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congratulations mike lieber
Daniel A. Foss (U17043@UICVM.BITNET)
Mon, 7 Nov 1994 20:03:13 CST
among Ashkenazi Jews betokened any genetic difference. It thus requires one
small logical step to deny that IQ test scores, tout court, correspond to any
genetic difference. One tiny step more, and we proceed to deny that, apart from
a tiny number of geniuses, and a somewhat larger number of the Retarded, there
is any essential difference among us at all in terms of Smartness-Stupidity.
Smartness-Stupidity is socially constructed, made up, just as race is.
Strategic control of the definition of the cognitive is highly political.
It is *the* most political Thingie in any hierarchical society, second only
to control of the means of violence, which it presupposes. The former control
has the effect of reproducing the division of society into those who do the
work and those who do the civilization.
The essentiality of cognitive correlates of race is, by convention among
you, loathesome. The essentiality of Smartness-Stupidity, on the other hand,
is taken-for-granted, part of the Natural Order Of The Universe. I note, in
passing, that only people who assumed the latter a priori could have supposed
that as "levity," comic relief, your, plural, iterative citations of under-
graduate Stupidities were *totally unrelated* to the IQ debate. (No more
outlandish than your, plural, own conjectures, and you, plural, know it.)
No evaluation of the cognitive does any more, statistically speaking, than
record the effects of the society wherein the cognitive is defined in shaping
the people required to live in that society. In the absence of the observed
society, people would be shaped otherwise by some other society which cannot
be observed because the observed society is the society which is observed.
Daniel A. Foss
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