It is now generally admitted by psychologists that higher intelligence is little concerned in such elementary processes as those mentioned above. Many of the animals have keen sensory discrimination. Feeble-minded children, unless of very low grade, do not differ very markedly from normal children in sensitivity of the skin, visual acuity, simple reaction time, type of imagery, etc. But in power of comprehension, abstraction, and ability to direct thought, in the nature of the associative processes, in amount of information possessed, and in spontaneity of attention, they differ enormously.
3. Binet would test “general intelligence.”
Finally, Binet’s success was largely due to his abandonment of the older “faculty psychology” which, far from being defunct, had really given direction to most of the earlier work with mental tests. Where others had attempted to measure memory attention, sense discrimination, etc., as separate faculties or functions, Binet undertook to ascertain the general level of intelligence. Others had thought the task easier of accomplishment by measuring each division or aspect of intelligence separately, and summating the results. Binet, too, began in this way, and it was only after years of experimentation by the usual methods that he finally broke away from them and undertook, so to speak, to triangulate the height of his tower without first getting the dimensions of the individual stones which made it up.
The assumption that it is easier to measure a part, or one aspect, of intelligence than all of it, is fallacious in that the parts are not separate parts and cannot be separated by any refinement of experiment. They are interwoven and intertwined. Each ramifies everywhere and appears in all other functions. The analogy of the stones of the tower does not really apply. Memory, for example, cannot be tested separately from attention, or sense-discrimination separately from the associative processes. After many vain attempts to disentangle the various intellective functions, Binet decided to test their combined functional capacity without any pretense of measuring the exact contribution of each to the total product. It is hardly too much to say that intelligence tests have been successful just to the extent to which they have been guided by this aim.
Memory, attention, imagination, etc., are terms of “structural psychology.” Binet’s psychology is dynamic. He conceives intelligence as the sum total of those thought processes which consist in mental adaptation. This adaptation is not explicable in terms of the old mental “faculties.” No one of these can explain a single thought process, for such process always involves the participation of many functions whose separate rôles are impossible to distinguish accurately. Instead of measuring the intensity of various mental states (psycho-physics), it is more enlightening to measure their combined effect on adaptation. Using a biological comparison, Binet says the old “faculties” correspond to the separate tissues of an animal or plant, while his own “scheme of thought” corresponds to the functioning organ itself. For Binet, psychology is the science of behavior.
Binet’s conception of general intelligence.
In devising tests of intelligence it is, of course, necessary to be guided by some assumption, or assumptions, regarding the nature of intelligence. To adopt any other course is to depend for success upon happy chance.
However, it is impossible to arrive at a final definition of intelligence on the basis of a-priori considerations alone. To demand, as critics of the Binet method have sometimes done, that one who would measure intelligence should first present a complete definition of it, is quite unreasonable. As Stern points out, electrical currents were measured long before their nature was well understood. Similar illustrations could be drawn from the processes involved in chemistry physiology, and other sciences. In the case of intelligence it may be truthfully said that no adequate definition can possibly be framed which is not based primarily on the symptoms empirically brought to light by the test method. The best that can be done in advance of such data is to make tentative assumptions as to the probable nature of intelligence, and then to subject these assumptions to tests which will show their correctness or incorrectness. New hypotheses can then be framed for further trial, and thus gradually we shall be led to a conception of intelligence which will be meaningful and in harmony with all the ascertainable facts.
Such was the method of Binet. Only those unacquainted with Binet’s more than fifteen years of labor preceding the publication of his intelligence scale would think of accusing him of making no effort to analyze the mental processes which his tests bring into play. It is true that many of Binet’s earlier assumptions proved untenable, and in this event he was always ready, with exceptional candor and intellectual plasticity, to acknowledge his error and to plan a new line of attack.
Binet’s conception of intelligence emphasizes three characteristics of the thought process: (1) Its tendency to take and maintain a definite direction; (2) the capacity to make adaptations for the purpose of attaining a desired end; and (3) the power of auto-criticism.[11]