ABSTRACT
This chapter examines a slightly different issue, the manner in which psychological treatments of intelligence sanction scientific and technological values. The contemporary psychological view of intelligence has its foundations in the intellectual individualism that emerged out of twenty-five centuries of Western philosophy. The modern era really begins with Descartes’s claim that the starting point for all knowledge is the individual’s experience of his own existence. Science has always depended on an irreducible consensus - among scientists if no others - about how truth is to be determined. Psychological models of human thinking, including scientific thinking, are based on an unmoderated form of intellectual individualism according to which it is the individual who thinks, chooses and acts, who invents, solves problems and discovers truth. Most features of current psychological approaches to intelligence can be traced back to the interests of the pioneers in the field of intellectual testing.
