Eye on Society

NEW BOOK

Uses and Abuses of Intelligence:
Studies Advancing Spearman and Raven’s Quest for Non-Arbitrary Metrics
Edited by John and Jean Raven

To order a copy from the publisher or view a synopsis of the book with chapter details click here.

Background and Objectives

Some years ago, a sister website - Web Psych Empiricist - was set up to facilitate dissemination of the results of psychometrically oriented research and proved remarkably successful.

Nevertheless it continued to be difficult to publish studies which shed light on the operation of society as a whole and what could be done to improve its functioning.

There were two main reasons for this. First, there were even less appropriate journals in this field than in the psychometric area. Second, the conventional criteria of academic merit were even more stultifying.

This second problem had even been underlined by Rothschild when reviewing the arguments for and against maintaining the Social Science Research Council in Great Britain and the way in which projects should be funded. While underlining the great need for studies which would engage with the wider problems of society, he noted that most of the research that got done was too small scale, too literature-driven instead of problem driven, too narrow in its conceptualisation, and much more concerned to be accurate about trivia than to engage with important, multiply determined, issues. This process was aided and abetted by journal editors and reviewers who could always find reasons for not publishing research which was adventurous, engaged with new issues, and came to conclusions which emerged from the data rather than being strictly proved within it.

The result is that it remains extremely difficult to get appropriate research conducted in the first place, and even more difficult to get the results published.

Our thought was, then, to set up an electronic journal that would carry such papers (with minimal prior review) and thereafter promote their discussion.

But then a more specific, and more urgent, objective emerged. Many previous papers in the area had been published in obscure journals. I had therefore adopted the practice of taking photocopies of a limited number of these papers to conferences and distributing them to participants. How much better it would be if copies of a wider range of these papers could be available on the Web so that seminar participants and others could download those they wanted. Plus it should surely be feasible to make it possible for readers to comment on those papers and post their own.

Unfortunately, we were overtaken by events. In general, our experience has been that it is very difficult to generate interest in the wider societal issues the discussion of which it is the main objective of this website to promote if one does not begin by reviewing more widely discussed topics. Accordingly, discussion of the topics we would like to be most concerned about here usually comes in the last session of a standard "Four Part Seminar" which begins a long way away. Having set up this website to disseminate publications ... and encourage comments and further articles ... relating to the fourth part of this seminar, it seemed only too obvious that papers relating to Parts I to III (previously disseminated by circulating photocopies at conferences) should also be included in the site. Unfortunately, in a manner perhaps symptomatic of the wider problem, setting up the site to do this, coupled with the unanticipated problems involved in setting up the interactive - Forum - component of the site almost completely diverted attention from the original objective for several years.

In the end, we seem almost to have two sites: A, rather comprehensive, "static", non-interactive, site (in which the materials are, on the whole arranged according to the order of presentation in the Standard Four Part Seminar), and an "interactive" site - or Forum - in which the order in which the first materials presented are, by and large, those that are most problematic and important.

It is greatly hoped that readers will raise topics for discussion within these articles and post related articles of their own.

The structure of the static site is as follows. It opens with a list of relevant forthcoming Events. This is followed by an outline of the Standard Four Part Seminar and the Resources (including downloadable handouts and publications) available to support it. The site concludes with an extremely valuable table which lists all publications mentioned on the site but in which published and unpublished articles relating to our original objectives are given special attention. In each case the table shows where each article can be found and, in most cases, includes a clickable link taking the reader to a PDF of the article or book in question. Should you, as we hope, wish to comment on these articles, please go to the "interactive" component of the site by clicking on the "Forum" button, registering as a participant, and inserting comments following the procedures with which so many people have become familiar as a result of the development of the "Wikipedia".

Please note that that this site does not set out to provide a narrative account of Dr. Raven’s areas of work and the conclusions which emerge from it. Such an account, together with a list of most of Dr. Raven’s publications, will be found at our sister site www.johnraven.co.uk