The noegenetic laws: are the eduction of relations and correlates the fundamental operations of intelligence?

Charles Spearman, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

Beneath the measured factor g lies a definite cognitive content: intelligence is the power to apprehend one's own experience, to educe the RELATIONS between things, and to educe the CORRELATES that a thing and a relation together imply.1 The analogy — A is to B as C is to what? — lays these operations bare, and they are the engine of all higher thought.2345

Sources

  1. In general, it seems quite as good as, if not better than, that usually reached in determining the mechanical equivalent of heat and thus establishing the law of conservation of physical energy. UNIVERSALITY OF G REQUIRED GENERAL SURVEY OF COGNITION. Use of Fundamental Laws. The Apprehension of One's Own Ex- perience. The Eduction of Relations. The Eduction of Correlates. DETECTION OF G WITH ALL TEN RELATIONS.
    The Abilities of Man, p. 161
  2. It probably characterizes more than half of the concepts ordinarily current. Of course, it enters into all that are of cognitive nature, as intellect, thought, attention, inquiry, comparison, discrimination, evidence, demonstration, discovery, belief, truth, expectation, supposition, communication, interpretation, concealment, news, report, ANG THE ABILITIES OF MAN painting, language, poetry, and so forth.
    The Abilities of Man, pp. 180–181
  3. But other psychologists—as it seems, with better reason—hold contrariwise that a person may know his own experience with varying degrees of clearness; at the limit, the clearness may even sink to zero, so that the knowledge —but not the experience—vanishes.
    The Abilities of Man, pp. 165–166
  4. Little flower — ^but if I could understand What you are, root and all, and all in all, I should know what God and man is." • f i tmit i t i on by batrinalo Riitan.
    The Nature of Intelligence and the Principles of Cognition
  5. By its means men must have learnt to seek shelter on seeing the sky grow black, countless ages before they could formulate any abstract relations of meteorology. And by the same means, probably, their tendency to behave upon lines that had gained their approval long preceded their drawing up abstract codes of ethical relations.
    The Nature of Intelligence and the Principles of Cognition

Where the argument is made

  • The Nature of Intelligence and the Principles of Cognition (1923): the three noegenetic principles — apprehension of experience, eduction of relations, eduction of correlates

How the argument was received

The noegenetic laws give g a psychological meaning it would otherwise lack, and I hold them as the cognitive core of general ability; that they are pitched at a level of abstraction hard to test directly I grant, and their proof lies in the correlations they predict rather than in direct observation of the mind at work.