Multiple Intelligences

What Constitutes an Intelligence?

Gardner puts forth both a new definition of intellect and a set of criteria for determining what qualifies as an intelligence. An intelligence entails the ability to process a certain kind of information and to solve problems or create products that are valued in at least one culture. In contrast to the view of intelligence as a single all-purpose computer, one can think of the MIs as a set of distinct computational capacities.

A candidate capacity is considered an intelligence if it fits the following criteria reasonably well:

• Potential isolation by brain damage or other forms of neuropsychological evidence. Intelligences can be destroyed or spared in relative isolation.
• The existence of savants, prodigies, individuals on the autistic spectrum, and other exceptional individuals. Such individuals have great strengths or selective weaknesses in one form of intellect.
• A distinctive developmental history and a definable set of expert end-state performances. Each intelligence-based activity has its own developmental time line. Different intelligences should develop at different rates and along trajectories that are distinctive.
• An evolutionary history and evolutionary plausibility. In most cases, human intelligences exist in less developed form in other primates and, at times, in other species.
• Support from psychometric findings. Performances on tests of one form of intelligence do not necessarily have a high correlation with performances on tests of other intelligences.
• Support from experimental psychological tasks. Exercise of one form of intelligence will transfer to tasks that draw on that intelligence but will not to tasks that marshal other intelligences.
• Core operations defined. Each intelligence consists of a small number of core skills or operations that differ from the core skills of other intelligences.
• Susceptibility to encoding in a symbol system. The key components or operations of each intelligence can be captured in a distinctive symbol system (e.g., linguistic in words, spatial in maps).

Gardner’s Eight Intelligences

Initial identification of the intelligences was a lengthy process, entailing studies by a team of researchers who examined candidate intelligences from the perspective of various scholarly disciplines (e.g., neuroscience, genetics, anthropology, psychology, special education). Gardner contends that at least eight human capacities qualify as distinct intelligences.