The issue related to the definition of intelligence quotient (IQ), its calculation and the ethical and social implications that this determines, is a topic of vast scale, which in the recent past has been the subject of several revisions. Its scope of application is so wide that, even today, there are different pedagogical perspectives in this regard and
multiple interpretations, regarding the criticalities, limits and effectiveness of this practice.
Specifically, assessing IQ, by definition, should be a quantitative and objective process, which describes the logical-mathematical and geometric-spatial ability of an individual. But as the recent psychological and educational sciences literature teaches us, from Guilford, De Bono and Gardner onwards, the intelligences are divergent, lateral and, above all, multiple and their evolution is not bound from a precise time relationship with the biological age of the person and his mental abilities. Therefore, the ability to be in the world and to live the context around oneself reflects, also and above all, linguistic, musical, bodily, kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal,
naturalistic and existential intelligences, elements that cannot be quantified arithmetically. Starting from the assumption that each individual communicates according to a psychic, logical and bodily way of a subjective nature, science and, in particular, medicine, have always experimented and drawn up codes, canons and grids to evaluate the greater or lesser degree (and, consequently, correct or incorrect) of linguistic ableism of the individual with respect to a Gaussian average: hence the development and bureaucratic implementation of the concept of calculating the intelligence quotient or IQ, imposed by the mathematical formula that evaluates it as the ratio between mental age of an individual, divided by his biological age at the time the test is conducted, multiplied by 100. Hence the biomedical coding of the evidence of dysgraphia, dysorthography, dyslexia and, in the most severe cases, of cognitive and motor disabilities, in subjects in developmental age. This way of understanding the IQ, as mentioned, is however a limiting methodology and linked to a logical-mathematical approach of science with respect to the individual.
Secondly, the medical report that we are describing is a scientific account as such or is it linked to an earlier biopsychosocial grammar that sees a “linguistic normality” defined a priori, depending, in particular, on the geographical, social and political context of reference? Authors such as Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari and had already warned us in this regard, with respect to this criticality, in their works. “The objects of knowledge are not given, but constructed and transformed by discursive practices. Knowledge is not made to understand, but to take a position.” (Michel Foucault, Interview with Le Monde, 1977). This is the heart of the problem: do the doctors and psychologists who deal with this evaluation take into account the biography, history, ethnic and geographical origin of the subject in front of them or do they merely develop a quantitative analysis? As
mentioned, the concept of linguistic normality and cultural ableism is not universal, but always dictated by a specific contingency, which reflects the social substratum of the particular context in which one lives and works. The assessment of an IQ considered normal at a particular longitude or latitude, in a country with a certain technological evolution, a certain economic well-being and a certain social and cultural setting, could be completely different, unsuitable and inappropriate in another context.
This paradigm identifies the communicative disability as an ontological problem that subsists in itself, but does not take into consideration, in my opinion, the communicative singularity of each subject with respect to the infinite plurality of the contexts in which it operates, fluid and changing in space and time, irreducible to a schematized vision to a logical equation, by its nature harnessed in its single moment of elaboration.
In the third instance, the IQ formula lays the foundations of a cultural heritage based on the validation of a terrible communicative ableism for which communication is a “capacity” and there is a certain threshold beyond which the individual is able to express his or her voluntary thoughts and emotions, with respect to his or her biological
age at the time. It is necessary, therefore, to overturn the approach of the IQ formula, placing as the denominator not the numerical value referring to the biological age of the subject, but the one referring to the number, consistency and impact of the significant experiences that he has lived in the course of his existence, up to that moment. By applying this corrective and giving a wide spectrum of action as a denominator to the coefficient linked to the personal significance of the individual
experiences for the subject, it will be impossible, in my view, a discrepancy between the mental age and the age of the experiences (which is the heart of the problem), starting from the postulate that the experiences of life are the experiences of the mind, which can never result, in overall value, lower than the former ones. In this regard, a
new formula for determining IQ could be evaluated: Age of mind divided by number of significant experiences, in percent. In this perspective, the concept of a person’s IQ would fall, starting from the assumption that the adjective “intellectual” would no longer have reason to exist, having shown that the activity of the intellect is only one of the many ways that the individual has to relate to the outside world, that does not give proof of the person’s corporeality, of his relationship to the contexts in which he is inserted and of his ability of relationship, adaptation and inclusion.
Conclusion
In the final analysis, in my opinion, the questions that the pedagogical, scientific and geographical community should ask itself and to which it should find a solution or at least an answer are the following: is it the context (social, political, geographical) that determines a biopsychosocial evaluation of the individual-citizen or is this autonomous with respect to the context in which the intervention and scientific evaluation operate? Is the individual “normal” and “able” as such, since normality and ability ontologically self-subsist in themselves, or are they a product of the external world and of the spatial grammar that contains, in Parmenidean terms, the human being and that binds him to a given context? Is it the cultural and, above all,
historical-geographical substratum that directs and conditions the process, interventions and scientific evaluations on a large and medium scale and “society is seen as the effect of associations that are activated within heterogeneous networks between humans and non-humans” (La Science en action, 1987) as the french sociologist Bruno Latour argued, or are these acts autonomous processes and extraneous to the spatial-temporal placement in which they are pigeonholed? Is there, as Deleuze and Guattari said, “a state apparatus that regulates, homogenizes and totalitarianizes organizations and processes”? (Capitalisme et Schizophrénie, Mille plateaux 1972/1980, p.645).
A common answer, certainly, is offered to us by the new school of thought on disability, which has its foundation in the 2006 United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD), ratified by the Italian Parliament in 2008, which lays the foundations for a new vision of disability and which, through the
concept of Universal Design for Learning (UDL), explains to us that it is necessary to know and redefine every context in which we live in order to understand our disabilities as a relationship between us and the geographical, social and political context that we live and not as objects, appendages and prostheses ontologically existing in themselves. Cities and the activities that take place in them must no longer be designed and organized only for “able-bodied minds and bodies”, as, unfortunately, has always happened in the past, but it is necessary to redesign the morphology of our society, both from a physical and psychic point of view, with a view to accessibility of every type of service to the entire community.
Nicolò Vignatavan
Nicolò Vignatavan 