Table Of ContentIN1ELLIGENCE AND REALISM
Also by Roy Nash
CLASSROOMS OBSERVED
SCHOOLING IN RURAL SOCIETIES
TEACHER EXPECTATION AND PUPIL PERFORMANCE
Intelligence and Realism
A Materialist Critique of IQ
Roy Nash
Senior Lecturer, Department of Education
Massey University, New Zealand
Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN 978-1-349-21145-6 ISBN 978-1-349-21143-2 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-21143-2
©Roy Nash 1990
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1990
All rights reserved. For information, write:
Scholarly and Reference Division,
St. Martin's Press, Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue,
New York, N.Y. 10010
First published in the United States of America in 1990
ISBN 978-0-312-04 736-8
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Nash, Roy.
Intelligence and realism : a materialist critique of IQ I Roy
Nash
p. em.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-312-04 736-8
1. Intelligence levels. 2. Intelligence tests. I. Title.
BF43l.N36 1990
153.9-dc20 90-31922
CIP
To Hannah, William and Thomas
Contents
Acknowledgements lX
1 Introduction: Individual and Social Differences 1
2 Fundamental Contradictions in Binet's Theory 7
3 The Pyschometric g Reconsidered 24
4 Processes of Behaviour or Organs of the Mind? 46
5 Logical Positivism and the 'Construct of
Intellligence' 68
6 The New 'Official' Revisionism 86
7 Intelligence and the Heritability Problem 103
8 Rethinking Psychometric Measurement 127
9 The Real Problem of Test Bias 147
References 164
Index 171
Vll
Acknowledgements
The problems discussed in this book have occupied my thoughts for some
years and those I should most like to acknowledge as having had the
greatest influence on my work are known to me only through their
writing. It certainly seems proper to mention Karl Berka, whose work
on the theory of measurement is quoted extensively in Chapter 8. My
more general philosophical debt to Mario Bunge will also be clear
I am particularly grateful to my colleagues in the Massey Education
Department who have taken an interest in this work as it has developed.
Eric Archer, James Chapman, John Codd and Don McAlpine all read and
commented on an earlier draft of Intelligence and Realism. Ivan Snook
helped to untangle several philosophical knots and encouraged my realist
tendencies. James Flynn at the University of Otago has been a penetrating
correspondent and I would like to acknowledge his willingness to read the
final version.
Chapter 2 draws extensively on an article published in Interchange
and I acknowledge the permission of The Ontario Institute for Studies
in Education to include that material in this volume. Some passages in
Chapter 7 are taken from a review published in The British Journal of
Sociology ofE ducation. The extended debate on testing in the New Zealand
Journal of Educational Studies was a stimulating exercise. Keith Ballard
and Mark Olssen, in particular, have left their mark on this work.
RoY NASH
ix
1 Introduction: Individual and
Social Differences
This book is written for students of individual and social differences by a
sociologist. The sociology of education concerns itself with differences in
access to education, where 'access' is understood in the broadest possible
sense, between different social groups. It leaves individual differences to
the psychologist. Something like that, at least, is the theory. It is not, of
course, a good theory. In fact, many sociologists (Jencks et al., 1972)
and psychologists (Scarr, 1981) work on broadly the same problem,
with broadly the same methods. Schiff and Lewontin's (1986) adoption
study, concerned with the sociological issue of group differences, provides
another recent example of work squarely in the research tradition of genetic
psychology. But while this area of theoretical and methodological overlap
does exist, the now dominant tradition in the sociology of education prefers
to bypass these issues which differential psychology places at the centre of
its concerns. These issues have to do with the determinants of educational
performance: in short, how much is due to intelligence and to what extent
is intelligence due to genetic endowment? In view of the crucial impor
tance of these questions it is astonishing that contemporary sociological
research into socially differentiated educational attainment should almost
completely ignore them.
When conventional sociological wisdom maintains that all observed
differences in the intellectual and scholastic performances of social groups
reflect environmental and cultural differences of one sort or another it ad
vances an ideological rather than a scientific position. There are approaches
to sociology which disguise the fact, but sociological theories, even those
formally hostile to methodological individualism, are often founded on a
philosophical anthropology which asserts not only the general species
similarity of individuals but the virtual genetic identity of all individuals.
When Marx and Engels (1975, p. 130) refer to the 'teaching of materialism
on the original goodness and equal intellectual endowment of men, the
omnipotence of experience, habit and education, and the influence of
environment,' then (and notwithstanding different interpretations which
might be placed on later marxian texts) the dependence of environmen
talism on the assumption of a socially equitable individual psychology is
1
2 Intelligence and Realism
clearly apparent. If all individuals come into the world with functionally
equivalent capacities for intellectual development then differences between
social groups of whatever kind must have environmental causes. It is not
difficult to find the most uncompromising assertions of 'natural equality'
from writers concerned with education. Helvetius (1969, p. 3) is an obvi
ous choice:
If it be true that the talents and the virtues of a people determine their
power and their happiness, no question can be more important than
this: are the talents and virtues of each individual, the effect of his
organisation, or of the education he receives?
Helvetius declared himself to be of the latter opinion and argued that the
only disposition people possess at birth is a faculty of comparing and
combining ideas. All operations of mind, he thought, reduce to these
fundamental functions of grasping the relations which obtain between
objects and between those objects and the observer. For Helvetius the
only causes of mental inequality in the understanding is but chance and
the desire for knowledge and instruction.
This is still the common opinion of social theorists. Among contempo
rary sociologists of education Bourdieu (1974, p. 42) may be taken to
represent a similar and influential position:
By awarding allegedly impartial qualifications (which are also largely
accepted as such) for socially conditioned aptitudes which it treats as
unequal 'gifts' it transforms de facto inequalities into de jure ones
and economic and social differences into distinctions of quality, and
legitimises the transmission of the cultural heritage. In doing so it is
performing a confidence trick. Apart from enabling the elite to justify
being what it is, the ideology of giftedness, the cornerstone of the whole
educational and social system, helps to enclose the underprivileged
classes in the roles society has given them by making them see as
natural inability things which are only the result of an inferior social
status, and by persuading them that they owe their social fate ... to
their individual nature and their lack of gifts.
Bourdieu, it seems, believes that average intellectual differences between
social classes are caused by differences in the social distribution of cultural
heritage and that theories of natural (genetic) differences should be re
garded as ideological (false) theories serving only to justify an inegalitarian
social order. Yet is it implied by Bourdieu' s comments that differences
