bob@onyx.UUCP (Bob Toxen) (12/13/83)
I'm surprised that there have been no references to culture in all of these "what is intelligence?" debates... The simple fact of the matter is, that "intelligence" means very little outside of any specific cultural reference point. I am not referring just to culturally-biased vs. non-culturally-biased IQ tests, although that's a starting point. Consider someone raised from infancy in the jungle (by monkeys, for the sake of the argument). What signs of intelligence will this person show? Don't expect them to invent fire or stone axes; look how long it took us the first time around. The most intelligent thing that person could do would be on par with what we see chimpanzees doing in the wild today (e.g. using sticks to get ants, etc). What I'm driving at is that there are two kinds of "intelli- gence"; there is "common sense and ingenuity" (monkeys, dolphins, and a few people), and there is "cultural methodology" (people only). Cultural methodologies include all of those things that are passed on to us as a "world-view", for instance the notion of wearing clothes, making fire, using arithmetic to figure out how many people X bags of grain will feed, what spices to use when cooking, how to talk (!), all of these things were at one time a brilliant conception in someones' mind. And it didn't catch on the first time around. Probably not the second or third time either. But eventually someone convinced other people to try his idea, and it became part of that culture. And using that as a context gives other people an opportunity to bootstrap even further. One small step for a man, a giant leap for his culture. When we think about intelligence and get impressed by how wonder- ful it is, we are looking at its application in a world stuffed to the gills with prior context that is indispensible to every- thing we think about. What this leaves us with is people trying to define and measure a hybrid of common sense and culture without noticing that what they are interested in is actually two different things, plus the inter-relations between those things, so no wonder the issue seems so murky. For those who may be interested, general systems theory, general semantics, and epistemology are some fascinating related sub- jects. Now let's see some letters about what "common sense" is in this context, and about applying that common sense to (cultural) con- texts. (How recursive!)