GOING BEYOND THE INFORMATION GIVEN

Abstract

More than thirty years ago, Charles Spearman (1923) undertook the ambitious task of characterizing the basic cognitive processes whose operations might account for the existence of intelligence. He emerged with a triad of non-genetic principles, as he called them, the first of these being simply an affirmation that organisms are capable of apprehending the world they live in. The second and third principles provide us with our starting point. One of these, called, as you know, “the education of relations,” holds that there is an immediate evocation of a sense of relation given the mental presentation of two or more things. “White” and “black” evoke “opposite” or “different.” The third principle, the “education of correlates,” states that in the presence of a thing and a relation one immediately educes another thing. “White” and “opposite of” evokes “black.” I think that Spearman was trying to say that the most characteristic thing about mental life, over and beyond the fact that one apprehends the events of the world around one, is that one constantly goes beyond the information given. With this observation I find myself in full agreement, and it is here that my difficulties start. For, as Professor Bartlett (1951, p. 1) put it in a recent paper, “. . . whenever anybody interprets evidence from any source, and his interpretation contains characteristics that cannot be referred wholly to direct sensory observation or perception, this person thinks. The bother is that nobody has ever been able to find any case of the human use of evidence which does not include characters that run beyond what is directly observed by the senses. So, according to this, people think whenever they do anything at all with evidence. If we adopt that view we very soon find ourselves looking out upon a boundless and turbulent ocean of problems.” Bother though it be, there is little else than to plunge right in.