Abstract
When one looks for a studied moment at the myriad of abilities that humans display, it’s as if one were to look into the heavens on a clear night and become stirred by the ceaseless drift of the clouds of the Milky Way. On such a night one might be dimly aware that there is order and system in the celestial white. But where among the drifting haze might one draw dimensions to represent this order? At first there is no answer to this question, only befuddlement. The same is true for human abilities. They appear as free-floating swarms emerging from spaces of unknown many dimensions. Is there genuine order in this throng, or can one at least impose an order that will not do great injustice to the complexity and still enable one to organize thinking and talking about it? That is the major question of this chapter.
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Horn, J. (1988). Thinking about Human Abilities. In: Nesselroade, J.R., Cattell, R.B. (eds) Handbook of Multivariate Experimental Psychology. Perspectives on Individual Differences. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-0893-5_19
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