just consider that the current educational systems in the West started life because the financial elite - for whom education was largely reserved - were virtually forced, in order to maintain their privilege, into handing out a few social crumbs to those that produced their wealth. Elitism has always been an ethos in Western educational systems and IQ testing spuriously bolsters its standing.

We do measure it, so it can be measured.

IQ tests measure one thing, and only one thing, uncontroversially: the ability to take an IQ test.

@creativesoul

You figure the IQ tests are responsible for how they're put to use

Of course the IQ tests themselves are not responsible for anything, it is those who believe them to be measuring something other than an ability to take an IQ test that are responisble.

The category mistake is to take an abstract, and very complex concept like intelligence and presuming it to be something akin to a name for a property of human beings that comes in amounts and is measurable, like their mass or height.

All children have potential. Using a test based on a category mistake and which is specifically designed to single out a few from the many, even if for supposed noble causes, singles out children on the basis of a mistake. Perhaps some good can come out of having done so in individual cases, it is logically possible for a mistake to have positive results. However, under the current educational systems (the ones I am aware of anyway) those kinds of tests consign the majority of children to mediocrity and the suppression of potential through neglect.

You leave a subproof in Ficht system by discharging the assumption that began it. You can discharge assumptions by negating them (which you can do if the assumption leads to a contradiction) or by making them the antecedent of an implication introduction.

I'm in!

I guess it depends on the people who insist that he's wrong. There is an IQ testing industry of sorts, and other occupations (human resources for one) that depend on it to some extent, so there are economic pressures on the people involved to insist that there genuinely is something being tested other than the ability to take a specific kind of test. There may be some people with an interest in IQ who truly are aiming to find some legitimacy for their racial or gender bias, but the few people I've met of that sort are not scientists or other professionals working in the field of IQ testing, but racists and sexists looking for reasons for an irrational belief.

Well, point taken to some extent, but only to the extent of my clumsy expression. Correlations have been made between results in IQ examinations and other phenomena. This does not, though, entail that IQ tests are measuring anything other than an ability to take an IQ test. The question that these studies is often supposed to raise is "why are less intelligent people less/more likely to x/y" whereas the question they in fact raise is "why are people who are better/worse at taking IQ tests less/more likely to x/y".

And the only thing that IQ tests have ever been able to tell about anyone is how good or bad they are at taking IQ tests.

Exactly. I recommend that anyone who wants to start making claims about what IQ can tell us about anybody or anything should first of all read Stephen J Gould's The Mismeasure of Man to see exactly its basis in, quite frankly, racial and gender bias. As Gould points out right at the beginning, the whole IQ idea is based on a fundamental category error that intelligence is something that can be measured.

Not sure I'm following you - but in any case you've whetted my appetite for rereading TLP and PI , so thanks for that, and I may be back with more later.

Thanks very much.

I think I'd read a couple of papers in which the authors tried to distinguish between those and others that were really meant as nonsense. What do you think?

I might just do that - in any case I've been thinking about rereading PI and TLP for a while now (since I joined the forum in fact, and saw Wittgenstein's name bandied and battled about a fair bit). Do you happen to have any specific papers in mind?

Kant had to invoke the metaphysical. Wittgenstein got by with doing without it.

Not sure about that: "reality is the totality of facts not of things" - that sounds like a metaphysical claim to me.

Not really. Wittgenstein set out to delineate the limits of language and thought with the Tractatus. I think he achieved that goal.

OK, but in the Tractatus he had a very restricted view of what language is (at least that is one interpretation of it). Language is precisely and only a way of picturing reality in the Tractatus, and in the Tractatus reality is just the totality of facts, so language in the Tractatus is just a way of picturing facts. All facts are built up from atomic facts, and the logical relations between propositions mirror the ontological relations between facts. With that in mind, proposition 7 reduces (or can be reduced) to the idea that you should shut up if you are not attempting to state either an atomic fact, or a fact constructed from atomic facts, because that's all that you can do with language. But where does that leave the propositions of the Tractatus? They are not statements to the effect that some specific atomic fact obtains. They also do not look like statements to the effect that some fact constructed from atomic facts obtains.

The later Wittgensteinian stuff does not deny that language is sometimes used in that picturing way, but it allows for other uses as well (perhaps the very use it is being put to in the Tractatus?)

(small edit - I forgot about tautologies in the Tractatus - not sure whether it is relevant, but they are allowed in language, but do not state facts.)

Entropy is just a measure of the energy of a system that is not available for conversion into work. That at least is the initial basic physical description, and it is consistent with the idea that it is a state variable. Measures/state variables are not the kinds of things that are susceptible to contradiction - propositions/theories/laws and so on are the kinds of things that can be contradicted. Life does not contradict the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics (which is the principle law concerning entropy) since when we are considering life, we are not considering isolated systems, and the 2nd law concerns isolated systems.

First, the mystical or the ethical is what can be referred to as those things which cannot be spoken about.

Aren't you already speaking about them in making that claim (and then going on to talk about them even more later on)? I presume, then, that you either disagree with Wittgenstein, or you believe that one can say something about the mystical and the ethical. Or do you mean to be deliberately paradoxical? I've heard it said that the entire Tractatus is meaningless nonsense if one takes literally this particular aphorism from Wittgenstein.

The world is my world: this is manifest in the fact that the limits of language (of that language which alone I understand) mean the limits of my world. (5.62)

I'll have to reread the Tractatus, but at that stage in his philosophy I think the idea of a private language still made sense to Wittgenstein, and this certainly seems to be lying behind this remark. He gave up on that, as well as the idea that the fact-picturing model of language developed in the Tractatus was the only way in which language operates. He later went on to appreciate that you can do more with language than just state facts (although fact stating remains an important part of language, of course).

Also, Wittgenstein was not the first philosopher to attempt to set limits to what philosophy can accomplish. Kant got there before him, and arguably did a better job of it. One thing one can certainly say about Wittgenstein is that he was parsimonious with this acknowledgement of his debt to others that came before him.

And you keep ducking the conservation of energy question, why?

Says the master of the technique of going silent when proved wrong.

You're not joking are you? I hope you are because the alternative is quite worrying.

Take the chemical laws of catalysis. Point me to the theoretical work that has reduced those to the laws of physics. If you are tempted to say "the laws of chemical analsys are laws of physics" then once again your argument that "the physical is what is the subject matter of physical laws" becomes "the physical is the subject matter of scientific laws", and then the question "Why aren't maths and logic sciences" remains one you have not addressed (other than to simply pronounce that they are not).

You don't use the principle of conservation of energy to check for the conservation of energy. You check for conservation of energy by measuring energy. I still don't see the point of this particular line of thought of yours. Uber's idea is that we identify something as physical because it is a process or object or whatnot the behaviour of which is bound by the laws of conservation of energy.

Quantum mechanics will always work as well as it does, and nothing it has revealed to us about reality can be forgotten.

Show a little philosophical sophistication please, this is a philosophy forum after all. The fact that QM is useful and always will be does not entail it tells us anything about reality.

Moving things on to another thread does not make you any more correct.
As Uber pointed out to you there are differential equations used in mechanics which are not time-invariant and so do display asymmetry that one would require for them to be modelling causation.

But this does not help us recover causality into physical law,

Maybe, maybe not. If you take the view that - whatever might have motivated their construction - physical laws are purely formal models, of course they have nothing to say about causation, since the issues about causation only become relevant when dealing with interpretations of those models. However, you think that physical laws must be more than merely formal models, then it will depend on the interpretation you feed into the purely formal parts that will determine whether or not there is causal asymmetry involved.

Philosophy of science has moved on since Russell. I suggest you do a little catching up.

Remind me, when was the last time the Schrödinger equation changed?

Irrelevant. The point is that if you tie "laws of physics" to "current laws of physics" you rule out any further development. If you just mean "whatever becomes a law of physics" your original claim is vacuous because who knows what will be subsumed under future laws of physics in that sense.

You think chemicals don't obey the laws of physics?

I think the laws of that cover chemical reactions do not reduce to the laws of physics - if by laws of physics you are specifically talking about the laws covering the so-called four fundamental forces. Certainly nobody has ever reduced them - the claim that they are so reducible is just that, a claim, and a pretty empty one at that. So, by your definition of physical, that would rule out chemical reactions as being physical. Unless, of course, you extend the scope of "physical law" to include laws of chemistry, and then I refer you to my previous post.

why don't you class mathematics and logic as sciences — MetaphysicsNow


Because they aren't.

So tom says that P entails that P?

How do you check for energy conservation?

I imagine it would depend on the circumstances - why, what's your point?

I could make things very metaphysically lean by saying something like this: physical things are just finite states of motion

By tying down the physical to motion, don't we tie it down to the spatiotemporal at the same time? I was under the impression that you were trying to avoid that particular criterion for the reason that spacetime might be emergent.
But perhaps I haven't understood what you mean by motion.

I can see no issue with defining as physical, everything that is subject to the laws of physics. And no, that isn't circular, because we know what the laws of physics are, to very high accuracy.

What are counted as the laws of physics have changed and continue to undergo development, so you are okay that what counts as physical changes? Also, what about other special sciences such as chemistry, biology and so on - are they studies of non-physical things? Or did you mean by "laws of physics" "laws of science", in which case, why don't you class mathematics and logic as sciences and (therefore, by the new definition) their objects as physical?

So far Uber's idea of linking the physical to energy conservation constraints seems the most promising.

Not my definition, but in any case, I'm not sure life contradicts entropy. It doesn't contradict the second law of thermodynamics (at least not obviously) since we are not usually dealing with isolated systems when we are dealing with living creatures and their physiology.

This force has traditionally been called the life force. I prefer call it the entropic force, since it is a force that is generated by entropy.

Links to the research on this supposed fifth force would be useful please. Entropy in physics, as I understand it anyway, isn't a thing itself that can generate anything, it is just a measure of how much thermal energy in a given system is not available for conversion into work.

1) Reason is a natural phenomenon.
2) Reason is a tool that can be used to investigate all natural phenomena.
These two propositions are supposed, by the antinaturalist (of a certain kind) to be contradictory in some way I presume, but certainly their surface logical form shows no such contradiction.
Sorry, babbling on a bit here, but I'm trying to get clear exactly what's at stake with this kind of argument against naturalism.

Let me put it this way: exactly what question is being begged if we use the tools of reason to investigate the possibility that reason is a natural phenomenon?
That reasonis a tool that we can use to investigate that reason is a natural phenomenon, presumably.
Well, of course naturalists are assuming this to be the case, but what is wrong with making that assumption as a working hypothesis? It is not as if the opposite claim: reasonis not a tool we can use to investigate that reason is a natural phenomenon, is obviously true.
You might want to argue that if you do make that hypothesis then if you are right and reason is a natural process, it cannot be used to investigate that it is a natural process. But that seems contentious to say the least - the entailment from one to the other would require an argument wouldn't it?

A Spinozistic argument would be: God = substance, no substance then no existence, therefore no God no existence. That's valid, although it may not be sound and I'm not sure if it is what MdB had in mind.

@Nop Nietzsche and Spinoza had very different conceptions of God. Nietzsche's attacks were (as I understand them) against the Christian notion of a personal god, and that is very definitely not the kind of god Spinoza's monism involves. Nietzsche seemed to have a great deal of respect for Spinoza (Della Rocca's recent book on Spinoza has a section on this).

@Pattern-chaser Incidently, if you are interested regarding this mechanism v rationalism debate, it resurfaces in other threads. The current exchanges between Uber and Wayfarer on the The non physical thread is one example.

To provide a completely objective and indeed physical account of the operations of reason, you would have to treat reason from a point that is outside of it.

I'm probably more sympathetic to your position than I am to Uber's - the psychologism that seems to be implied by it gives me pause for one thing - but this remark of yours bothers me a little. Why do you have to operate outside of reason in order to show that reason is amenable to a naturalistic treatment? There seems to be no obvious contradiction in supposing that we can use the tools of reason to investigate what reason is and how it surfaced. I've not seen an argument to say that the only approach to understanding reason is the Kantian one of attempting to delimit its bounds. You might be inclined to think that naturalists are trying to go (surreptitiously) transcendental with reason, but that would take some serious argument.
I suppose there is an issue about burden of proof here. The anti-naturalist seems to think that it is for the naturalist to show that his/her position is not self-refuting in some way, whilst the naturalist seems to think that it is for the anti-naturalist to show that it is self-refuting. I've not seen an argument to show who really has the burden of proof here.

@BlueBanana

My problem with Frege is his that he account natural languages equalities by reducting them to formal ones, so the problem of saying/showing emerges when we think about concrete examples.

With this, however, I agree.

@BlueBanana

BlueBanana = banana
The banana Belter ate = banana
Therefore I am the banana Belter ate, and therefore I am dead.

Nope,
BlueBanana = a banana
The banana Belter ate = a banana
Therefore I am the banana Belter ate, and therefore I am dead.

Invalid argument. "BlueBanana = banana" is not a statement - ever heard anyone say something like "John is identical to cabbage, therefore John is identical to the cabbage" and thought they were on to something?

What are you talking about?
Bluebanana is a banana.
Belter has eaten a banana.
Therefore Belter has eaten BlueBanana

That's just an invalid argument.

Hesperus = Venus
Venus = Phosphorus
Therefore Hesperus = Phosphorus

Is a valid and sound argument based on the transitivity of identity.