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What Is Intelligence?
Why we pretend it can’t be meaningfully talked about
Imagine we lived in a world in which we were supposed to believe (i) everyone is the same height, and (ii) it’s impossible to measure height anyway, and (iii) there are many different kinds of height and each is just as good as all the others.
In this curious world, a racehorse jockey would be assumed to have the same height as a professional basketball player and we would be told it’s impossible to say anything about height anyway because there’s no way to measure it. Furthermore, as there are different sorts of height (jockey height, basketball player height, Empire State Building height) everyone has their own special height that is just as good and therefore just the same as everyone else’s height.
In this imaginary world it might be rather problematic to design car, train, and airplane seats. It might be awkward to determine the appropriate dimensions for beds and duvets.
Just imagine the scandal if we attempted to measure a range of people in order to be able to accommodate more adequately their different height-related needs. Imagine the vitriol directed toward anyone evincing the temerity to suggest that some people are shorter than others.
Clearly a wholesale denial of the evident fact that people come in a range of heights would lead to…
