Flynn Effect 10: Shorthand Abstractions (SHAs) and their enemies
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There is no reason to believe IQ gains will go on forever. There may remain few who have not absorbed the scientific worldview to whatever degree they can. The trend toward a higher ratio of adults to children in the home may reverse. Any further drop in the birth rate is likely to be outweighed by more solo-parent homes. There must be some saturation point in our willingness to be challenged by more conceptually demanding leisure activities. The number of professional and managerial jobs may continue to increase, but that may be only enough to compensate for worse childhood environments. Although IQ gains are still robust in America, they have stopped in Scandinavia (Flynn & Weiss, under review; Schneider, 2006). Perhaps their societies are more advanced than ours and their trends will become our trends.
The end of IQ gains over time would not necessarily mean the end of cognitive progress. People have assimilated some of the basic language of science, tend to organize the world using its taxonic categories, and are willing to take the hypothetical seriously. However, those achievements will be of limited value unless people take the next step. Can we capitalize on science to enhance our ability to debate moral and social questions intelligently? No one has written a history assessing whether there has been a rise in critical acumen over the last century or so. There is one pioneering study of which I an aware. Rosenau and Fagan (1997) compare the 1918 debate on women's suffrage with recent debates on women's rights and make an excellent case that the latter shows less contempt for logic and relevance. Note the setting, namely, debate that goes into the Congressional Record. That Congressmen have become less willing to give their colleagues a mindless harangue to read does not necessarily mean that Presidential speeches to a mass audience have improved.
How often they are used I cannot tell. But over the last century and a half, science and philosophy have expanded the language of educated people, particularly those with a university education, by giving them words and phrases that greatly increase their critical acumen. Each of these terms stands for a cluster of interrelated ideas that virtually spell out a method of critical analysis applicable to social and moral issues. I will call them shorthand abstractions (or SHAs) it being understood that they are abstractions with peculiar analytic significance.
I will name ten SHAs followed by the date they entered educated usage (dates all from the Oxford English Dictionary on line), the discipline that invented them, and a case for their virtues. None of them appear in the verbal subtests of the various editions of the WISC or WAIS, that is, Similarities, Information, Comprehension, and Vocabulary. So if we want a test to measure the enhancement of critical acumen over time, we will have to invent a new one.
(1) Market (1776: economics). With Adam Smith, this term altered from the merely concrete (a place where you bought something) to an abstraction (the law of supply and demand). It provokes a deeper analysis of innumerable issues. If the government makes university education free, it will have to budget for more takers. If you pass a minimum wage, employers will replace unskilled worker with machines, which will favor the skilled. If you fix urban rentals below the market price, you will have a shortage of landlords providing rental properties. Just in case you think I have revealed my politics, I think the last a strong argument for state housing.
(2) Percentage (1860: mathematics). It seems incredible that this important SHA made its debut into educated usage less than 150 years ago. Its range is almost infinite. Recently in New Zealand, there was a debate over the introduction of a contraceptive drug that kills some women. It was pointed out that the extra fatalities from the drug amounted to 50 in one million (or 0.005 %) while without it, an extra 1000 women (or 0.100 %) would have fatal abortions or die in childbirth.
(3) Natural selection (1864: biology). This SHA has revolutionized our understanding of the world and our place in it. It has taken the debate about the relative influences of nature and nurture on human behavior out of the realm of speculation and turned it into a science. Whether it can do anything but mischief if transplanted into the social sciences is debatable. It certainly did harm in the 19th century when it was used to develop foolish analogies between biology and society. Rockefeller was acclaimed as the highest form of human being that evolution had produced, a use denounced even by William Graham Sumner, the great "Social Darwinist". I feel it made me more aware that social groups superficially the same were really quite different because of their origins. Black unwed mothers who are forced into that status by the dearth of promising male partners are very different from unwed mothers who choose that status because they genuinely prefer it (Flynn, under review a).
(4) Control group (1875: social science). Recognition that before and after comparisons of how interventions affect people are usually flawed. We introduce an enrichment program in which pre-school children go to a "play center" each day. It is designed to raise the IQ of children at risk of being diagnosed as mentally retarded. Throughout the program we test their IQs to monitor progress. The question arises, what has raised their IQs? The enrichment program, getting out of a dysfunctional home for 6 hours each day, the lunch they had at the play center, the continual exposure to IQ tests. Only a control group selected from the same population and subjected to everything but the enrichment program can suggest an answer.
(5) Random sample (1877: social science). Today, the educated public is much more likely to spot biased sampling than they were a few generations ago. In 1936, the Literary Digest telephone poll showed that Landon was going to beat Roosevelt for President and was widely believed, even though few had telephones except the more affluent.
(6) Naturalistic fallacy (1903: moral philosophy). That one should be wary of arguments from facts to values, for example, an argument that because something is a trend in evolution it provides a worthy goal for human endeavor.
(7) Charisma effect (1922: social science). Recognition that when a technique is applied by a charismatic innovator or disciples fired by zeal, it may be successful for precisely that reason. For example, a new method of teaching mathematics often works until it is used by the mass of teachers for whom it is merely a new thing to try.
(8) Placebo (1938: medicine). The recognition that merely being given something apparently endorsed by authority will often have a salutatory effect for obvious psychological reasons. Without this notion, a rational drugs policy would be overwhelmed by the desperate desire for a cure by those stricken with illness.
(9) Falsifiablility/tautology (1959: philosophy of science). The stipulation that a factual claim is bankrupt (a mere tautology or closed circle of definitions) unless it is testable against evidence. It can be used to explode, for example, a theory of motivation that asserts all human acts are selfish and yet rules out every possible counter-example; or the claim that "real" workers by definition have a revolutionary psychology;or that "real" Christians are always charitable; and so forth.
(10) Tolerance school fallacy (2000: moral philosophy). Somehow my coining this term has not made it into common currency, but no doubt that is merely a matter of time. It underlines the fallacy of concluding that we should respect the good of all because nothing can be shown to be good. This fallacy put a spurious value on ethical skepticism by assuming that it entails tolerance, while the attempt to justify your ideals is labeled suspect as a supposed source of intolerance. It surfaced in William James, was embraced by anthropologists such as Ruth Benedict, and is now propagated by postmodernists who think they have invented it (Flynn, 2000a, C. 9).
Not all critical progress has been due to SHAs. Detaching logic from the concrete has made it a powerful instrument for dealing with the hypothetical and without this, much moral argument could not get off the ground. An apt example arises from arguing against classical racism. To emphasize the role of the hypothetical, the "if"s are in bold. If I gave a white person a pill that darkened his or her skin, would they deserve to be deprived of the vote, etc., etc.? It is those born black that deserve these things. If a white woman took a pill while she was pregnant and her child was born black, would he or she deserve these things? The point, of course, is to force an admission that it is not blackness per se that justifies special treatment but rather, certain traits (permanent immaturity, tainted genes) that are supposedly associated with blackness. When that admission is made, falsifying evidence can be introduced.
There is another set of concepts that superficially resemble SHAs but are actually wolves in SHA's clothing. They may pretend to offer a method of analysis but the method is either mere words or bankrupt in some other way. Often, either by accident or design, they devour SHAs by denigrating them in favor of an ideology of anti-science. I will give a short list to illustrate the point but sadly, it could be much longer.
(1) Contrary to nature. Although this is a special case of the naturalistic fallacy, it deserves mention because of its persistence. By calling something "unnatural", the speaker labels it intrinsically wrong in a way that is supposed to bar investigation of its consequences including beneficial ones. As Russell points out, the New England divines condemned lightning rods as unnatural because they interfere with the method God uses to punish the wicked (bolts of lightning). As Mill points out, nature has no purposes save those we read into it. It does not condemn gays, we do. When Haldane was asked what his study of nature had revealed to him about God's purposes, he replied "an inordinate fondness for beetles".
(2) Intelligent design. This implies a method in the sense that one investigates nature to find signs of order imposed by a rational agent. On one level it is not objectionable. It is a respectable enterprise to update this ancient argument for God's existence by appealing to the theories of modern science (arguing that the conditions for the development of the universe are too delicately balanced to be taken simply as a given). But as an alternative to evolutionary biology, it is entirely counterproductive. Rather than adding to our knowledge of nature, it delights in any present failure of science to explain a phenomenon so it can insert its monotonous refrain, "it was designed that way".
(3) Race or gender science. There is no implication that those who speak of gender science share the viciousness of those who spoke of "Jewish physics", but they are just as muddled. In essence, there is only one method of understanding both the universe and human behavior, one based on theory-formation, prediction, and attempts at falsification by evidence. Not one of its critics has an alternative. The practice of science is flawed in all the ways in which any human endeavor is flawed, that is, the interests and prejudices of scientists color the problems they investigate, how they go about it, the theories they propose, and the evidence they collect. The antidote is better science, not endless and empty assertions that some epistemological issue is at stake.
(4) Realty is a text. This phrase sums up the anti-science of our time. No one is willing to plainly say what it means because its plain meaning is ridiculous: that the world is a blank slate on which we can impose whatever subjective interpretation we like. The evidence against the assertion that all theories are equally explanatory/non-explanatory is refuted every time we turn on a light switch. As for the social sciences, how arbitrary is the choice between two theories of why most prostitutes in Boston were Anglicans (circa 1890)? The ministers who suspected that some subliminal text in their sermons was corrupting young women; or Sumner's observation that most prostitutes were graduates of orphanages and that the orphanages were run by the Anglican Church.
This concept is supposed to foster a method of investigation, but that method comes to no more than classifying the different kinds of texts we impose on the world. At its best, it merely copies the distinctions made by orthodox philosophy of science, which is careful to emphasize that some of these "texts" contain truths attested by evidence (physics) while others do not (aesthetic categories). Usually, it blurs these distinctions and asserts that they are all merely subjective, as if the text of an up-to-date timetable was not more valuable than the text of an out-of-date timetable because it tells the truth about something, namely, when busses actually depart. If all of this sounds absurd, that is not my fault.
Note that the ersatz SHAs are evenly divided between the contributions of obscurantist churches and contemporary academics. The battle over the SHAs is being fought out within the walls of the universities. It is a contest pitting those who attempt to help students understand science and how to use reason to debate moral and social issues against those of whom it may be said that every student who comes within range of their voice is that little bit worse for the experience. There is no case for barring the latter from the university. But much depends on demonstrating the error of their ways.