Unraveling Routine Fallacies
by http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=1742
Every so often some neophyte, convinced that intelligence is undefinable, attempts to debunk the validity of IQ tests. The subject is ripe for upstart freelance journalists who believe the concept is a sham.
A case in point is Stephen Murdoch’s http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2375: A Smart History of a Failed Idea. The gist of Murdoch’s book is that IQ tests are unreliable measures of mental ability. He challenges the accuracy of their utility as a tool for educational advancement or employment selection. Publishers Weekly describes Murdoch’s book as “fast-paced storytelling.” If one knew nothing about the subject and relied on Murdoch’s warped tale, the uninformed reader would get the impression that IQ tests were devised to sterilize the inferior, suppress illiterates, stem the flow of nonwhite immigrants, and sort the mentally defective for the Third Reich’s Erwachseneneuthanasie program.Murdoch’s position at best is rather equivocal. He says on the one hand “it is untrue… that the IQ test is a measure of innate intelligence.” Yet three paragraphs down he claims, “The argument here is not that IQ tests are never useful…. IQ tests can predict, with varying and debated degrees, that higher scorers on average will perform better than low ones in certain settings.” If IQ tests cannot measure “innate” intelligence and are unreliable, how can these tests therefore be useful (even on a limited basis) with predictable results (in certain settings)? An unresolved problem for the author is whether or not IQ tests are really useful regardless of their so-called limited applicability.
Murdoch’s thesis rests on common fallacies often attributed to IQ testing and the broader history of psychometrics as a subfield of psychology. For example, using questionable historical inferences, the author makes unreasonable claims about the contemporary state of IQ research based on generalizations from the earliest era of IQ testing. This is comparable to using the standards of a Model-T Ford to evaluate the performance of a Corvette.
The claim that IQ tests were instrumental in restricting immigration and played a major role in the passage of the Immigration Act of 1924 was refuted by Mark Snyderman and Richard Herrnstein in the American Psychologist. In their informative book The IQ Controversy, Mark Snyderman and Stanley Rothman point out, “An examination of the relevant legislative history reveals that the Act would have been passed had the testing data never existed.”
Critiques of IQ testing are nothing new. They have been around since the early 1900s during the pioneering period of intelligence testing. However, the flippant nature of more recent criticism in the post-Bell Curve era reveals the ideological fanaticism behind these egalitarian critics. Murdoch dwells on irrelevant straw-man fallacies and yet skillfully avoids any sustained analysis of valid contemporary findings from recent trends in IQ research.
http://www.fgfbooks.com/Lamb%20-%20Kevin/Lamb080916.html