Re: Arizona is the Dumbist state in the US

From: Dirk Van de moortel (dirkvandemoortel_at_ThankS-NO-SperM.hotmail.com)
Date: 07/25/04 

Date: Sun, 25 Jul 2004 12:19:39 GMT

"Alfred Einstead" <whopkins@csd.uwm.edu> wrote in message news:e58d56ae.0407240952.1cdf6fce@posting.google.com...
> "Dirk Van de moortel" <dirkvandemoortel@ThankS-NO-SperM.hotmail.com> wrote:
> > Did [sic] they teach you about correlation and about statistics?
> > Did [sic] they explain to you how you can use statistical data to
> > define concepts like intelligence?
>
> There is no such thing as a definition of intelligence and there
> never will be. The definition of intelligence and, for that
> matter, the EXISTENCE of any such cohesive concept as "intelligence",
> is all the major open issue of Cognitive Psychology and Artificial
> Intelligence.
>
> Correlations and statistics are irrelevant. There's nothing to
> correlate anything to, since there's nothing that's it's been
> defined to be correlated to. In order to validate something,
> there has to already be something to validate it AGAINST. There
> is nothing to validate any test of intelligence against since
> nobody has a definition of intelligence.

As I replied to Andrew, if you take psychology at a high enough
level, you will see that there are even more definitions of
intelligence than there are authors who write about the subject.
So, we seem to be in agreement there.
What is usually done, is that one uses statistics to define (and
consequently measure) something (like IQ), and use that when
talking about "intelligence", implicitly or explicitly assuming that
there is a correlation between the well defined and measurable
IQ and the ill-defined or non-definable intelligence. Whether that
is justified, I'll leave to be discussed by those who (think they)
are specialists in the subject.

Dirk Vdm

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