> Arthur Jensen? Isn't he Shockley's brother in arms?
Now there's a mature and intellectually respectable response.
And ravi wrote:
>>http://www.debunker.com/texts/jensen.html
> from the above:
>>Underlying all the varied detail of Gould's exposition is a
>>philosophy of science, or rather a sociology of science, which
>>emphasizes the notion that scientific endeavor generally is not so
>>much a search for o objective knowledge as it is a sociopolitical
>>activity, reflecting the social context and value systems within
>>which individual scientists do their work. According to this view,
>>socially conditioned presuppositions or prior prejudices about the
>>nature of society force even "good scientists" to produce theories
>>and conclusions that inevitably confirm their own social prejudices
>>and lend to them additional support in the guise of scientific truth.
>><and more>
>
> isn't gould's book a pretty straightforward critique of certain theories
> and personalities in the history of the intelligence measurement
> community? isn't adventures into the philosophy of science, in
> responses, the real strawman?
Not at all. The above is nothing more but an attempt to describe a significant aspect of Gould's own position, as briefly outlined in the very first pages of "The Mismeasure of Man", once you get past the inevitable literary showing off of the opening paragraphs. The description is overly extreme in that Gould would not say that "social prejudices" *inevitably* are confirmed by the scientific theories produced under their influence, but this kind of error on Jensen's part is understandable and even somewhat excusable since Gould's position is rather slippery and not very carefully expressed.