Jay asked:

This is a question that came up on the language forum at http://www.a-i.comand is still under debate
on both sides: Does conversation measure intelligence? Can a being that cannot communicate be
said to be intelligent? Or does the responsibility lie in the being that is receiving the information?

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This is interesting to me for a couple of reasons. First, the association between language and
thought, and second, the measurement or data problem. First, assuming that "conversation" means
the use of natural, verbal language to communicate with another person, we have an interesting
history on that. For ancient man, and not just the Greeks, the difference between man and animals
was language, period. For the Greeks, the term "logos" encapsulated, in a word, humanness, and it
also meant, literally, speech. Logos was thought, and thought was speech, and if you didn't have the
latter you didn't have the former. In fact, most ancient peoples went so far as to regard any foreign
language as non-language, just a kind of stammering, and if you didn't speak theirlanguage you were
an animal, or at the least a lesser variety of man. As recently as the 19th century, and certainly into
the 18th, deaf people were considered retarded because they couldn't speak, and only when the
French (I believe they were the first) started teaching and learning sign language was it recognized
that this wasn't true.

But what person, really and totally, does not have speech? You can, after all, be deaf and be aware
that language is all around you, learn to read, and so forth. So you have to look for examples in very
strange situations: feral children, children born deaf and blind. The former, from the very little data we
have, never master language. They can learn a kind of simplified version, at best, of a natural
language; D. Bickerton has some theories about this. But he's coming from a particular point of view
(which is not to say he's incorrect, of course). What about Helen Keller? Well, she's an ambiguous
case. She didhave some exposure to language, to some extent, as a very young child, then became
deaf and blind as a result, I think, of scarlet fever. She lost her language, but to what extent? From
her description of her mental life pre- and post- language it is very unclear as to what exactly was
going on. There's a lot of debate on that point, and besides, she's just one person. It's very hard, if not
impossible, to find people with no ability to learn speech who really are not retarded; it's not really my
field, but offhand I can't think of any examples of this. But that says only that speech is related to
intelligence, but not how.

We do have many examples of people who have lostthe ability, through some sort of brain damage,
to have speech in one form or another, and they are usually pretty intact cognitively — an argument
for modularity and against the intimate relation of speech and intelligence. These people are much
easier to find, and they, I think, demonstrate that speech, or at least subclasses of language functions
(and it seems to be virtually any subclass) are independent of intelligence, if that latter is considered
apart from specific language skills, i.e., as general problem solving, the understanding of
abstractions, the ability to solve visual puzzles, and so forth. Of course if someone has lost the ability
to read you're not going to test their intelligence through a written test, right?

Which brings us to the data aspect. Just how do you get evidenceof intelligence? Um... through
speech, right? What else? Suppose dolphins were intelligent... well, they don't have hands, so they
can't be tested with little blocks or mazes, their eyes aren't all that good, so there's a problem trying to
teach them to read (not to mention being wet all the time)... now what? Look at elephants... now
there's a strange case. Elephants have passed the mirror test, i.e., they can look at a mirror, like no
animals except us and the higher apes (hard to test this with cetaceans), and know that the reflection
is themselves,and not just an anonymous elephant. But now what? They have no vocal chords
(capable of speech), no hands, who knows what goes on in their minds? But it is almost certain, from
the little we can tell, that they and the higher apes (like gorillas, bonobos, chimpanzees, orangutans)
are conscious, self-conscious, even. Are they "intelligent"? Well, there is the classic chimpanzee,
cited in the literature for quite a while, who put a couple of sticks together to reach for a banana
outside its cage. Was that intelligence? You tell me. There's the couple of gorillas who can put little
symbols together to make simple messages. It may not be "language", but it seems to be intelligence.
What else would you call it?

There is also the case of non-verbal problem solving and thinking in humans. This is really my
interest in all this. I think that the emphasis on verbal thinking is due to the fact that virtually all
psychologists and philosophers are highly verbal people; that's how they think. But what about
painters, musicians, dancers, laborers? Take a simple example: you can tell time by adding, say 30
minutes to the current time to find the time in half an hour, right? But you can also visualize an analog
clockface and visually flip the hand half around, then read the time from your internal picture. I can, at
least. So that's visualthinking. Arnheim has a book on it, so did Kepes. But there's not much on it,
because to be an academic, you have to be highly verbally skilled, so that's your bias. Now, all IQ
tests have visual components, and so I'm really puzzled that when people talk about "intelligence"
they don't just automatically take this into account. Makers of intelligence tests certainly do... why? It's
clear to me, at any rate, that one can use virtually any kind of sensory internalization to think, and
also it is notclear to me that mathematical and logical operations, for example, normally considered
(one would hope!) thinking, are verbal operations. Do mathematicians think in "language"? Well
mathematics is definitely not a natural language in the sense that English, Russian, etc. are, and what
little (again, hardly anyone has studied this!) evidence we have (e.g., a letter by Einstein) indicates
that mathematics can be done, at least in part, through kinesthetic (internalized body movements and
feelings) thinking. I also do that kind of thinking, to some extent.

Given all the above, it seems fairly absurd to me to equate language and intelligence. They are
clearly related in the senses a) that linguistic skills are an aspectof intelligence, and b) that loss of
one is correlatedwith some loss of the other. But correlation is not equivalence.

Steven Ravett Brown