Everyday Intelligence Research Articles

Beyond the Reach: Horror and Phenomenal Life

ABSTRACT The goals of this paper is to offer a phenomenological analysis of the phenomenon of horror and argue that horror displays an organization of experience that cannot be traced back to the activity of the constituting subject. The main claim is that the essential feature of horror consists of its unintelligibility, which is neither reducible to the psychoanalytical repression nor to the complete breakdown of intelligibility but should be rather conceived as counter-intelligibility: horror occurs when anomalies and irregularities that are normally seen as disrupting the phenomenal field and undermining everyday intelligibility turn into positive principles of a new organization of experience. The confusion and perversion of horror consist of transforming the negativities and counter-forces of the cultural phenomenal field into a positive way of being. Horror is an optimal way of bringing non-optimality and disarray, which is characterized by self-exclusion from the cultural domain of intelligibility.

Causality, Randomness, Intelligibility, and the Epistemology of the Cell

Because the basic unit of biology is the cell, biological knowledge is rooted in the epistemology of the cell, and because life is the salient characteristic of the cell, its epistemology must be centered on its livingness, not its constituent components. The organization and regulation of these components in the pursuit of life constitute the fundamental nature of the cell. Thus, regulation sits at the heart of biological knowledge of the cell and the extraordinary complexity of this regulation conditions the kind of knowledge that can be obtained, in particular, the representation and intelligibility of that knowledge. This paper is essentially split into two parts. The first part discusses the inadequacy of everyday intelligibility and intuition in science and the consequent need for scientific theories to be expressed mathematically without appeal to commonsense categories of understanding, such as causality. Having set the backdrop, the second part addresses biological knowledge. It briefly reviews modern scientific epistemology from a general perspective and then turns to the epistemology of the cell. In analogy with a multi-faceted factory, the cell utilizes a highly parallel distributed control system to maintain its organization and regulate its dynamical operation in the face of both internal and external changes. Hence, scientific knowledge is constituted by the mathematics of stochastic dynamical systems, which model the overall relational structure of the cell and how these structures evolve over time, stochasticity being a consequence of the need to ignore a large number of factors while modeling relatively few in an extremely complex environment.

What Could Be More Intelligible Than Everyday Intelligibility? Reinterpreting Division I of Being and Time in the Light of Division II

Martin Heidegger was the first philosopher to see skillful coping as the basis of our understanding of the world and ourselves. But he acknowledges that such average understanding is banal and conceals more than it reveals. He, therefore, holds that, to ground intelligibility, people must conform to everyday practical norms, but that, by acting in the face of anxiety, a person can resist conformism and refine standard ways of acting. His model is Aristotle’s phronimos (man of practical wisdom) who responds with ethical expertise to the demands of the concrete situation. Further, Heidegger suggests that, when a person is fully authentic, he or she can transform everyday practice. Here, his model is Kierkegaard’s reborn individuals whom Heidegger sees as radical world disclosers capable of changing the issue for their age and so of changing history.

Interpreting Heidegger onDas Man

In their debate over my interpretation of Heidegger's account of das Man in Being and Time, Frederick Olafson and Taylor Carman agree that Heidegger's various characterizations of das Man are inconsistent. Olafson champions an existentialist/ontic account of das Man as a distorted mode of being‐with. Carman defends a Wittgensteinian/ontological account of das Man as Heidegger's name for the social norms that make possible everyday intelligibility. For Olafson, then, das Man is a privative mode of Dasein, while for Carman it makes up an important aspect of Dasein's positive constitution. Neither interpreter takes seriously the other's account, though both acknowledge both readings are possible. How should one choose between these two interpretations? I suggest that we choose the interpretation that identifies the phenomenon the work is examining, gives the most internally consistent account of that phenomenon, and shows the compatibility of this account with the rest of the work.

Imposed-Etic and Emic Measures of Intelligence as Predictors of Early School Performance of Rural Philippine Children

Emic and imposed-etic strategies were applied to the assessment of intelligence in rural Philippine children. Emic (culture-specific) measures assessed children's "intelligence" as conceptualized by rural adults. We concluded that Western-type (imposed-etic) tests measure a concept of intelligence that only partially overlaps emic conceptions. The imposed-etic measures were better than the emic measures as predictors of school performance, which could be viewed as an imposed-etic criterion. Most indigenous (emic) competencies showed no relationship to school performance. Thus what is "intelligent" in everyday barrio functioning ("everyday intelligence') is distinct from "academic intelligence."

People's conceptions of intelligence.

Abstract : Three experiments are reported investigating experts' and laypersons' conceptions of intelligence. In the first experiment, persons studying in a college library, entering a supermarket, and waiting for trains in a railroad station were asked to list behaviors characteristic of either 'intelligence,' 'academic intelligence,' 'everyday intelligence,' or 'unintelligence,' and to rate themselves on each of the three kinds of intelligence. In the second experiment, experts and laypersons (excluding students) were asked to rate various properties of the behaviors listed in Experiment 1; the laypersons also rated themselves on the three kinds of intelligence and took an IQ test. In the third experiment, laypersons received written descriptions of behaviors characterizing fictitious people, and were asked to rate these people's intelligence. We found that people have well-formed prototypes corresponding to the various kinds of intelligence, that these prototypes are quite similar for experts and laypersons, that the prototypes are closely related to certain psychological theories of intelligence, and that the prototypes are used in the evaluation of one's own and others' intelligence. Moreover, proximity of one's behavioral self-characterizations to an ideal prototype is quite strongly related to intelligence as measured by an IQ test. (Author)

Six authors in search of a character: A play about intelligence tests in the year 2000

Six points of view regarding the future of intelligence testing are considered, and a combined, “prototypical” point of view is synthesized that seems to represent a consensus of authors regarding the directions in which intelligence testing and research on intelligence are going. The past history and present status of intelligence testing and research are briefly considered, and then their future is discussed. The future seems to include assessment of various kinds of components of intelligence—performance components, acquisition components, transfer components, and metacomponents. The distinction between academic and everyday intelligence is discussed, as are the cultural and temporal limits of any one notion of intelligence. Finally, the usefulness of the notion of intelligence as a prototype of people's beliefs is considered.