If there is a pseudo-intellectual tradition that has survived the 20th century most undeservedly, it is the concept of IQ. Many difficulties and ambiguities plague the subject to the point where its entire legitimacy must be questioned: the test score which many lament or flaunt and pride themselves on,is based on nothing. IQ is a societal fancy, but before there can be an explanation as to why, it would do some good to revisit some of the history of the idea and what it means now.
While not a single figure is responsible for the idea of IQ, many throughout the years have attempted to quantify ‘intelligence’ for one social need or another, to influences great or small. Two such titans, Alfred Binet and Thèodore Simon (1916), had recognized the issue when in 1904, the French Minister of Public Instruction created a special committee concerned with the “benefits of instruction to defective children”(p. 9). No child should be seized from school and placed into a special class without first undergoing an examination to see if it was warranted. The problem was: how exactly would it be determined if a child lacked the intelligence they were supposed to have? Binet and Simon recognized the issue as a scientific and psychological one, and they would take it upon themselves to create a test that would lay the foundations of IQ and the IQ test known today. To their credit, they knew full well the ambiguities of the subject and the errors of their predecessors. Nonetheless, they believed intelligence could be accounted for with caution and an empirical eye. “Quantitative differences…are of no value unless they are measured, even if measured but crudely” (p.24). And as outlined a little bit later:
To what method should we have recourse in making our diagnosis of the intellectual level? No one method exists, but there are a number of different ones which should be used cumulatively, because the question is a very difficult one to solve, and demands rather a collaboration of methods (p. 39).
Notice how while Binet and Simon attempted the implausible, they understood that the complexity of the subject required complex methodology; the road to figuring a precise intelligence level was anything but a straight path. Years later, the wide variety of their proposed experiments and tests would be revised at Stanford to make the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scales. The test itself is always under revision, but the questions are typically word problems meant to test logic, basic arithmetic, and pattern-recognition. The idea behind the scale is that while intelligence, of course, can’t be pinpointed, it can be “estimated”. This troubling idea opens the door to many questions which can’t possibly be answered. Earlier IQ tests, for instance, like those of Alfred Binet and Thèodore Simon, were built around the idea that intelligence was multi-faceted, and to get even the crudest of its measurements required careful layers of planning and tests. The IQ tests of today are a far shot from the prudence of their predecessors, while also embodying the worst aspects of their past. What I mean is that contemporary IQ tests lack the healthy skepticism of their older forms, while also using old scientific language to make them seem legitimate.
There is nothing wrong with using scientific language per se, but it can become misleading. What IQ attempts to do is to quantify something to which there is no agreement on. ‘Intelligence’ is a vague and airy abstract term with a protean meaning. In other words, there are no definite criteria for deciding what intelligence is, and if that’s the case, how can there be a set of tests that claim to give it a rough estimate? How can it be measured? Of course, in everyday use, most people claim they can roughly tell intelligence in a person by the way one carries themselves or by retroactive accomplishments, and often this ‘sense’ is not accompanied by a rigorous test or definition of the term. But this everyday use of ‘intelligence’ is hardly in agreement with every other. As a result, it seems there are an indefinite number of differing meanings to ‘intelligence’. No two ideas may be the same, just as the same man may be regarded as intelligent by one person and unintelligent by another. This striking circumstance does two major things: one is that it shows how varied and hard to pin down the term really is, and the other is to cast doubt on charlatans who believe they can prove what it is definitively, and then quantify it in a person.
Let’s, however, throw a bone to the IQ believers. Let’s assume that indeed, intelligence is quantifiable and can be examined through a series of tests. The problem that remains is that IQ tests would still be lacking in rigor because they are unable to account for other types of intelligence. What about the intelligence of artistic geniuses? The musical genius of Mozart, the artistic intelligence of Francisco Goya? The fluidity of words given life and dynamism by countless poets like Jack Kerouac and Walt Whitman? None of these creative figures are given a chance to perform their creative feats of intellect in a testing environment relegated to a few questions of logic. It does nothing for them, but that does not mean they aren’t geniuses. Would a poor IQ score of a creative genius be reflective of their whole dynamic intelligence? Or ought we be suspicious of tests and charlatans who believe they can find the contours of intelligence while ignoring the creative figures of the humanities? After all, it does not follow that intelligence must be monolithic, so I struggle to see why a test would be able to do what it was intended for without recognizing the many faces of intelligence.
If this entire time we have been dealing with an amorphous concept with no central meaning, then IQ as a quantification becomes meaningless. For one, it is not clear at all that intelligence can be measured, and if it can, then the question remains whether the use of narrow questions focused on a small area of word problems, puzzles, and logic can get there. The questions begin to mount, and what at first seemed like a test grounded in hard science and fact begins to crumble. The reductionism of the tests, the willful ignorance of the creative side of intelligence, simply does not bode too well for IQ’s reliability. There is simply no pigeonholing vast, dynamic human intelligence into numbers, and the very notion of IQ presupposes that it is possible, but as just seen, even if it is, that is not necessarily confirmation that the tests and methods used to find it are accurate. Alfred Binet and Thèodore Simon, despite pioneering the work done in the area, had not wanted the kind of reductionism so rampant and prevalent in modern IQ tests. A difficult task requires complex and careful methodologies. It perhaps requires rigorous planning and years of research. IQ tests of today are anything but, they are often a hodgepodge of questions that follow a rough outline, and then within one to two hours, it is claimed that the IQ of the test taker is found, “roughly”. The methodology is speedy and hasty, not careful and time-consuming for precision.
The problem has persisted, and the more studies centered around IQ, the further humankind retreats into the cave. IQ, as of now, has no promising features, but nonetheless has allowed study after study to be misled. If an empirical examination is only as good as the ground it is founded on, IQ as a platform for estimating intelligence must be called into question. At the moment, there is no reason to suggest that IQ does what we say it does. And if what it is supposed to do is to measure intelligence in a person, despite there being no such measurement besides itself, then it is meaningless and also fails to consider the broad range of intellect.
References
Binet, A., & Simon, T. (1916). The development of intelligence in children ( E. Kite, Trans.). Williams & Wilkins Company, Baltimore. From https://archive.org/details/developmentofint00bineuoft/page/n7/mode/2up
