Spearman's g = Anderson's ACT?: Reflections on the Locus of Generality in Human Cognition

Knowledge Cognitive theories and models tend to implicitly assume that a cognitive architecture-augmented with learning mechanisms-plus a task-specific knowledge base are sufficient to explain human cognition. Consequently, recent research has emphasized analogy and case-based reasoning, expertise, and the so-called situatedness of cognitive processes. These approaches focus primarily on the concrete and particular and ignore the abstract categories, methods, principles, schemas, and regulatory ideas that philosophers from Plato to Immanual Kant and Bertrand Russell assumed constitute the basic machinery of the human mind. Not everyone has jumped onto the particularity bandwagon. In Outsmarting IQ and elsewhere (Perkins & Salomon, 1989), David Perkins has championed the importance of what he calls reflective intelligence. To see how reflective intelligence can be both a source of generality and a source of individual differences, you need to consider some specific proposals as to the nature of the abstract knowledge structures that may underpin this type of intelligence. In Outsmarting IQ Perkins suggested that abstract knowledge can be conceptualized as a repertoire of dispositions (pp. 275-277). He proposed a list of seven thinking dispositions that characterize good thinking. These include the disposition to be adventurous in your thinking (e. g., to search far and wide for ideas and to be willing to consider seemingly weird solutions) and the disposition to be intellectually careful (e.g., to have a tendency to double check everything twice, to avoid fallacies, to ask for evidence, to probe for weaknesses, etc.). The seven thinking dispositions are abstract in character and have the potential to be useful in almost any domain or task. A different possibility is that reflective intelligence operates with a repertoire of abstract schemas (Ohlsson, 1993). Abstract schemas have many of the same properties as domain-specific schemas (internal structure, open slots), but the relations that connect the slots are so general as to be applicable across domains, and the slots have no constraints on their fillers. An abstract schema is pure structure, as it were. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.237 on Thu, 07 Jul 2016 04:53:57 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms