Language, Intelligence, and Thought

Robin Barrow

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138925847
• eBook ISBN: 9781317406488
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Geschichte & Theorie der Philosophie

In this text, first published in 1993, Barrow decisively rejects the traditional assumption that intelligence has no educational significance and contends instead that intelligence is developed by the enlargement of understanding. Arguing that much educational research is driven by a concept of intelligence that has no obvious educational relevance, Dr Barrow suggests that this is partly due to a widespread lack of understanding about the nature and point of philosophical analysis, and partly due to a failure to face up to the value judgements that are necessarily involved in analysing a concept such as intelligence. If intelligence is to be of educational significance, it must be understood in terms that allow it to be educable. Written by a philosopher of education, this study offers a reasoned and extended argument in favour of an original view of philosophical analysis. It focuses on the issue of intelligence from a philosophical perspective. It should be of interest to students of education, philosophy and the philosophy of education alike.

PART I Intelligence

DOI: 10.4324/9781315683546-1

1. The Educated Intelligence

DOI: 10.4324/9781315683546-2

Largely Procedural

Imagine a man who lacks any noteworthy academic credentials, who is more or less ignorant of history (be it of the dawn of civilization, events leading to the Second World War, or his own country), who reads little more than the occasional thriller and newspaper, who is not particularly well informed on current affairs, and who has only a rudimentary understanding of general scientific theory. But suppose also that this man is a very good gardener (he has what some would call green fingers), that he runs a successful landscaping business, that he is religious and has some understanding of church doctrine and affairs, that he is kind and sensitive in his dealings with people, generally adjudged an excellent husband and father, and that he is blessed with the knack of swift and amusing repartee such that many would say he has a quick wit.

Now contrast this man with his brother and two sisters. His elder sister, also somewhat lacking in terms of formal education and quite without interest in the arts, is a highly successful (certainly wealthy) businesswoman. She lacks the light touch and witty response in conversation, but she is very knowledgeable about international politics and current affairs, and can be relied upon to get things done efficiently and well in the day-to-day practical sphere. The younger brother is a successful academic, whose personal life is somewhat erratic and who has no obvious practical skills. He is generally thought to be clever and is not an uninteresting companion, but he lacks the sparkle of his brother and the solid common-sense of his elder sister.

The other sister, like the academic brother, went to university and is well read in literature and history. She started adult life as director of a museum, switched to publishing, and then, in mid-life, started all over again, taking law exams, and became a solicitor. In each stage of her professional life she proved herself extremely capable, but her private life has always been unsatisfactory (even in her own view): she is in fact rather lonely and finds it hard to communicate with other people except in a rather serious, usually professional, manner.

The questions I want to pose are: which, if any, of these individuals should we be inclined to call intelligent? And on what grounds should we make our judgement? Or is the evidence so far provided inadequate to make a judgement, perhaps even altogether the wrong kind of evidence?

Some would say that it is the right kind of evidence, for how else are we to judge people’s intelligence if not by reference to what they do and how they live their lives? Amongst this group, however, there might be differences of opinion as to the relevance of different bits of the evidence. To some the reference to quickness of wit would seem to be quintessential, to some the degree of success in life, whether personal or professional, would be considered more important, while to others the question of a more academic kind of knowledge would be crucial. An entirely different group of judges might argue that all the details given are strictly speaking irrelevant: a person’s intelligence is not necessarily reflected in how they conduct themselves, still less in their success in life. After all, it may be said, it is quite possible to be intelligent but hugely unsuccessful (due to circumstances beyond one’s control), and lacking in confidence, rather sad, and anti-social as a result. Or again, one might be intelligent but lack wisdom, or intelligent but impractical. On this sort of view, one is likely to conclude that estimates of intelligence have to be made by administering some kind of generic test that does not presuppose knowledge of particular subject matter or specific practical abilities. Hence the claim that some people can be shown to have considerable intelligence which they never successfully utilize in terms of their daily lives.

Whatever our particular views on these and similar issues, it is certain that they must be resolved before one could sensibly and meaningfully answer the original question: which, if any, of these individuals could we reasonably call more or less intelligent? You cannot talk about intelligence, make claims as to whether somebody has it, or research into matters relating to it, if you don’t have some clear idea of what it is. In just the same way, you cannot reasonably inquire into whether married people are more happy than unmarried people, substantiate the claim that certain people are happy, or talk about the value of happiness, if you cannot give some account of what it means to say that someone is happy. The point can be generalized: you cannot do or say anything about anything (call it x) unless you can provide some definition of x.¹

So much will be generally admitted. ‘I have just discovered that all well-educated people went to private schools’ will be widely and correctly dismissed, not as a false, but as an absurd claim, a meaningless one, if the speaker turns out to be incapable of explaining what constitutes being well educated. However, this crucial point needs to be qualified and slightly more fully elaborated, if only because it is generally recognized and therefore, in practice, people very seldom make such a crass error. They do have ‘some idea’ of what they mean by ‘well educated’, ‘happy’, or ‘intelligent’. The question therefore becomes, more specifically, what kind of a definition does one need before one can proceed to make judgements about something? How should one proceed to arrive at a definition, and in what terms should it be given? It is clear enough from daily experience and a casual scrutiny of arguments, claims, and research, that, while virtually everybody acknowledges that you need to have some idea of what it is you are making claims about, people have very different ideas as to what counts as ‘some idea’.

It has been argued, quite correctly, that the process of empirical investigation can serve as a means of defining something. The chemist in the laboratory finds out more about a drug through experimentation, and by so doing refines our understanding of the nature of that drug, of what its properties are. The historian, by sustained historical inquiry, modifies and redefines certain historical concepts. The educationalist studying gifted children gradually comes to a more precise understanding of what is involved in being gifted. So much is granted. But three important and major qualifications must be noted.

First, it is in fact very seldom the case that empirical research throws up evidence for some universal characteristic of the object of inquiry, and, even if it does, it does not necessarily follow that this characteristic should be part of the definition. We do not usually come across findings of the type ‘all married people are happy; all unmarried people are unhappy’. Far more usual would be some positive correlation that, in ordinary language, amounts to saying something like ‘most married people are happier than most unmarried people’. But that, if it were true, would obviously not lead to the conclusion that we should define happiness in terms of being married. In saying that most married people are happier, we are acknowledging that some are not: if it is possible to be married and unhappy, then being married cannot be part of the definition of being happy. More to the point, even if it were the case (mirabile dictu) that all married people were always happy and all unmarried people always unhappy, it still would not follow automatically that being married was part of the meaning of being happy. One could decide to make it part of the definition, so that being happy comes to mean something like ‘being in a state of benign equilibrium within the state of marriage’. But we would be much more likely to conclude that happiness is to be defined as ‘being in a state of benign equilibrium’, and that it is an interesting contingent fact that the only way (and an infallible way) of attaining it is through marriage.² The important point is that whichever way we go, it is not dictated by the empirical finding. Thus, whether empirical research into intelligence helps us to define the concept more precisely is not a question that the research itself enables us to answer. The most that can be said is that empirical data relating to a concept may suggest redefinition of the concept to us. But whether or not to act upon this suggestion is something that must be decided by what is commonly called philosophical reflection.

Secondly, the help that empirical inquiry may indirectly provide in the task of conceptualizing something is probably proportional to the degree that the concept in question is of something material as opposed to abstract. A chemical, after all, is a physical substance. We may indeed get a more precise understanding of its constituent properties through observation and experiment in the laboratory, and these properties may well become part of the definition of the substance (though whether they do would still be a matter of reflective decision-making). In the same way, if we were to discover that all cows, as normally defined, have some hitherto undetected organ in their bodies and that no other animal had such an organ, we could decide either to make this a part of the definition of a cow or to record it as an invariable fact about cows, defined in the traditional way. But intelligence being abstract, more complex, and more contentious a concept (akin to happiness rather than a cow in these respects), the case is altogether different. If we were to discover (which is emphatically not the case) that all persons whom we were otherwise disposed to call intelligent invariably had an IQ of 150 or over, we surely wouldn’t thereby be tempted to say that being intelligent means, amongst other things, having such an IQ. It doesn’t mean that: it simply is not the case that what we are trying to say about somebody when we call them intelligent is that they perform to a certain standard on a particular test. In the circumstances depicted, the IQ test would provide us with an infallible indicator of intelligence, but good performance on the test wouldn’t be intelligence, just as a thermometer gives us an infallible reading of the temperature but is not to be confused with the temperature itself.

Thirdly, even though, in the limited ways referred to, empirical research may help us indirectly to refine our conceptions, it remains the case that one cannot begin the research without some idea of what one is researching into: some definition arrived at by reflective philosophical analysis rather than by any kind of empirical inquiry is a necessary precondition of empirical inquiry.

We thus come again to the questions of what kind of an idea will suffice and how, in more precise terms, does one arrive at an idea that is adequate or sufficient for the purposes of further inquiry, including empirical research.

We cannot give a general answer in quantitative terms to the question of how much of an idea is sufficient to count as ‘some idea’. It depends upon factors such as what kind of an idea we are dealing with and what we intend to do with it. But what we can do is indicate the criteria that an appropriate conceptualization ought to meet (in practical terms come as near to as possible), and, equally important, draw attention to some ways of explaining ideas that are quite inappropriate and that need to be avoided, despite their popularity. Prominent amongst the techniques to be avoided are the use of metaphor, analogy, example, behavioural definition, and simple verbal synonyms. Rather, we need to expound a conception by reference to the four criteria of clarity, coherence, completeness, and compatibility with our other ideas and beliefs. (For the obvious reason, I refer to these criteria as the Four Cs of analysis.)³

Let us imagine that our interest is in happiness and that we are trying to articulate some account of what we take ‘happiness’ to mean, or happiness to be, prior to investigating various hypotheses as to what sorts of thing make what sorts of people happy. We can now illustrate in greater detail both the moves to be avoided and those with which we should be concerned.

It will not be adequate to say in response to the question, ‘What do I mean by happiness?’, ‘Well, I mean by happiness the sort of feeling that I have when I fall in love’ or ‘The sort of disposition that my friends Fred and Ginger, whom everybody agrees are happy, have’. This kind of approach will not do because, quite apart from obvious difficulties such as that nobody but you knows how you feel, and that we don’t know whether Fred and Ginger are truly happy, whatever everybody agrees, it is not answering the question at all. To give examples both begs the question of whether they are in fact truly examples and at the same time fails to provide us with any means of determining that, since it says nothing about why they should count as examples. Why is the feeling that I have when I fall in love to be classified as a feeling of happiness? That is the question. Examples can be useful as part of a much larger strategy, but they are only useful in so far as one mines them to extract criteria for determining whether something is to count as an instance of happiness (or whatever the concept may be).

Metaphors and analogies, if they are all we provide and if we do nothing to analyse them, are likewise a way of avoiding the challenge. If I want to know what you mean by happiness, then learning that it is like being high on a drug may not only be unilluminating to me (if, for example, I have never taken drugs), but also fails to tell me precisely what I want to know: granted that it is in some way like being high on a drug, how does it differ? Everybody knows that happiness refers to some kind of euphoric sense, some sense of well-being. What we need to know is something about its distinctive nature, something about what distinguishes it from other similar but different states of mind.

Behavioural definitions are fine in their place. And their place is to be found when we are concerned with matters that are exclusively matters of behaviour. A behavioural definition of politeness, for example, would be entirely in order, since being polite is entirely a matter of behaving in certain ways. It has nothing to do with how you feel or your motives for so behaving. But, in our example, happiness is clearly not exclusively a matter of behaviour. Conceivably one might cry all day, shout at people, rail at the world, and still be happy. There is no set of specific behaviours that is sufficient to establish that a person is happy by definition, and no particular behaviour (I think) that is necessary to what we mean by happiness.⁴ So, in this case, a behavioural definition would be positively misleading.

Simple verbal synonyms merely exchange one perplexing word or set of words for another perplexing word or set of words. If I don’t know what a ‘dog’ is, telling me that it is a ‘chien’ won’t help at all. Of course, for many simple ideas, when our problem is simply lack of familiarity with certain vocabulary, verbal synonyms and other kinds of dictionary definition are entirely satisfactory. I may not be familiar with the word ‘pulchritude’, but I will be entirely satisfied with the explanation that it’s another word for ‘physical beauty’. And while the words ‘induction coil’ are both individually familiar to me, I may need to be told that the phrase refers to ‘a transformer for producing high voltage from low voltage’. But my problem with happiness and intelligence is not of this kind. I know what the words mean at the level of vocabulary: ‘intelligence’ is the same as the Greek ‘nous’ and the French ‘intelligence’; it refers to mental ability, and it might be glossed as the capacity for understanding. That much I know. My problem, and our problem, if we want to research it, is that whatever word or words I use, the idea is still too obscure to allow us to do such things as regularly recognize it.⁵

Operational definitions are, or may be, subversive creatures. The argument often goes: ‘I am a researcher wanting to research into happiness. But since I want to conduct a certain kind of research I must have a definition in terms that lend themselves to my kind of research. I will call it operational to indicate it is a definition designed to suit my operating needs and that I do not lay claim to having captured the essence of happiness. But it will at least be clear what I am researching into’. Well, of course it will. But what a pity you called it ‘happiness’, if in fact it has nothing to do with happiness. And how confused the world will be when your research is summarized as establishing that happy people are generally male, whereas in fact you merely established that males smile a lot.

What is required is philosophical analysis, an approach which, despite its manifest importance as a necessary foundation for all other forms of inquiry, has something of a bad name in certain quarters today. I attribute this to three main factors. First, it is a very general term covering a variety of quite distinct species. (Or, to put it another way, it means different things to different people.) Secondly, some types of analysis deserve a bad name, being, for one reason or another, very implausible ways of approaching the question of what something such as ‘intelligence’ means. Thirdly, as a consequence of the first two points, much actual analysis is of very little practical help.

Two types of analysis that deserve particular mention as species to be avoided are linguistic analysis and essentialist analysis. In fact I doubt whether many, if any, philosophers are guilty of being wedded to either of these heresies in the extreme form that I am concerned with. But, since there is widespread criticism of philosophical analysis on the mistaken grounds that it necessarily involves one or both of these approaches, they need to be mentioned.

The view that merely by analysing the way a word is used we arrive at a proper understanding of a concept is quite untenable. Clearly, the way people use the word may be muddled, confused, and even contradictory. Besides, at best this tells us what a group of language users mean; it tells us what they think about intelligence or whatever. But what they think may be nonsensical. How words are used is obviously something that should be given close consideration, and it will generally reveal data that should be grist to the philosophical mill. But it cannot be more than one technique among others. Other criteria have to be used to decide where and in what respects usage should be our guide.

Of more significance to the overall argument of this book is a repudiation of the so-called essentialist view. This is the view that there is a definitive correct answer to a question of the form ‘what is x?’, or that there is a true conception of, for example, intelligence, in some sense out there waiting to be captured, brought to earth, and dissected by the philosopher. More will be said about this later, but here it should be clearly stated that I am assuming that, while silly, unacceptable, unconvincing, etc., conceptions of abstract ideas such as happiness and intelligence may be offered, the presumption that there is a true or correct conception is to be resisted. It is not so much that the question of truth or falsity does not arise, as that it is irrelevant to this inquiry. Our concern is to come to grips with concepts that we do have, rather than to argue about whether (and therefore in what sense) they are true, real, have existence, and so on.

Our task, starting from the hazy and vague idea of intelligence that we share, since we are brought up in a common culture conveyed by a common language, is to get as full a grasp as we can of that concept, knocking some shape into it along the way. In attempting to explicate the idea, we need to be guided not by any concern for its truth or reality in the abstract, but by a concern that the concept be clear,...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Part I – Intelligence
• Part II – Education