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Show Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume II: A Kantian Conception 313 order concepts to accommodate them, on pain of violating the requirement of vertical consistency, and so of revealing the conceptual inadequacy of the theory. The dilemma for one who is personally and dogmatically invested in such a theory is that she must accommodate the anomaly without seeming to revise the higher-order concepts of her favored theory; this dilemma is what separates the dogmatist from the true skeptic. It is for the dogmatist that rationalization is of greatest use: It is the process by which one stretches, distorts, or truncates the customary scope of instantiation of the higher-order concepts of one's theory, in order to accommodate the recalcitrant phenomenon within the theory's scope of rational intelligibility. Consider, for example, Jensen's and Murray's theories of the putatively inferior intelligence of African Americans. Now that we know the very concept of race itself to be without foundation in genetics, merely a pseudorational fiction developed in order to rationalize seventeenth-century slavery in the Americas, Jensen's and Murray's theories look even dimmer. Based on the relatively low mean scores of African Americans on standardized intelligence tests, they both dismiss the overwhelming evidence of environmental influence in favor of the now fully discredited notion of genetically inherited racial characteristics. However, it is generally agreed that such tests incorporate a cultural bias along many dimensions that limit their diagnostic use to the assessment of competence at performing only certain very specific and rather circumscribed tasks, namely those required by the tests themselves. The resulting clinical concept of "intelligence" is used only with scare quotes by most legitimate diagnosticians. In order to derive from performance on such tests the conclusion that African Americans are of inferior intelligence in the broader, socially honorific sense, one must redraw that honorific concept of intelligence very narrowly. Jensen's and Murray's concept of intelligence must exclude, for example, the ability to not only survive but in many instances flourish in a lethally hostile social environment in which one is outnumbered ten or more to one; to formulate and carry out complex, ambitious, and self-interested long-term plans of action under highly adverse conditions deliberately designed to thwart them; the ability not only to grasp but successfully to use, analyze, and refine abstract cultural concepts that may be completely alien to one's native or familial environment; to learn, adapt, and creatively develop predominant but unfamiliar social and cultural practices to one's own benefit as well as to that of the predominant alien culture; and so forth. These are the true tests of intelligence, and would that we were all so successful in passing them. To redraw the concept of intelligence so narrowly that it excludes such abilities is to save the coherence of the theory by sacrificing the plausibility of the concepts that compose it. But it is not difficult to spot the background, provincial theory of which Jensen's and Murray's are crudely rationalized refinements, nor the theoretical anomaly © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
