In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
Rich Ulrich <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I liked Gould's book. I know that he offended people by pointing to
> gross evidence of racism and sexism in 'scientific reports.' But he
> has (I think) offended Carroll in a more subtle way. Gould is
> certainly partial to ideas that Carroll is not receptive to; I think
> that is what underlies this critique.
>
> ===snip
I've several problems with Gould's book.
(1) Sure - some of the original applications of intelligence testing
(screening immigrants who were ignorant of the language using tests
which were grossly unfair to them) were unfair, immoral and wrong. But
why impugn the whole area as 'suspect' because of the
politically-dubious activities of some researchers a century ago? It
seems to me to be exceptionally surprising to find that ALL abilities -
musical, aesthetic, abstract-reasoning, spatial, verbal, memory etc.
correlate not just significantly but substantially.
(2) Gould's implication is that since Spearman found one factor
(general ability) whilst Thurstone fornd about 9 identifiable factors,
then factor analysis is a method of dubious use, since it seems to
generate contradictory models. There are several crucial differences
between the work of Spearman and Thurstone that may account for these
differences. For example, (a) Spearman (stupidly) designed tests
containing a broad spectrum of abilities: his 'numerical' test, for
example, comprised various sorts of problems - addition, fractions, etc.
Thurstone used separate tests for each: so Thurstone's factors
essentially corresponded to Spearman's tests. (b) Thurstone's work was
with students where the limited range of abilities would reduce the
magnitude of correlations between tests. (c) More recent work (e.g.,
Gustafsson, 1981; Carroll, 1993) using exploratory factoring and CFA
finds good evidence for a three-stratum model of abilities: 20+
first-order factors, half a dozen second-order factors, or a single
3rd-order factor.
(3) Interestingly, Gardner's recent work has come to almost exactly the
same conclusions from a very different starting point. Gardner
identiied groups of abilities which, according to the literature, tended
to covary - for example, which tend to develop at the same age, all
change following drugs or brain injury, which interfere with each other
in 'dual-task' experiments and so on. His list of abilities derived in
this was is very similar to the factors identified by Gustaffson,
Carroll and others.
I have a feeling that we're going to get on to the issue of whether
factors are merely arbitrary representations of sets of data or whether
some solutions are more are more meaningful than others - the rotational
indeterminacy problem - but I'm off to bed!
Colin Cooper
=================================================================
Instructions for joining and leaving this list and remarks about
the problem of INAPPROPRIATE MESSAGES are available at
http://jse.stat.ncsu.edu/
=================================================================
