I see a lot of statements here that are presented as fact that I don't believe are substantiated (and in fact are contrary to my experience)

Agreed. For the benefit of readers of HN, I'll try to touch base with some of my main factual disagreements with Ferguson. His text appears below in quotation marks (except that some quotations from other authors in my replies also appear in quotation marks) and my replies follow each block of quoted text.

"A number of scholars, including L.L. Thurstone and more recently Robert J. Sternberg, have argued that intelligence has been defined too narrowly."

Thurstone is deceased, but Sternberg is alive and well and still doing research. And his books are very worthwhile for thought-provoking challenges to mainstream g theory. (I should point out that I don't think I agree with most of Sternberg's proposed alternative theory, but I appreciate his books

http://learninfreedom.org/iqbooks.html

for their collections of articles by different authors.)

"Gardner, a professor of cognition and education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, who won a prestigious MacArthur Foundation "genius award" in 1981, has had enormous influence, particularly in our schools.

"Briefly, he has posited that our intellectual abilities are divided among at least eight abilities: verbal-linguistic, logical-mathematical, visual-spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, naturalistic, musical, interpersonal, and intrapersonal."

Everyone, including Gardner, agrees that much of the controversy surrounding this proposal came from labeling these abilities "intelligences" rather than "talents" when his book was first published in the 1980s. There is no doubt whatever among any serious neuropsychologist or cognitive scientist that human mental abilities are expressed in part as modules, but the dispute of the submitted article is whether the modules can be connnected by an over-arching general ability, summed up as g.

"More important, especially for education, it implicitly (although perhaps unintentionally on Gardner's part) promises that each child has strengths as well as weaknesses. With eight separate intelligences, the odds seem good that every child will be intelligent in one of those realms."

Gardner, indeed, never makes such a promise, and Gardner is surprising NOT in the camp of persons who personally believe in high malleability of human abilities. Rather, Gardner thinks learners have a rather fixed endowment of ability set primarily by genes, but influenced by opportunities for developing in one domain or another. Some of what is said about Gardner's framework in schools doesn't closely match what Gardner claims in his own writings.

"The movements that took flower in the mid-20th century have argued for the essential sameness of all healthy human beings and for a policy of social justice that treats all people the same."

My actual observation of the real-world behavior of schoolteachers is that they are second to none in making excuses for poor educational results on the basis of inherent limitations in learners. It may indeed be politically correct among educational administrators to claim that all children can learn, but most teachers believe--and in unguarded moments say--that many learners in their care cannot achieve more than they already do.

"the idea that redefining the way we treat children will redefine their abilities and future successes."

Surely how children are treated by others matters for something. It may be, as Judith Rich Harris has suggested through her research, that peers are more influential on children than parents are, but I've not recently heard anyone advocate a policy of deliberate neglect of children.

"(Perhaps that's what leads some parents to put their faith in "Baby Einstein" videos: the hope that a little nurturing television will send their kids to Harvard.)"

Some parents surely believe something along these lines, because the baby videos sell fairly well. There were better baby books (and phonograph records?) long before Gardner first published, so I doubt he had much to do with this. And, again, Gardner himself does not have this view of child development.

"It would be difficult to overestimate the influence of Gardner's work, both in repudiating that elitist, unfair concept of "g" and in guiding thought in psychology as it applies to education."

And it would be difficult to overestimate how much Gardner's personal views are misrepresented by some people who claim his backing. A really good book for understanding Gardner as of the year 1993 is

Bock, Gregory & Ackrill, Kate (Eds.) (1993). The Origins and Development of High Ability. (Ciba Foundation Symposium 178). New York: Wiley.

The The Origins and Development of High Ability is a symposium volume collecting commissioned articles. Each article is followed by fascinating verbatim discussion transcripts in which the authors draw out the implications of one another's ideas. Gardner argues strenuously for a much limited view of malleability there than I thought he personally held.

"The only problem, with all respect to Gardner: There probably is just a single intelligence or capacity to learn, not multiple ones devoted to independent tasks."

The evidence that Gardner appealed to in his first book, such as brain-injured patients with selective deficits in learning, is a familiar line of evidence for cognitive modularity. A good recent discussion of cognitive modularity can be found in What Intelligence Tests Miss,

http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=97803001238...

a book I've cited to HN before by a psychologist well familiar with the mainstream psychometric tradition and its limitations.

"To varying degrees, some individuals have this capacity, and others do not."

Is the statement here that some people have NO capacity to learn?

"To be sure, there is much debate about Gardner's theory in the literature, with contenders for and against. Nonetheless, empirical evidence has not been robust. While the theory sounds nice (perhaps because it sounds nice), it is more intuitive than empirical. In other words, the eight intelligences are based more on philosophy than on data."

I can agree with this statement that Gardner's grouping of "intelligences" has not been firmly established (just as I agree that Sternberg's triarchic theory of mind is not firmly established either) without being forced to think that g theory is the most accurate description of human cognitive abilities.

"By contrast, a wealth of evidence supports the existence of 'g,' which, contrary to the claims (or wishes) of some people, remains a strong predictor of academic performance, job performance--particularly in highly technical careers or those requiring decision making--and other markers of 'success.'"

High IQ scores (what Ferguson is really talking about when he mentions g) are fairly strongly correlated with success in school. Success in school, in turn, is reasonably strongly correlate with success at entry into certain occupations, and those occupations in turn are somewhat correlated with high income and other marks of "success." But the direction of causation is not completely clear, because many highly able young people of low family income are unable to pursue higher education,

http://www.tcf.org/Publications/Education/carnrose.pdf

http://www.jkcf.org/assets/files/0000/0084/Achievement_Trap....

http://www.reason.com/news/show/123910.html

and a sociologist who examined the data from the Terman longitudinal study suggested that the Terman study subjects were underachievers compared to their advantageous socioeconomic status (Ceci 1996, citing Sorokin (1956).

"Another issue with the theory of multiple intelligences is that too many of the categories correlate too highly with one another to be separate intelligences. Cognitive performance on skills related to verbal-linguistic, logical-mathematical, and visual-spatial tasks, as well as many memory tasks, tends to be highly related. In other words, it goes back to 'g.'"

But many skills related to actual item-content performance on IQ tests are poorly correlated one with another, especially at high levels of IQ. Terman discovered this as he developed a new edition of his Stanford-Binet IQ test: "However, when our correlation arrays [between Form L and Form M] were plotted for separate age groups they were all discovered to be distinctly fan-shaped. Figure 3 is typical of the arrays at every age level.

"From Figure 3 it becomes clear that the probable error of an I.Q. score is not a constant amount, but a variable which increases as I.Q. increases. It has frequently been noted in the literature that gifted subjects show greater I.Q. fluctuation than do clinical cases with low I.Q.'s . . . . we now see that this trend is inherent in the I.Q. technique itself, and might have been predicted on logical grounds. (Terman & Merrill, 1937, p. 44)"

"The remaining intelligences have nothing to do with intelligence or cognitive skills per se, but rather represent personal interests (for example, musical represents an affinity for music;"

This will sound totally bogus to anyone well acquainted with skilled musicians, as I am as the husband of a piano teacher.

"Only bodily-kinesthetic--the ability to manipulate one's own body with dexterity--may truly represent a separate cognitive ability, probably stemming from cerebellar activity involved in fine motor control."

There do seem to be good grounds for claiming that "athletic ability" or "coordination" or whatever you call it is orthogonal to the skills tapped by IQ tests, but it is plainly brain-based, and has as much claim to be called a cognitive ability as any of the skills underlying the tasks required in a typical IQ test.

"Finally, as Waterhouse noted in her exchange with Gardner, the theory of multiple intelligences has little value for clinical testing of intelligence or the prediction of future performance. 'G' alone is highly predictive of both academic and work success."

Here is where we especially see that Ferguson sets up Gardner as a straw man, rather than grappling with current authors who expand the theory such as Stanovich. There is much evidence

http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=97803001238...

that high-IQ individuals can make spectacular, harmful cognitive errors, because IQ tests don't tap important human cognitive abilities that Stanovich sums up as "rationality."

"Despite some naysayers (think of Richard E. Nisbett's Intelligence and How to Get It: Why Schools and Cultures Count, published this year by Norton),"

Notice the total absence of response to Nisbett's recent book. I'm reading it, and I appreciate Nisbett's reexamination of primary research studies that have been debated in the IQ literature for years.

"evidence from behavioral-genetics studies has long shown that environment plays a much smaller role than inheritance in the development of intelligence."

This is just a flat-wrong statement. The consensus of geneticists is that no more than half the determination of intelligence is set by genes, and that's without systematic efforts to vary environmental influences in directed ways. There are still environmental interventions with huge impact that have rarely been tried.

I'll stop here in the interest of time for my personal life. I agree with some of what Ferguson says below the quoted statements, and disagree with some more.

PARTIAL REFERENCES

Bock, Gregory & Ackrill, Kate (Eds.) (1993). The Origins and Development of High Ability. (Ciba Foundation Symposium 178). New York: Wiley.

Ceci, Stephen J. (1996). On Intelligence: A Bioecological Treatise on Intellectual Development Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Terman, Lewis & Merrill, Maude (1937). Measuring Intelligence: A Guide to the Administration of the New Revised Stanford-Binet Tests of Intelligence. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.