While the notion of aptitude no longer occupies centre stage in the work of applied psychologists, it and its near neighbours continue to play somewhat ambiguous roles in the wings, not only for academic writers but also for more mundane controversialists and decision-makers. The awkwardness of many academic accounts and so-called "definitions"1 suggests that once again philosophical analysis would be a salutary prolegomenon to the "subtle and penetrating psychological research" urged by Carroll.2 But for practical purposes an examination of the logical structure of our concept of aptitude might contribute most by weighing up the extent to which that notion really involves two other ideas often linked with it in educational writing: that aptitude is by and large environment-proof, and that lack of aptitude as revealed by failure of an aptitude test betokens eternal inability.
These two notions reflect the good and the bad side of much educational concern for aptitude. On the one hand people can contrast aptitude, or ability, with present achievement so as to discount the effects on achievement of extremely unequal schooling and home support - it may matter little what you can now achieve if you have but the ability. Such aptitudes or as yet unexercised abilities are not likely to be attributed to the social environment that has produced or obstructed achievement, and so it is tempting to see them as somehow innate. But while this route to innateness can work in favour of the at present non-achiever who manages to give evidence of ability or aptitude, it can easily work to the permanent harm of those who do not: "a low score may be interpreted as an indication that any additional educational effort would be wasted."3 The fact that this inference worries a writer such as Dore4 strongly suggests that its logical cogency be examined.
The present paper aims to evaluate these linkages by presenting an analysis of the concept of aptitude which, it is hoped, will also contribute to clarity in less applied discussions and will display both the attractiveness of the concept for our common-sense folk psychology and its almost certain irrelevance to the "real psychology" of the future.5
Somewhat belatedly following Austin's injunction to read one's dictionary I was pleased to find in the Concise Oxford Dictionary confirmation for an initial gloss on aptitudes as quasi second order abilities, abilities to acquire abilities.6 This leads us straight into the murky waters of ability. Here I shall merely state a position; I shall not attempt to discuss other analyses that have been offered.
One very simple preliminary point should be made since it will have ramifications at a more detailed level. An ability is always an ability to VP.7 The fact that the nominalization ability allows elision of the infinitive verb phrase may encourage in some people the thought that there is some sort of undifferentiated stuff, ability, that people have in varying amounts. While this mistake8 may not trouble sophisticated educationalists, it is worth noting that there must always be some specification of abilities or aptitudes if anything determinate is to be in question, and that many qualifications naturally attached to abilities or aptitudes rightly belong in the VP. It is not, for instance, the ability that is musical but rather what it is an ability to do.
So what is an ability to VP? I would suggest that in answering this question we distinguish between what could be called assertion-conditions and truth-conditions, or in Mackie's terms between an account of the observational cues and logical structure governing our regular usage and an account of what we standardly intend to convey by such usage.
In order to give the assertion-conditions for talk of an ability to VP I shall adopt the common idea that at the core of ability and of several other notions (freedom, opportunity, the modal verb can, etc.) is the negative claim that there is no obstacle to VPing.9 We treat such obstacles as roughly countable and measurable.
This simple account needs to be complicated in various ways, two of which I shall mention now. The first has been stressed recently by Cohen10 and concerns time references. The claim that John can VP has to be construed as the claim that there are no obstacles at t1 to John's VPing at t2. These times can of course overlap or be identical, but they may not be. The second complication is inspired by Mackie's account of responsibility11 and involves the claim that obstacles are roughly classified into types (physical and moral, for instance) and that we usually are only concerned with some such limited range or field of obstacles on any particular occasion of utterance. So in talking of what John can or can not do we are to be understood as referring to obstacles in a field.
So far we have looked at a core common to several notions. How is ability differentiated from the others? I shall follow Graham's suggestion12 that a distinctive notion of ability focuses on obstacles located in the body of the person concerned. One might say that the obstacle field is sharply restricted; I am not sure whether we still need the openness the notion of obstacle field gives us after noting this restriction. (Has someone like George Washington got the ability to tell a lie?)
Before applying these ideas to aptitude it is necessary to note some more rather messy complications. There are various perspectives on our linguistic usage in this area which can singly or in combination illuminate what is going on; there may be one unified account to be had, but at the moment I cannot give it and I think clarity is well enough served by the three ideas I shall offer. One way in is to apply a claim Gellner once made about Ryle's knowing how: "to say that somebody knows how to do something is to say two things: that he can do it, and that he can do it correctly."13 While perhaps all such cases could be seen as really differences in the VPs, Gellner is certainly right that normative elements get built in more clearly when we talk about having an ability or knowing how to VP.
A second useful idea is that of implicit or explicit comparison classes. I may have an ability to learn languages, compared to the great apes, but not when compared to many humans. Again, strictly speaking, it may be the VPs that are different, but the debate is likely to remain at the level of ability.
The third suggestion, which might in fact be capable of subsuming the others, is to appeal to Gricean maxims for conversation, in particular to explain why instances that fit the analysis offered above might well be rejected as lacking the requisite ability: because to give point to asserting possession of an ability it needs to be somehow distinctive, not shared equally with everyone else. We may all have an aptitude for languages, but this is hardly worth mentioning, except in a Chomskyan comparison with other animals; when talking within the species, only those whose aptitude is particularly noticeable will be attributed an aptitude and it may be denied to the rest of us. Such Gricean force can be indicated as if part of the basic meaning by some such formulation as this: there is a notable absence of obstacles to John's VPing.
In moving now to the application of the preceding ideas to aptitude itself, we should note that a crude substitution in the original account of aptitude would have us talking of acquiring an absence of obstacles; I shall rephrase this to make it fit English idiom. So, the suggestion is that the claim that John has an aptitude for foreign languages, say, says that there is a notable absence of obstacles in John at t1 to his getting rid of obstacles in himself at t2 to his speaking a foreign language at t3. (I have omitted any relativization of obstacles to fields in this formulation.)
So much for assertion-conditions. Some of us some of the time may only be committing ourselves to the above claim in talking of aptitude, but it is plausible, I think, to say that often people put slightly more into such claims. In what are deliberately vague terms, the extra idea is that these abilities are positive items rather than mere negative absences of obstacles. To the extent that an obstacle to VPing is the lack of something, it will indeed be true that the absence of that obstacle will be the possession of that something. I suspect that people build in this idea of abilities as positive acquisitions rather than excisions or losses, so to that extent the truth-conditions of what they say go beyond the analysis offered above. But of course, in many cases they may be right to make such an extension, though it is worth allowing for the possibility that, for instance, overcoming shyness (i.e., acquiring an ability to interact with people more openly) may be more a matter of losing beliefs than of gaining any.
Adding this feature to the account of aptitude we get the suggestion that John's aptitude is something notable about John now such that he can acquire at t2 the positive grounds for VPing at t3. (The "can" here is in deference to English; it does not vitiate the analysis.) We can see here, as indeed we could with the earlier and more accurate account of assertion-conditions, the obvious links with the notion of the ease of acquiring a skill and with the idea that speed of acquisition reflects such an underlying aptitude. But speed is only one possible way in which the acquisition of skills may be conspicuous - accuracy and length of retention are a couple of others - we should not be diverted from considered aims by an undue emphasis on speed.
I would claim that what we have now mirrors fairly well what people do in careful talk about aptitudes. We must now ask about its epistemological basis and its connection with the two topics mentioned at the beginning.
Ordinary talk of ability and the more complex kind of ability that constitutes aptitude reveals what I suspect is very common in common-sense psychology: a complex semantic web woven over virtually total ignorance of the actual causal factors. The epistemological foundation for ascriptions of ability to VP is either observation of actual VPing or observation of some other activity that we have good reason to think indicates ability to VP. (This formulation ignores the complexity due to the various possible time references, as indeed we usually do in practice.) While this account needs some qualifications to cover the exclusion of flukes, the important point is that we do not in general establish an ability to VP by reference to an exhaustive survey of the absence of the obstacles to VPing or even of the presence of the positive acquisitions usually believed to underlie abilities; and we do not do this because the obstacles may be unlimited, and more importantly, unknown. While we can sometimes modify machines to do new things when we know what is at the root of the machine's ability, we can not do the same for ourselves. The factual analysis of talk of abilities remains for us as agnostic as anything Locke claimed for his real essences. Perhaps its syntax encourages a premature belief in the unity of particular abilities.
Aptitudes are ascribed on equally unrevealing foundations. Some VPing may be noteworthy in some respect; often we take proficiency at something that we believe to be at least an inus condition14 of VPing as a sign of aptitude, but there is much uncertainty about what really is required for what. One striking thought, especially given the considerable overlap between the contents of aptitude and ability tests, is that whatever underlies a first order ability may be very different from what underlies an aptitude to acquire that ability. Being able to speak French might be having internalized a particular rule structure; having an aptitude for French might be a kink in the cortex!
Exploring the same thoughts quickly throws up the idea that aptitudes are often likely to be design features, as it were. And this idea is close to that of environment proofing with which we started. Of course, in general we do not know what features of the organism give it an aptitude (we may not even know that they are features of the organism), but it is at least plausible to think that they will often be fairly stable features of its organization. Even if they are, this does not in fact mean that they must be innate, or unchangeable, or uninfluenced by the social environment, though equally all or any of these further claims may be true. One imagines that progress will come by specifying the factual basis or bases of particular aptitudes.
While a small first step on the road to innateness can be given a measure of support, at least as plausible conjecture, what should we say of the other side of the picture, of the idea that lacking an aptitude means being forever unable to VP? The answer must again be that it is really an empirical question, to be decided case by case. But that entails that it certainly isn't a logically guaranteed consequence of lack of aptitude that a person will not learn how to VP. Lacking a notable ability to acquire a certain sort of skill may, and usually does, mean just that one has an ordinary amount of ability to acquire that skill. And in most educationally significant cases, an ordinary amount of such ability is perfectly acceptable.
Of course, in allocating scarce and expensive resources there might be good reason to follow the distribution of aptitude, at least if one has taken care also of motivational matters and if one has checked that what measures the aptitude in question reflects what is valued and does not omit equally valued aspects of VPing. Even so, there is no reason to suppose that someone who fails such a test would be unable to learn to VP, nor is there any reason in logic to suppose that people one cannot afford to train are untrainable, though in the real world that reflection cannot bring them much comfort.
In conclusion, then, we have seen aptitude in its place in a complex and nuanced web of concepts that allow us to speak at length and often truthfully about a reality whose intrinsic nature we are unable to reveal. For the purposes of an ignorant common-sense such concepts have considerable utility, but for purposes of scientific understanding I suspect they can only be ignored, and even for everyday practice they often bring with them ideas (of insulation from the social; of unity and generality; of untrainability when aptitude is lacking) that certainly are not logically entailed by aptitude as it has been analysed here. But these associated ideas are often the main reasons people have for attending to aptitude, so if they are only contingently linked, if at all, perhaps much of the ordinary educational employment of the idea should cease as well.
1 Jensen, for instance, equates aptitude with intelligence but he then has to allow for "special aptitudes" to cater for Mozart and the athletic fraternity (A. R. Jensen, Bias in Mental Testing (New York: Free Press, 1980) p. 239). Wesche attributes the following to J. B. Carroll: "'language aptitude' is the ability to learn a new language quickly and to a high degree of proficiency" (M. B. Wesche, "Language Aptitude Measures in Streaming, Matching Students with Methods and Diagnosis of Learning Problems," in Individual Differences and Universals in Language Learning Aptitude, ed. K. C. Diller (Rowley, Mass: Newbury House, 1981) p. 119). Carroll himself has on occasion distinguished aptitude from subsequent learning progress (e.g. in his own contribution to the same collection, J. B. Carroll, "Twenty-five Years of Research on Foreign Language Aptitude," in Diller, Individual Differences) but while some will want to contrast present manifested ability with aptitude, others play fast and loose with the terms: an encyclopedia article begins by saying "the term 'aptitude' is often used interchangeably with the term 'ability' " ("Aptitude" in International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, ed. D. L. Sills (London: Collier-Macmillan, 1968) Vol. 1, p. 369). This is yet one more case where philosophical analysis should not be content simply to record the vagaries of often sloppy usage, but should lay down the law.
2 Carroll, op. cit., p. 87.
3 Robert Wood, "Aptitude and Achievement," Caribbean Journal of Education 9 (1982): 79-123. Let me take this opportunity to acknowledge that this paper owes a very great deal to collaborative work with Professor Wood arising out of his Inaugural Lecture, now embodied in this reference.
4 R. Dore, The Diploma Disease (London: Allen & Unwin, 1976), esp. pp. 192-193.
5 Since methods of philosophical analysis are contentious, let me say that my approach is meant to follow the main lines of that recommended by Mackie (J.L. Mackie, Truth, Probability, and Paradox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973) ch. 1); my own emphases are discussed in "The Philosophy in the Philosophy of Education," Teaching Philosophy 7 (1984): 1-15.
6 This suggestion was made in the course of a book review published in the Caribbean Journal of Education, Vol. 9.
7 As is obvious, I hope, I am using 'VP' to hold a place for verbal phrases. The analysis deliberately keeps close to English grammar, and I employ traditional grammatical terminology.
8 The mistake would be in moving from the linguistic form to a belief about a unitary basis without further empirical investigation. As a matter of fact there might be one underlying structure for a vast range of abilities, but this is not guaranteed or even supported by what the language allows us to say.
9 For one discussion, see Keith Graham, J. L. Austin: A Critique of Ordinary Language Philosophy (New Jersey: Humanities, 1977), pp. 254ff.
10 G. A. Cohen, "Capitalism, Freedom and the Proletariat," in The Idea of Freedom, ed. Alan Ryan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979) p. 21. Cohen acknowledges the influence of an article by Alvin Goldman, whose earlier book (A Theory of Human Action (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1970) ch. 7) traces the debt to work by Chisholm, Lehrer and Richard Taylor.
11 J. L. Mackie, "Responsibility and Language," Australasian Journal of Philosophy 33 (1955): 143-159.
12 Graham, J. L. Austin, ftn. p. 273.
13 Ernest Gellner, The Devil in Modern Philosophy (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974) ch. 8, originally published in 1951.
14 This, I hope, familiar acronym stands for "an insufficient but necessary part of an unnecessary but sufficient condition". Mackie used the notion in the analysis of causation (for instance in The Cement of the Universe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974)) but I am assuming that it can be extended from causal to embrace logical conditions also.
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