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The Mathesis of Intelligence
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Home > Archive > Article: The Mathesis of Intelligence |
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The Mathesis of Intelligence
Hans Varghese Mathews |
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The particular claim contested by The mathesis of intelligence concerns the statistical technique called factor analysis : with the aid of which seemingly determinate and measurable factors of intelligence, which are specifiable in a daily or ‘ordinary’ language moreover, may be extracted from the results of inteliigence tests. The claim in question is that factor analysis mirrors how words that name latent features of the world acquire their meanings in ordinary language : and hence that the technique elicits the meaning implicit in everyday uses of the word “intelligence”. The large issue here is the tension between the social and behavioural sciences on the one hand, considered as discursive practices, and on the other the ordinary language from which these sciences must borrow their theoretical terms : which tension is exacerbated in particular ways when numerization both drives and constrains the ‘objective’ articulation of these terms. That the ‘sciences of man’ are not free to invent the words they theorize with, unlike their ‘natural’ cousins, is a deep fact about the social world in which these sciences acquired their institutional contour : they seem to have been shaped, much more so than the natural sciences, by the political circumstances in which industrial modernity emerged and matured.
These large matters are not directly addressed by our essay : but they are touched upon now and again in the text, and ventured around in some of the notes. Considering the nature of the claim being contested the essay is unavoidably technical ; and a detailed exposition of factor analysis follows the first section, which introduces in a general way the proposition about technique and ordinary language set out above. The second section is given over almost entirely to the exposition of the technique : and may irritate those who are indifferent to mathematics. But the latter part of the second section, which comments generally on the utility of factor analysis in the testing of intelligence, should be accessible if one has looked enough at the first part to grasp, even roughly, the technical terms one will now meet. The third and last section of the essay counters the claim in question; and the thrust of the arguments here should be plain, even to those who have hurried themselves through the second section. Some speculation on quantification in the social sciences follows this forensic exercise, and concludes the essay.
Phalanx apologizes for exhibiting the implements of a technical discipline to readers who may be repelled by such arcana ; our only excuse is the larger situation of the essay, and the need, made urgent by that situation, to consider certain things closely. The author is willing to clarify for such readers, as much he can, such technical matters as might interest them here.
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