The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life Read Online Free PDF Page B

stigmatizing the ones who do not do well and creating a self fulfilling prophecy that injures the socioeconomically disadvantaged in general and blacks in particular.
     
INTELLIGENCE REDUX
     
    As far as public discussion is concerned, this collection of beliefs, with some variations, remains the state of wisdom about cognitive abilities and IQ tests. It bears almost no relation to the current state of knowledge among scholars in the field, however, and therein lies a tale. The dialogue about testing has been conducted at two levels during the last two decades—the visible one played out in the press and the subterranean one played out in the technical journals and books.
    The case of Arthur Jensen is illustrative. To the public, he surfaced briefly, published an article that was discredited, and fell back into obscurity. Within the world of psychometrics, however, he continued to be one of the profession’s most prolific scholars, respected for his meticulous research by colleagues of every theoretical stripe. Jensen had not recanted. He continued to build on the same empirical findings that had gotten him into such trouble in the 1960s, but primarily in technical publications, where no one outside the profession had to notice. The same thing was happening throughout psychometrics. In the 1970s, scholars observed that colleagues who tried to say publicly that IQ tests had merit, or that intelligence was substantially inherited, or even that intelligence existed as a definable and measurable human quality, paid too high a price. Their careers, family lives, relationships with colleagues, and even physical safety could be jeopardized by speaking out. Why speak out when there was no compelling reason to do so? Research on cognitive abilities continued to flourish, but only in the sanctuary of the ivory tower.
    In this cloistered environment, the continuing debate about intelligence was conducted much as debates are conducted within any other academic discipline. The public controversy had surfaced some genuine issues, and the competing parties set about trying to resolve them. Controversialhypotheses were put to the test. Sometimes they were confirmed, sometimes rejected. Often they led to new questions, which were then explored. Substantial progress was made. Many of the issues that created such a public furor in the 1970s were resolved, and the study of cognitive abilities went on to explore new areas.
    This is not to say that controversy has ended, only that the controversy within the professional intelligence testing community is much different from that outside it. The issues that seem most salient in articles in the popular press (Isn’t intelligence determined mostly by environment? Aren’t the tests useless because they’re biased?) are not major topics of debate within the profession. On many of the publicly discussed questions, a scholarly consensus has been reached. 34 Rather, the contending parties within the professional community divide along other lines. By the early 1990s, they could be roughly divided into three factions for our purposes: the classicists, the revisionists, and the radicals.
The Classicists: Intelligence as a Structure
     
    The classicists work within the tradition begun by Spearman, seeking to identify the components of intelligence much as physicists seek to identify the structure of the atom. As of the 1990s, the classicists are for practical purposes unanimous in accepting that
g
sits at the center of the structure in a dominating position—not just as an artifact of statistical manipulation but as an expression of a core human mental ability much like the ability Spearman identified at the turn of the century. In their view,
g
is one of the most thoroughly demonstrated entities in the behavioral sciences and one of the most powerful for understanding socially significant human variation.
    The classicists took a long time to reach this level of consensus. The ink on Spearman’s first