INTRODUCTION:
Ability, capacity, faculty, talent, skill, competence, aptitude. These nouns denote qualities that enable a person to achieve or accomplish something. Ability is the mental or physical power to do something: “to make a fortune some assistance from fate is essential. Ability alone is insufficient”. Capacity refers to the potential for acquiring that power: “the capability (women) has shown in the realm of high education, their achievements in the business world, their capacity for organization… have been a revelation”. Faculty denotes and inherent Ability: my lawyer has a faculty for detecting hypocrisy. Talent emphasizes inborn ability, especially in the arts: “There is no substitute for talent. Industries and all the virtues are of no avail” Skill stresses Ability acquired or developed through experience: “The intellect, character and skill possessed by any man are the product of certain original tendencies and the training which they have received”. Competence suggests the Ability to do something satisfactorily but not necessarily outstandingly: the violinist played the concerto with unquestioned competence but limited imagination. Aptitude implies inherent capacity for learning, understanding, or performing: “She handled her brushes with a certain ease and freedom which came, not from long and close acquaintance with them, but from a natural aptitude” (Kate Chopin).
MINDS ARE SIMPLY WHAT BRAINS DO
We all believe that we have minds – and that minds, whatever they may be, and are not like other worldly things. What makes us think that thoughts are made of different stuff? Because, it seems thoughts can’t be things; they have no weights or sounds or shapes, and cannot be touched or heard or seen. In order to explain all this, most thinkers of the past believed that feelings, concepts, and ideas must exist in a separate mental world.
We have heard a good deal of discussion about the idea that the brain is the bridge between those worlds. At first this seems appealing but it soon leads to yet worse problems in philosophy. I maintain that all the trouble stems from making a single great mistake. Brains and minds are not different at all; they do not exist in separate worlds; they are simply different points of view—ways of describing the very same things. Once we see how this is so, that famous problem of mind and brain will scarcely seem a problem at all, because … minds are simply what brains do.
MEMORY AND CHANGE
What do brains do? Doing means changing. Whenever we learn or ‘change our minds’, our brains are engaged in changing their states. To comprehend the relationship between mind and brain, we must understand the relationship between what things do and what things are; what something does is simply an aspect of that thing considered over some span of time. When we see a ball roll down a hill, we appreciate that the rolling is neither the ball itself, nor something apart in some other world – but merely an aspect of the ball’s extension in space-time; it is a description of the ball, over time, seen from the viewpoint of physical laws. Why it is so much harder to appreciate that thinking is an aspect of the brain, that also could be described, in principle, in terms of the self-same physical laws? The answer is that minds do not seem physical to us because we know so little of the processes inside brains.
This brings us back to what it means to talk about what something does. Is that different from the thing itself? Again it is a matter of how we describe it. What complicates that problem for common sense psychology is that we feel compelled to think in terms of Selves, and of what those Selves proceed to think about. To make this into a useful technical distinction, we need some basis for dividing the brain into parts that change quickly and parts that change slowly. The trouble is that we don’t yet know enough about the brain to make such distinctions properly. In any case, if we agree that minds are simply what brains do, it makes no further sense to as Embodiments of Minds.
UNCERTAINTY AND STABILITY
What connects the mind to the world? This problem has always caused conflicts between physics, psychology, and religion. In the world of Newton’s mechanical laws, every event was entirely caused by what had happened earlier. There was simply no room for anything else. Yet common sense psychology said that events in the world were affected by minds: people could decide what occurred by using their freedom of will. Most religions concurred in this, although some preferred to believe in schemes involving divine predestination. Most theories in psychology were designed to support deterministic schemes, but those theories were usually too weak to explain enough of what happens in brains. In any case, neither physical nor psychological determinism left a place for the freedom of will.
The situation appeared to change when, early in this century, some physicists began to speculate that the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics left room for the freedom of will. What attracted those physicists to such views? As I see it, they still believed in freedom of will as well as in quantum uncertainty—and these subjects had one thing in common: they both confounded those scientists’ conceptions of casuality. But I see no merit in that idea because probabilistic uncertainty offers no genuine freedom, but merely adds a capricious master to one that is based on lawful rules.
THE NATURE OF MENTAL ABILITIES
In education we are primarily concerned with the adjustment that the child makes to his social and physical environment and this adjustment is essentially the child’s learning. Learning is related to the abilities of the learner and particularly to the learner’s mental abilities. For this reason it is proposed to begin with an examination of the research evidence concerning the nature of mental abilities.
British and American psychologists often differ in the typical analyses of abilities that they favour, the British generally learning towards a view that abilities are essentially unitary or holistic in their nature, the Americans towards a view emphasizing the diversity and atomistic nature of abilities. The writings of Vernon and Burt would represent the present British viewpoint and those of Thurstone, Guilford and Bayley would be representative of an American approach.
GROUP-FACTOR THEORY ON HUMAN ABILITIES
The current British viewpoint concerning mental abilities could be summed up in what is called the hierarchical group-factor theory as expressed by Burt and Vernon. It is an extension and a refinement of the early work of Spearman. In his early writing Spearman postulated a two-factor theory, maintaining that mental abilities could be explained in terms of a broad general factor manifesting itself in all cognitive activities involving neogeneses, designated ‘g’, and numerous specific factors designated ‘s’. The theory of two factors, g and s,s, s..appears to have imprinted itself indelibly upon the minds of educationists, because later, and rather grudgingly, Spearman admitted the necessity for another set of factors which ran through groups of but not all, mental activities and hence could be designated ‘group factor’; but the theory of two factors continued to dominate the thinking of Spearman’s followers.
THE AMERICAN VIEWPOINT REGARDING MENTAL ABILITIES
The traditional British viewpoint has been to regard mental abilities as homogeneous and unitary – dominated by the general factor, plus some small subsidiary pieces, and to favour techniques of factor analysis which support this view. The Americans tend to view mental abilities as numerous and diverse, and in turn to favour techniques of fact analysis which support a more atomistic view of relatively independent mental traits. Historically the work of Thorndike and more recently that of Thurstone and Guilford support such a view point.
THE IMPORTANCE OF GENERAL INTELLIGENCE
The usefulness of the concept of general intelligence essentially rest upon the usefulness of tests of general intelligence in education, and this in turn rests upon the ability of intelligence tests to predict school, and possibly vocational performance. In schools, intelligence tests may be used in grouping children – e.g., into homogenous classes (streaming), in educational and vocational guidance, and in selecting pupils for remedial work. In all these functions their usefulness depends upon their capacity to predict future performance and the nature of the situation often implies prediction over a long time span.
THE VALIDITY OF THE I.Q. AS A PREDICTOR
In summary, it is apparent that the I.Q. is a moderate predictor of academic achievement in the primary school-the usual correlation approximating +0.55. Co-efficient of this order account for approximately 30 per cent of the variability measured in children’s scores. It is apparent that a very large percentage of the variability is attributable to factors other than those measured by the intelligence test.
THE STABILITY OF THE I.Q.
Already it has been established that the I.Q. is only a moderate predictor of school achievement. Also there has been a tendency to regard the I.Q. as innately determined and therefore possessed in some ‘fixed’ amount by every child. The relative importance of nature and nurture in contributing to measure I.Q. will be discussed in another section but it is apparent that the concept of fixed, inborn intelligence implies and I.Q. that is constant or stable, within the errors of measurement.
THE DIFFERENTIATION HYPOTHESIS
It has been postulated-the differentiation hypothesis-the mental abilities become more specialized with maturity, that especially during and after adolescence, special aptitudes represented by the group factors and specific factors in the hierarchical group factor theory of intelligence, become more important in mental functioning and that the general factor becomes correspondingly less important. It is proposed to consider the evidence advanced by Garrett, Burt, Vernon, Williams, Meyors and Bendig, Meyers, Dingman and O’Neil.
IMPLICATIONS FOR EDUCATION
The present state of research evidence concerning mental abilities places considerable emphasis upon individual learning and experience as a component in intelligence behaviour with a corresponding tendency less to regard it as some fixed attribute innately determined. This also requires a modified view of maturation, regarding it less as a simple biological unfolding and more as particular stages in behavior which are partly learned. Again, this means that there is less emphasis in present studies on ‘ages and stages’ type material. Earlier work attempted to formulate a sort of schedule or time-table stating the attributes and achievements of the child at each age level (Gesell and others), but the present trend is to regard such a time-table with more skepticism and the remark “It all depends”. What the child can cope with at any one age level depends very much upon how well he has learned to cope at preceding age levels.
HUMAN ABILITIES IN ACTION
THINKING
The word “thinking” is used to describe a number of rather differing processes. There is austistic thinking, which includes such activities as day dreaming and idle fantasies; there is imaginative thinking; there is the thinking which expresses belief as in “What I think about so-and-so”, and the thinking which is remembering as in, “I can’t think where I saw that man before”. Finally there is the thinking, pondering, which is reasoning, reflecting, problem-solving, and it is in this sense that the word will be used in these pages.
CREATIVE INTELLIGENCE
A brief review of some recent and important studies on creative intelligence is included here as the topic is closely related to that of mental abilities which has been discussed, and to thinking and learning, which follows. Reference will be made to the work of Barlett (1951), Vinacke and Guilford have a good deal to say about the measurement of creative abilities, this review will be concerned more with the nature, educational importance, and promotion of creativeness. Some persons who have studied creativeness have followed an ‘artistic’ approach and others a ‘scientific’ approach. This review will concern itself only with scientific studies of creativeness.
CONCLUSION
In contrast, chemical atoms are actually extremely stable because their electrons are constrained by quantum laws to occupy only certain separate levels of energy and momentum. Consequently, except when the temperature is very high, an atomic system can retain the same state for decillions of years, with no change whatever. Furthermore, combinations of atoms can combine to form configurations, called molecules that are also confined to have definite states. Although those systems can change suddenly and unpredictably, those events may not happen for billions of years during which there is absolutely no change at all. Our stability comes from those quantum fields, by which everything is locked into place, except during moments of clean, sudden change. It is only because of quantum laws that what we call things exist at all, or that we have genes to specify brains in which memories can be maintained – so that we can have our illusions of will.
Ability, capacity, faculty, talent, skill, competence, aptitude. These nouns denote qualities that enable a person to achieve or accomplish something. Ability is the mental or physical power to do something: “to make a fortune some assistance from fate is essential. Ability alone is insufficient”. Capacity refers to the potential for acquiring that power: “the capability (women) has shown in the realm of high education, their achievements in the business world, their capacity for organization… have been a revelation”. Faculty denotes and inherent Ability: my lawyer has a faculty for detecting hypocrisy. Talent emphasizes inborn ability, especially in the arts: “There is no substitute for talent. Industries and all the virtues are of no avail” Skill stresses Ability acquired or developed through experience: “The intellect, character and skill possessed by any man are the product of certain original tendencies and the training which they have received”. Competence suggests the Ability to do something satisfactorily but not necessarily outstandingly: the violinist played the concerto with unquestioned competence but limited imagination. Aptitude implies inherent capacity for learning, understanding, or performing: “She handled her brushes with a certain ease and freedom which came, not from long and close acquaintance with them, but from a natural aptitude” (Kate Chopin).
MINDS ARE SIMPLY WHAT BRAINS DO
We all believe that we have minds – and that minds, whatever they may be, and are not like other worldly things. What makes us think that thoughts are made of different stuff? Because, it seems thoughts can’t be things; they have no weights or sounds or shapes, and cannot be touched or heard or seen. In order to explain all this, most thinkers of the past believed that feelings, concepts, and ideas must exist in a separate mental world.
We have heard a good deal of discussion about the idea that the brain is the bridge between those worlds. At first this seems appealing but it soon leads to yet worse problems in philosophy. I maintain that all the trouble stems from making a single great mistake. Brains and minds are not different at all; they do not exist in separate worlds; they are simply different points of view—ways of describing the very same things. Once we see how this is so, that famous problem of mind and brain will scarcely seem a problem at all, because … minds are simply what brains do.
MEMORY AND CHANGE
What do brains do? Doing means changing. Whenever we learn or ‘change our minds’, our brains are engaged in changing their states. To comprehend the relationship between mind and brain, we must understand the relationship between what things do and what things are; what something does is simply an aspect of that thing considered over some span of time. When we see a ball roll down a hill, we appreciate that the rolling is neither the ball itself, nor something apart in some other world – but merely an aspect of the ball’s extension in space-time; it is a description of the ball, over time, seen from the viewpoint of physical laws. Why it is so much harder to appreciate that thinking is an aspect of the brain, that also could be described, in principle, in terms of the self-same physical laws? The answer is that minds do not seem physical to us because we know so little of the processes inside brains.
This brings us back to what it means to talk about what something does. Is that different from the thing itself? Again it is a matter of how we describe it. What complicates that problem for common sense psychology is that we feel compelled to think in terms of Selves, and of what those Selves proceed to think about. To make this into a useful technical distinction, we need some basis for dividing the brain into parts that change quickly and parts that change slowly. The trouble is that we don’t yet know enough about the brain to make such distinctions properly. In any case, if we agree that minds are simply what brains do, it makes no further sense to as Embodiments of Minds.
UNCERTAINTY AND STABILITY
What connects the mind to the world? This problem has always caused conflicts between physics, psychology, and religion. In the world of Newton’s mechanical laws, every event was entirely caused by what had happened earlier. There was simply no room for anything else. Yet common sense psychology said that events in the world were affected by minds: people could decide what occurred by using their freedom of will. Most religions concurred in this, although some preferred to believe in schemes involving divine predestination. Most theories in psychology were designed to support deterministic schemes, but those theories were usually too weak to explain enough of what happens in brains. In any case, neither physical nor psychological determinism left a place for the freedom of will.
The situation appeared to change when, early in this century, some physicists began to speculate that the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics left room for the freedom of will. What attracted those physicists to such views? As I see it, they still believed in freedom of will as well as in quantum uncertainty—and these subjects had one thing in common: they both confounded those scientists’ conceptions of casuality. But I see no merit in that idea because probabilistic uncertainty offers no genuine freedom, but merely adds a capricious master to one that is based on lawful rules.
THE NATURE OF MENTAL ABILITIES
In education we are primarily concerned with the adjustment that the child makes to his social and physical environment and this adjustment is essentially the child’s learning. Learning is related to the abilities of the learner and particularly to the learner’s mental abilities. For this reason it is proposed to begin with an examination of the research evidence concerning the nature of mental abilities.
British and American psychologists often differ in the typical analyses of abilities that they favour, the British generally learning towards a view that abilities are essentially unitary or holistic in their nature, the Americans towards a view emphasizing the diversity and atomistic nature of abilities. The writings of Vernon and Burt would represent the present British viewpoint and those of Thurstone, Guilford and Bayley would be representative of an American approach.
GROUP-FACTOR THEORY ON HUMAN ABILITIES
The current British viewpoint concerning mental abilities could be summed up in what is called the hierarchical group-factor theory as expressed by Burt and Vernon. It is an extension and a refinement of the early work of Spearman. In his early writing Spearman postulated a two-factor theory, maintaining that mental abilities could be explained in terms of a broad general factor manifesting itself in all cognitive activities involving neogeneses, designated ‘g’, and numerous specific factors designated ‘s’. The theory of two factors, g and s,s, s..appears to have imprinted itself indelibly upon the minds of educationists, because later, and rather grudgingly, Spearman admitted the necessity for another set of factors which ran through groups of but not all, mental activities and hence could be designated ‘group factor’; but the theory of two factors continued to dominate the thinking of Spearman’s followers.
THE AMERICAN VIEWPOINT REGARDING MENTAL ABILITIES
The traditional British viewpoint has been to regard mental abilities as homogeneous and unitary – dominated by the general factor, plus some small subsidiary pieces, and to favour techniques of factor analysis which support this view. The Americans tend to view mental abilities as numerous and diverse, and in turn to favour techniques of fact analysis which support a more atomistic view of relatively independent mental traits. Historically the work of Thorndike and more recently that of Thurstone and Guilford support such a view point.
THE IMPORTANCE OF GENERAL INTELLIGENCE
The usefulness of the concept of general intelligence essentially rest upon the usefulness of tests of general intelligence in education, and this in turn rests upon the ability of intelligence tests to predict school, and possibly vocational performance. In schools, intelligence tests may be used in grouping children – e.g., into homogenous classes (streaming), in educational and vocational guidance, and in selecting pupils for remedial work. In all these functions their usefulness depends upon their capacity to predict future performance and the nature of the situation often implies prediction over a long time span.
THE VALIDITY OF THE I.Q. AS A PREDICTOR
In summary, it is apparent that the I.Q. is a moderate predictor of academic achievement in the primary school-the usual correlation approximating +0.55. Co-efficient of this order account for approximately 30 per cent of the variability measured in children’s scores. It is apparent that a very large percentage of the variability is attributable to factors other than those measured by the intelligence test.
THE STABILITY OF THE I.Q.
Already it has been established that the I.Q. is only a moderate predictor of school achievement. Also there has been a tendency to regard the I.Q. as innately determined and therefore possessed in some ‘fixed’ amount by every child. The relative importance of nature and nurture in contributing to measure I.Q. will be discussed in another section but it is apparent that the concept of fixed, inborn intelligence implies and I.Q. that is constant or stable, within the errors of measurement.
THE DIFFERENTIATION HYPOTHESIS
It has been postulated-the differentiation hypothesis-the mental abilities become more specialized with maturity, that especially during and after adolescence, special aptitudes represented by the group factors and specific factors in the hierarchical group factor theory of intelligence, become more important in mental functioning and that the general factor becomes correspondingly less important. It is proposed to consider the evidence advanced by Garrett, Burt, Vernon, Williams, Meyors and Bendig, Meyers, Dingman and O’Neil.
IMPLICATIONS FOR EDUCATION
The present state of research evidence concerning mental abilities places considerable emphasis upon individual learning and experience as a component in intelligence behaviour with a corresponding tendency less to regard it as some fixed attribute innately determined. This also requires a modified view of maturation, regarding it less as a simple biological unfolding and more as particular stages in behavior which are partly learned. Again, this means that there is less emphasis in present studies on ‘ages and stages’ type material. Earlier work attempted to formulate a sort of schedule or time-table stating the attributes and achievements of the child at each age level (Gesell and others), but the present trend is to regard such a time-table with more skepticism and the remark “It all depends”. What the child can cope with at any one age level depends very much upon how well he has learned to cope at preceding age levels.
HUMAN ABILITIES IN ACTION
THINKING
The word “thinking” is used to describe a number of rather differing processes. There is austistic thinking, which includes such activities as day dreaming and idle fantasies; there is imaginative thinking; there is the thinking which expresses belief as in “What I think about so-and-so”, and the thinking which is remembering as in, “I can’t think where I saw that man before”. Finally there is the thinking, pondering, which is reasoning, reflecting, problem-solving, and it is in this sense that the word will be used in these pages.
CREATIVE INTELLIGENCE
A brief review of some recent and important studies on creative intelligence is included here as the topic is closely related to that of mental abilities which has been discussed, and to thinking and learning, which follows. Reference will be made to the work of Barlett (1951), Vinacke and Guilford have a good deal to say about the measurement of creative abilities, this review will be concerned more with the nature, educational importance, and promotion of creativeness. Some persons who have studied creativeness have followed an ‘artistic’ approach and others a ‘scientific’ approach. This review will concern itself only with scientific studies of creativeness.
CONCLUSION
In contrast, chemical atoms are actually extremely stable because their electrons are constrained by quantum laws to occupy only certain separate levels of energy and momentum. Consequently, except when the temperature is very high, an atomic system can retain the same state for decillions of years, with no change whatever. Furthermore, combinations of atoms can combine to form configurations, called molecules that are also confined to have definite states. Although those systems can change suddenly and unpredictably, those events may not happen for billions of years during which there is absolutely no change at all. Our stability comes from those quantum fields, by which everything is locked into place, except during moments of clean, sudden change. It is only because of quantum laws that what we call things exist at all, or that we have genes to specify brains in which memories can be maintained – so that we can have our illusions of will.
