Some recent philosophers seem to have lent moral support to these deplorable verdicts by asserting that an individual's intelligence is a fixed quantity, a quantity which cannot be increased. We must protest and react against this brutal pessimism.
Quelques philosophes récents ont paru donner leur appui moral à ces verdicts déplorables en affirmant que l'intelligence d'un individu est une quantité fixe, une quantité qu'on ne peut pas augmenter. Nous devons protester et réagir contre ce pessimisme brutal.
Psychologists
Alfred Binet
Alfred Binet (1857-1911) was a French psychologist who, with Theodore Simon, invented the first practical intelligence test, the Binet-Simon scale of 1905. Trained originally in law and self-taught in physiology, he led the Laboratory of Experimental Psychology at the Sorbonne from 1894 until his death and founded the first scientific psychology journal in France, L'Annee Psychologique. He insisted that intelligence was plural, qualitative, and malleable, and warned explicitly against treating test scores as fixed quantities. Yet after his early death the scale crossed the Atlantic, was renamed the Stanford-Binet, and was absorbed into the American IQ movement and eugenics legislation. The tension between his cautious original purpose and the rigid use it acquired remains the central case study in the ethics of psychometrics.
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Alfred Binet's Other Quotes
You must yourself possess what you wish to give to others; you must be intelligent to make others intelligent.
The scale, strictly speaking, does not permit the measurement of intelligence, because intellectual qualities do not superimpose on one another and consequently cannot be measured as linear surfaces are measured.
The intelligence of these children is capable of being developed; with exercise and, above all, with method, we manage to increase their attention, their memory, their judgment.
To understand, to invent, to direct and to criticise: everything is there.
Related Quotes
Shot by a fool — it can't be helped.
-- Itō Hirobumi
You must yourself possess what you wish to give to others; you must be intelligent to make others intelligent.
-- Alfred Binet
The intelligence of these children is capable of being developed; with exercise and, above all, with method, we manage to increase their attention, their memory, their judgment.
-- Alfred Binet
Truth-force — not passive resistance, but the active pursuit and holding of truth.
-- Mahatma Gandhi