Developmental <b><i>g:</i></b> Lost in the Construct Jungle

In Defense of a Developmental Theory of Intelligence: Response to the Commentators

“…Once serving their developmental role, they subsequently part company with g. Thus, executive functions remorph in development. Müller and Garcia-Barrera [2018] also criticize the fact that EF and cognizance appear as processes at two different levels, being constituents of both g and the Abstraction, Alignment, Cognizance (AACog) mechanism orchestrating the interactions between the processes constituting g. They claim that this renders the theory culpable of infinite regress because the same processes (EF and cognizance) appear to be both regulators and being regulated. AACog is the representational part of g, fusing together (a) the mapping of representations onto each other according to a goal -which is itself another representation (alignment), (b) abstraction of commonalities between them (inference), and (c) their evaluation and encoding into new representations (cognizance).…”

“…Finally, Müller and Garcia-Barrera [2018] claim that we are not explicit enough regarding the mental possibilities of infants: i.e., if we consider infants mentalistic creatures in the neonativist sense of crediting infants with awareness of mental states or in a more lenient sense of emerging awareness, starting from a state where awareness involves the objects of thought but not mental processes or states themselves. They warn us that subscribing to the first view would make the theory vulnerable to the criticisms plaguing empiricist representational theory that it cannot account for how representations emerge in the first place.…”