Review of David Perkins Outsmarting IQ: The Emerging Science of Learnable Intelligence, 1995, Free Press.
Human thinking ability results from learning our way around. Navigation is fundamental to all sorts of human thinking. Perkins suggests that all intelligent human thinking results from navigation of various kinds, which can be thought of in terms of levels of realms. Perkins organizes the realms in an overall map or mindscape from the lowest level of specific contexts of thinking to the highest level dealing with thinking itself. In learning to solve problems we not only learn our way around physical realms geographically, but we learn our way around specific contexts we find ourselves in such as the realm of buying a house or the realm of choosing a career. We learn our way around different situations like resolving conflicts or making purchases in general. We learn our way around professional fields like law, physics, and mathematics, and areas of technical expertise such as probability and statistics, game theory, and business. We learn our way around the use of tools. We learn our way around various basic kinds of challenges like problem solving, decision making, planning, and learning. Finally, at Perkins top level, which he calls thinking dispositions, and we learn our way around thinking itself in terms of the qualities and attitudes that make it more or less effective. Perhaps the central thrust of this book is that in organizing human problem solving areas into navigational realms, Perkins is not just providing a training map for learning problem solving skills a million different areas, he is also making a case for the learning the critical skills of navigation itself. Perkins realms are very similar to the traditional concept of domains of expertise, but different in one critically important way: realms emphasize the central skills of navigation rather than just the use of repetition or rote memorization or even
just the use of deliberate practice. The concept of realms makes it more explicit that all areas of ability that we learn share some commonality in terms of key skills and attitudes we need for navigation itself. It is learning to be a better navigator; in all realms of human thinking and not just certain subset of them; that is the central message of Perkins book. This is encapsulated in his concept of reflective intelligence. Reflective intelligence is the aspect of intelligence that can be most improved for the greatest effect across the range of all realms of thinking. Perkins reviews a number of different attempts to improve human thinking and makes various suggestions based on their results regarding specific kinds of changes that can be made to educational curricula in order to teach children to be better navigators in all areas.
From these three bodies of evidence, Perkins derives three corresponding dimensions of human intelligence: (1) a neural intelligence dimension which respects what psychometric data gets right and is most closely associated with what we typically assume IQ tests are measuring, (2) an experiential intelligence dimension which respects what expertise research data gets right, and (3) a reflective intelligence dimension which respects what we have learned about metacognition and from the various programs that have tried to teach thinking skills in general. Neural intelligence, Perkins concludes, is a real dimension of human ability and very important in some situations especially, but it is simply the wrong target for attempts at improvement for various reasons. Experiential intelligence represents most of our actual problem solving abilities in practice. Faced with novel and complex situations where we have no relevant experience, our neural intelligence gives us our best chance at solving the challenges presented. But once we have been acquiring experience in an area, a difference in expertise will make people better problem solvers in that area than will a difference in general intelligence. So experiential intelligence and neural intelligence work together to make us the generally good problem solvers that we are in most situations: neural intelligence helps us deal with novelty and complexity, and experiential intelligence helps us acquire the knowledge and skills we need to deal with specific domains. So the obvious question is: what role does reflective intelligence play and why does Perkins consider it so important?
SPRAWLING. When a pattern-seeking process does not have a single clear path to follow, as often happens in very complex situations, it will tend to follow one path after another and keep switching back and forth rather than working toward an overall goal. Experiential intelligence, Perkins concludes, is an elegant system for long-term moderate success. When situations are new to us or complex, we get help from our neural intelligence and we have also learned various tricks for getting around our weaknesses, and these are largely accounted for in reflective intelligence. Reflective intelligence represents realms where we think about our own thinking in order to avoid settling on hasty conclusions, to broaden our thinking beyond the initial scope we assumed, to use precision to distinguish similar looking but different things, and to stay on track when notice we are sprawling. This explains why reflective intelligence is so important to us in tricky situations where we have inadequate experience and where experience misleads us. But it also helps explain, in Perkins view, why reflective intelligence is so important for us to learn to be better thinkers in general. Neural intelligence does not replace experiential intelligence, it tends to reinforce it. When we dont have experience, neural intelligence helps us grasp the situation, but when we do have experience, we tend to use our neural intelligence to reinforce what our experience already tells us. Thats one big reason why genius is not simply high IQ. Thats why reflective intelligence is so important, it is the tool we use to remind us of the weak points in our own thinking and help us compensate for them regardless of our experience and general intelligence. The abilities and traits we need in order to overcome our blind spots are learnable. A large and crucial aspect of intelligence is learnable.
attention and memory, and we can use our symbol systems and tools to help us keep track of things we could not track individually. This is a wonderful general description of how we are attempting to use computer networks to help us manage complexity (as opposed to some of the more superficial books in recent years which imply that networks somehow replace rather than enhance individual thinking). 2. Intelligence can embrace complexity -- through information visualization tools, effective use of classification, tagging, and finding things by meaning, consolidation, filtering, the mathematical tools for finding large scale patterns in complex phenomena, and by eliminating narrow information silos, we can use our intelligence to solve increasingly complex problems. 3. Intelligence can be dialectical -- this means raising the level of thinking from lower level more concrete concerns to higher order patterns by recognizing the properties specific to complex systems. Perkins offers Peter Senges The Fifth Discipline and Murray Gell-Manns The Quark and the Jaguar as exemplifying ways of understanding dialectical intelligence. Perkins covers a massive amount of data about intelligence and problem solving, summarizes it effectively, and applies it to a practical, powerfully supported, and exceptionally understandable approach to improving human life by teaching ourselves to be more intelligent. Thinking well in general is an unnatural act but we can learn to do it. All that is left is for us to overcome the ideological and political barriers. This book would make a wonderful, gentle manifesto for that grand effort.