Re: What Are the Race Deniers Denying?

(frank@clark.net)
14 Nov 1996 02:28:05 GMT

Toby Cockcroft (hegeman@wchat.on.ca) wrote:
: In article <5629u0$2ng@clarknet.clark.net>, frank@clark.net () wrote:
:
: >Ron Kephart (rkephart@osprey.unf.edu) wrote:
: >: Of course, there is also a problem with the whole concept of "IQ" and
: >: the notion that it represents anything more than performance on a test
: >: which happens to be called an "IQ Test."
: >
: >I'm not sure the readers here understand what an IQ test is. An IQ test
: >has a bunch of questions, such as "Apple is to fruit as hamburger is to ?"
: >There are questions of greater and greater difficulty, and the point of
: >the test is to find out where the cut off point of the testee is. He can
: >answer questions up to a certain level of difficulty and not beyond.
:
: Sorry your wrong again Frank.

Now what *are* IQ tests designed to accomplish?

: IQ tests aren't as value free as you would like us, and others, to
: beleive. I would like to refer you to the work done by the eminent
: linguist Labov (1969 "The Logic of Non-standard English" IN 1972
: _Language and Social Context_ edited by Pier Paolo Giglioli) in which he
: refutes the notion that IQ tests have anything

Aren't you exaggerating here, maybe just a little bit.

to do with intelligence.
: Rather, IQ test serve to test cultural knowledge and Anglo forms of
: speech. The questions are phrased in ways that are typically Anglo middle
: class language and reflect cultural knowns that are European in origin.

What would you have IQ tests test for? Europeans have been rather
successful in the last 500 years, and I would certainly think that their
habits of thought have something to do with it.

: IQ questions have to this point assumed to be value neutral but recent
: studies (forgive me if I don't have them on hand right now) have shown
: this to not be the case.

How recently? IQ tests wereenthusiastically supported by liberals,
progressives, or whatever you call them, esp. in England, since they were
far more objective in assessing merit than the lcass-based network that
selected pupils to go futher in theiri educaiton. [Sorry for the typos. My
ISP is sluggish and I am mostly typing blind.] The kicking and screaming
began only when race got dragged into the discussion.

IQ test were originally introduced in societies
: (Europe: namely France and England) with a much higher degree of shared
: culture, these same tests were then transposed on to the American
: population and have prooved to be disasterous, not only have they served
: to maintain states of disadvantage for poorer populations but they have
: served as ammunition for bigots and racists.

WHO benefits from maintaining staes of disadvantage? I have never seen any
real explanation, only assertions. In any case, just how big of a molehill
are we talkig about , regards the bias of the IQ tests? This is really off
topic, and I hpoe you start up another thread. I'm trying to find about
what it is that the race deniers are denying.

: I must stop here and just speak my mind for a moment. I quite
: dissappointed with you Frank for someone who claims to be an intellectual
: you have shown a profound ignorance of both biology/genetics and of
: culture.

I don't recall having made any such claims.

You carry yourself as some sort of authority attempting to
: enlighten the members of alt.anthropology yet these omissions on your part
: lead me to beleive that you have little or no education at all and that
: your arguments are based not in science or knowledge but in 'just so'
: notions of how the world works.

My knowledge or ignorance should be directed toward another thread. I'm
just trying to get an answer to a question. I am sorry I said anything at
all about IQ tests, since it is distracting.

Your understanding of science is poor as
: is you knowledge of culture (ideational material)

I am a materialist, in the sense that all things are composed of matter,
but I am not a reductionist that bulldozes all ontological layers down to
the physical. Societies are *systems* of organisms with emergent
properties.

I'd love to talk about these things: in fact I have written a book,
_The Metaphysics of Liberty_ (Dordrecht, Holland: Kluwer Academic, 1989),
on just this subject, but not on this thread.

I reccomend that you
: begin reading some serious academics and listen a little harder to the
: words that the people of alt.anthropology are saying.

I have done a fair amount of reading in the area of cultural and social
anthropology. The general claim here is that all our concepts are
*socially constructed*. This is true in a trivial sense, namely that those
raised in total isolation will have hardly any concepts at all. It is also
true that our concepts change over time. It is further true that total
objectivity is rarely, if ever, attained. (This goes for cultural and
social anthropologists, too.) But these truths all come in degrees.

I'm a moderate relativist, in other words. Now what haven't I been
listening to?

You have been
: refuted on many an occasion and yet you have learned nothing but like a
: parrot or a scratched record keep repeating the same line over and over
: again.

But I haven't been refuted, unless you mean that someone has
satisfactorilly described what it is that the race deniers are denying and
I have denied their description.

I don't beleive in the hopeless case but you don't seem to be
: improving and that has me worried.

I certainly would like to improve, and I invite you to further enlighten
me. But on another thread, please.

Frank Forman
frank@clark.net
"It is a far, far better thing to be firmly
anchored in nonsense than to put out on the
troubled seas of thought" - John Kenneth Galbraith