Alfred Binet Quotes

France, Psychologist
June 8, 1857 – October, 18, 1911.

Alfred Binet was a French psychologist who invented the first practical IQ test, the Binet–Simon test. In 1904, the French Ministry of Education asked psychologist Alfred Binet to devise a method that would determine which students did not learn effectively from regular classroom instruction so they could be given remedial work. Along with his collaborator Théodore Simon, Binet published revisions of his test in 1908 and 1911, the last of which appeared just before his death.

Comprehension, inventiveness, direction, and criticism: intelligence is contained in these four words.

Alfred Binet
We must protest and react against this brutal pessimism; we will try to demonstrate that it is founded on nothing.

Alfred Binet

Heredity, to our understanding is not capable of giving to this illness (paraphilia) its characteristic form ... Heredity invents nothing, creates nothing anew; it has no imagination.

Alfred Binet
We do not attempt to establish or prepare a prognosis and we leave unanswered the question of whether this retardation is curable, or even improveable.

Alfred Binet
A person may be a moron or an imbecile if he is lacking in judgment; but with good judgment he can never be either.

Alfred Binet
- Never
- Person
- Judgment
Materialism is the metaphysics of those who refuse to be metaphysicians.

Alfred Binet
- Materialism
- Metaphysics
The statistical method gives only mediocre results.

Alfred Binet
Our purpose is to be able to measure the intellectual capacity of a child who is brought to us in order to know whether he is normal or retarded.

Alfred Binet

Indeed the rest of the intellectual faculties seem of little importance in comparison with judgment.

Alfred Binet
The experimenter judges what may be going on in [the subject's] mind, and certainly feels difficulty in expressing all the oscillations of a thought in a simple, brutal number, which can have only a deceptive precision.

Alfred Binet
- Mind
- Difficulty
- Number