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The history of the “availability of consciousness to observation in scientific psychology” is reviewed under the headings: Dualism; Classical Introspection; Description of the Impalpable; Awareness of Mental Activity; Phenomenological Description; Patients’ rotocols; Psychophysics; Animal Consciousness; Verbal Report. “Consciousness nowadays is simply one of many concepts which psychology employs, usually under some other name, whenever it finds the category useful for the generalization of observations.” 99-item bibliography.

During the 1920's intelligence tests came in for violent criticism. The myth of the "child mind" of the American adult, fostered by an uncritical view of the Army test data, was ridiculed; critics, notably Walter Lippmann, lambasted psychologists for pretending to test what they could not even define. Boring's paper was an attempt to communicate to a popular audience what the psychologist was doing and what a score on an intelligence test meant. Intelligence as the Tests Test It* EDWIN G. BORING 1923If you take one of the ready-made tests of intelligence and try it on a very large number of persons, you will find that they succeed with it in very different degrees. Repeat the test, and you will find that they cannot, with the best will in the world to do well, alter their scores very greatly. Then give the same group another intelligence test, and you will discover that the differences among individuals are approximately, although not exactly, the same. And you can go on. You will find that an adult, after continued exposure to his social and educational environment, does not greatly alter his score on a given test; that children, however, do steadily improve their performances until somewhere between ten and twenty years old; that the average age at which improvement stops is about fourteen years; but that children while improving tend to maintain the same individual differences, so that in a given group every child would keep about the same rank within the group. These are basic observational facts of the psychology of intelligence. What do they mean? WHAT THE TESTS TEST

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