Newsgroups: bit.listserv.edstat-l
Date:         Tue, 6 Oct 1992 08:17:35 EDT
Reply-To:     Steven R Brown <SBROWN@KENTVM.BITNET>
From:         Steven R Brown <SBROWN@KENTVM.BITNET>
Subject:      FACTOR ANALYSIS

On Tue, 6 Oct 1992 06:29:29 EDT Lee said:
>   With regard to factor analysis, one might also want to read
>Stephen Jay Gould, _The Mismeasure of Man_, W.W. Norton & Co.,
>1981.
>
>   With regard to Sir Cyril Burt, who also, of course, had a
>hand in factor analysis, not to mention multiplying numbers of
>subjects of identical twins reared apart, I believe the first
>reference to this episode can be found in Leon Kamin, _The
>Science and Politics of IQ_, Lawrence Erlbaum, 1974.

Burt's fudging his twins data has little to do with his contribution to
the metaphysics of factors, as found in his _The Factors of the Mind_,
London, 1940.  Burt was among the first to notice the close connection
between factor analysis and the mathematics of quantum mechanics.

As to Gould's somewhat surface treatment of factor analysis, I had
occasion some months ago to post the following to another list:

                      ________________________


THE FOLLOWING WAS ORIGINALLY POSTED TO QUALRS-L (QUALITATIVE RESEARCH
METHODS) BACK IN FEBRUARY 1992, IN RESPONSE TO A QUERY ABOUT STEPHEN JAY
GOULD'S TREATMENT OF CHARLES SPEARMAN IN GOULD'S _THE MISMEASURE OF
MAN_.

I would like to pick up on an exchange that is now two weeks old.  It
began as follows:

On Mon, 10 Feb 1992 10:25:00 PST, MHORNEY@OREGON said:

        I recommend to everyone Stephen Jay Gould's book WONDERFUL
     LIFE. Gould is a paleontologist at Harvard and also writes
     wonderfully on the history of science....  Gould presents a
     scientist making misinterpretations because of his philosophic
     commitments. Gould has followed this same process in other
     books, most notably THE MISMEASURE OF MAN, which is about sci-
     entific racism in the last century and IQ testing in this one.

Then, on Mon, 10 Feb 1992 14:16:49 EST, I replied as follows:

        I look forward to reading _Wonderful Life_....  However, we
     need also be aware of Gould's misinterpretations:  In _The
     Mismeasure of Man_, he badly mangled what Charles Spearman was
     up to, treating him ... as if he were merely trying to create
     IQ tests.  In his _The Nature of "Intelligence" and the Prin-
     ciples of Cognition_ (Macmillan 1923), Spearman placed the
     word intelligence in quotes because he wanted to distinguish
     what he was doing from the IQ people, a subtlety apparently
     wasted on Professor Gould.

Finally, on Mon, 10 Feb 1992 12:01:00 PST, MHORNEY@OREGON asked if I
could "elaborate on how Gould has mangled Spearman?"  My delay in re-
sponding has been due to the fact that I could not find my copy of
Gould's book, which, as is often the case, was finally located on some-
one else's shelf.

Now that I have found it and reread the final chapter -- "The Real Error
of Cyril Burt: Factor Analysis and the Reification of Intelligence,"
which contains lengthy commentary about Charles Spearman -- I am re-
minded of how careless Gould was on these matters.  He implies where he
doesn't say so directly that Charles Spearman was in the same tradition
with Burt and the IQ testers, but Spearman's concerns were far more ab-
stract and theoretical.  As I pointed out in my earlier posting, Spear-
man's _The Nature of "Intelligence" and the Principles of Cognition_
(1923) placed "intelligence" in quotes so as to alert the reader to the
difference between his project and those of others.  Spearman measured
people's performances on a number of tasks, and these performances were
then factor analyzed, and from this welter of scores, he said, "there
emerges the concept of a hypothetical _general_ and purely _quantita-
tive_ factor underlying all cognitive performances of any kind.  Such a
factor as this can scarcely be given the title of 'intelligence' at all"
(p. 5).  Consequently, he employed the letter "g" to represent this
nameless mental energy.

We are reminded that by the mid '20s, when Spearman was writing,
Einstein's theories were well known and crucial discussions were taking
place between him and Niels Bohr concerning the nature of the subatomic
world.  (The back pages of Spearman's 1923 volume contain an advertise-
ment for Carr's _The General Principle of Relativity in Its Philosoph-
ical and Historical Aspect_.)  Physical science was unlocking the power
of the atom, and Spearman was likewise concerned with unlocking the
power of the mind -- the source of creativity and new knowledge.  It is
noteworthy that of all Spearman's books, Gould failed to mention _Crea-
tive Mind_ (1930), and yet it is far more likely that Spearman was moti-
vated by a desire to understand the mind's potential and by scientific
considerations than by anything racial or genetic as a first principle.

One of Spearman's motivations, according to Gould, was "physics envy"
(Gould, 1981, p. 262), and by quoting selectively and out of context
Gould makes a plausible case; even a casual examination of Spearman's
texts, however, shows the situation to be otherwise.  Spearman was crit-
icizing what had come before in the study of the mind -- his later two-
volume history of _Psychology Down the Ages_ (1937) provides thorough
documentation -- and the lines which Gould quotes (from Spearman, 1923,
p. 30) are in reaction to William James's dismal conclusion that psy-
chology was not a science, but simply the expression of a hope for sci-
ence.  What was missing, Spearman thought, were ultimate laws, of the
kind that characterize physics.  He was not, however, seeking to mimic
physics, but to indicate the character of "ultimate laws."  Spearman no
doubt respected physics, but there is little to indicate that he envied
it in the sense that Gould seems to imply.

Indeed, there is evidence to the contrary.  When discussing the idea of
"mental energy," for instance, Spearman (1930) had the following to say:

        An outstanding example is the hypothesis of "energy," which
     was taken over from philosophers and psychologists by physi-
     cists, in order to explain the fact that all different forms
     of physical work display constant equivalences. (p. 105)

So, it was physics which had borrowed from philosophy and psychology,
rather than the other way around!  Spearman was not just the technician
that Gould supposes, but a broadly educated man with a firm grasp of the
sweep of intellectual ideas, and of the location of physics and psychol-
ogy in the intellectual flow.

William Stephenson was Charles Spearman's last graduate assistant, and
he once reminisced that "what I myself learned from Spearman was not the
principles of eduction, of noesis and anoesis, but scientific logic"
(Stephenson, 1977, p. 3).  According to Stephenson, factor analysis for
Spearman had two aspects -- the one metatheoretical, the other operant.
Spearman's noegenetic principles concerned the generation of new mental
content based on already accepted ideas, and this (plus abstraction)
provided the foundation stones for g (the central intellective factor),
which was vaguely conceived as a mental power or energy not susceptible
to change through practice or learning.  Those things which we learn
were subsumed under s: hence, mathematicians will be good at math prob-
lems.  g and s therefore constituted Spearman's two-factor metatheory,
for which he is best remembered -- especially by Stephen Jay Gould.

But there were also measurements to take into account.  Heretofore, the
IQ technicians and mental testers had begun with definitions which they
then sought to operationalize, a process which neophyte social scien-
tists learn even today, three-quarters of a century later.  Spearman,
however, was ahead of the game, and his "Copernican revolution in point
of view" consisted of beginning not with definitions, but with measures:

        We have not--as all others--set out from an ill-defined
     mental entity the "intelligence," and then sought to obtain a
     quantitative value characterising this.  Instead, we have
     started from a perfectly defined quantitative value "g," and
     then have demonstrated what mental entity or entities this re-
     ally characterises. (Spearman, 1927, p. 411)

It is ironic that the above statement was published in the same year
(1927) and by the very same publisher (Macmillan) as that great treatise
on operationism, P.W. Bridgman's _The Logic of Modern Physics_, in which
the principle was asserted that "the proper definition of a concept
[e.g., intelligence] is not in terms of its properties [definitions] but
in terms of actual operations [measurements]" (p. 6) -- or, alterna-
tively, that "the true meaning of a term [intelligence] is to be found
by observing what a man does with it [measurement], not by what he says
about it [definition]" (p. 7).  From the standpoint of measurement,
therefore, Spearman introduced the functional equivalent of operantcy a
decade ahead of Skinner.

But, as Stephenson (1977) has said, what has been remembered of Spear-
man's factor analysis is only its metatheoretical side:

        Factor analysis was developed as a deductive system for
     this [i.e., Spearman's] psychological theory.  For decades,
     and in so far as it is still in textbooks, the metatheory has
     been remembered and the principles it was meant to model have
     been forgotten.  There was discussion _ad nauseam_ on such
     matters as "abilities," "powers," "factors in the mind," "fun-
     damental functions of the mind," "inborn potentialities,"
     "reification" and "deification" of factors, "faculties,"
     "causes," "primary factors," "true psychological entities"
     [which reads like Gould's checklist] and the like, and none at
     all about noesis" (p. 4).

Spearman was fully aware of the tentativeness of his theory: "...science
is never final.  All the preceding conclusions ... will probably in the
course of time suffer at least modification" (1927, p. 415).  He there-
fore emerges more real and multidimensional than the caricature which
Stephen Jay Gould portrays, and it was for this reason that I initially
posted the view that Gould had "badly mangled" what Spearman was up to.
There were other carelessnesses, but the above seems the most serious.

According to the original post by MHORNEY@OREGON, Gould's new book, like
_The Mismeasure of Man_, shows how scientists misinterpret because of
their philosophic commitments.  What of Gould's?  How do we account for
his having missed the mark?  I can only offer a tentative hypothesis,
which I precede with the recollection of a recent paper which I heard
read in which it was contended (by a literary deconstructionist from an
American university) that the British class system merely covered even
deeper racial sentiments.  Perhaps.  But I'm more inclined to the view
that the literary critic as well as Gould (as well as white Americans,
as well as all other Americans) are highly sensitized to race, and that
we tend to see it everywhere -- especially when it's not overtly ex-
pressed.  After all, we were distracted by civil unrest and eventually a
civil war in which race was a central issue, and were therefore not pay-
ing close attention when Marx and others were sensitizing the rest of
the Western world to class distinctions, and so it may be more difficult
for us to imagine that class considerations might take precedence over
racial ones.  It is therefore possibly the strength of _our_ racial
sensitivities (not racist sentiments) that leads us to see racism in the
activities of others.  This is even more likely if our reading of oth-
ers' works is superficial.

References
__________

Bridgman, P.W. (1927).  The logic of modern physics.  New York:
  Macmillan.
Gould, S.J. (1981).  The mismeasure of man.  New York: Norton.
Spearman, C. (1923).  The nature of "intelligence" and the principles of
  cognition.  London: Macmillan.
Spearman, C. (1927).  The abilities of man: Their nature and measure-
  ment.  New York: Macmillan.
Spearman, C. (1930).  Creative mind.  Cambridge: Cambridge University
  Press.
Spearman, C. (1937).  Psychology down the ages (2 vols.).  London:
  Macmillan
Stephenson, W. (1977).  Factors as operant subjectivity.  Operant
  Subjectivity, 1, 3-16.