There are a variety of different hypotheses on what, and how to describe, intelligence is. But I want to talk about a controversy that pervades all of these various ideas before I get into that. And that is the issue of whether or not there is one general intelligence, or whether there are various aspects of intelligence, or whether multiple intelligence exist. And so, as we go through all these various ideas, I want you to keep the conversation in mind and really think about where this debate stands with each theorist.
The first theory I want to explore is the general intelligence theory that was put forward by a man named Charles Spear man. To classify clusters of similar skills, he used factor analysis, which is a statistical technique. The definition of general intelligence, which is often referred to as the G Element, or sometimes just G, was predicted by him. And he predicted that in varied academic fields, this general intelligence could predict our performance.
Currently, there is a lot of proof to support this. Studies have shown that in other fields, such as special reasoning, those who score high in one area, such as verbal intelligence, also appear to score highly. This proposal, however, was controversial then and now it is still controversial. Human talents are extremely complex when you really think about it. Should we really believe that all of them could be accounted for by one single factor? Ok, a different psychologist, L.L. Don't think so, Thurnston.
So he suggested a hypothesis that concentrated on primary mental skills. Instead of Spear man single one, Thurnston came up with seven intelligence variables. I'm not going to write all of them down, but they include fluency in words, verbal understanding, special reasoning, speed of thinking, numerical capacity, inductive reasoning, and memory. One of the key benefits of this theory, for me, is that getting a breakdown seems more true. We can imagine, after all, that someone might have strong inductive reasoning abilities despite maybe not having high verbal comprehension.
But the issue with the theory of Thurnston is the very thing that was a strength for Spear man, which is that those who do well on one of these variables often appear to do well on others, indicating an underlying single factor of intelligence. But in fact, both of these theories have another drawback, and that's because they seem very restricted in what they think intelligence is.
Even the theory of Thurnston, which has seven variables, appears to concentrate mainly on what we would classify as book smarts. And then, in order to try to build on this, Howard Gardner introduced the theory of multiple intelligence to try to be more inclusive, which extended our ideas of what kind of stuff could be included as intelligence. And our intelligence was divided into seven by Gardner, and then nine by independent intelligence.
And they're separate in that they don't rely on each other, or they don't depend on each other, which means that your intelligence doesn't predict your intelligence in another field in one area. And again, I'm not going to write down all of these, because it will take a lot of time, but he expected logical-mathematical intelligence, linguistic intelligence, musical intelligence, spatial intelligence, body-kinesthetic intelligence, intrapersonal intelligence, and interpersonal intelligence. Later on, as well as existential intelligence, he incorporated the concept of naturalistic intelligence.
Of course, the power of this hypothesis is that it requires more than just book smarts. It takes into consideration lots of other human abilities. But is this all intelligence? Why do we need the word to be used? Wouldn't it make much more sense to refer to these as gifts or abilities? And it sort of depends on whether or not we think that intellect versus ability has some effect on naming them.
It seems to me that it only makes a difference if you assign a certain weight to this word intelligence, that somehow, by naming this intelligence, you make it more important or more serious than it was before when it was just a talent, and I don't really know if I agree with that. Either way, it seems to me that it is necessary and worthwhile. Another concern with this hypothesis is that there is simply not a lot of proof to support it, and this has to do partly with the fact that there is no real way to evaluate it.
I know that people who have heard of this theory before, or heard of items such as various learning styles that emerge from this theory, may come as a surprise. It really sounds like a nice idea to me, but it's just not backed by research as of now. Robert Sternberg put forward the last theory I want to speak about, and that is the triarchic theory of intelligence. With Gardner, Sternberg agreed on the presence of multiple intelligence, but he said that three of them were not seven, eight, or nine.
Sternberg narrowed his concept of intelligence to activities that he believed would contribute to success in the real world. It includes logical intelligence, creative intelligence, and practical intelligence, or problem solving skill. He deliberately chose stuff that he believed had contributed to results in the real world. Another advantage was that stuff along these lines can be calculated accurately because it's pretty easy to identify, so it's easy to evaluate.
As for concerns, we kind of fall back on the initial one, which is that studies have shown that people who score high on one of these three intelligence often appear to score highly on the others. So, are these three intelligence only three sides of the same coin, really? And now that I've written it down, this kind of expression seems a little funny to me, but I think you're getting the idea, which is that maybe these three intelligence differ, because we're always talking about general intelligence, or G.
I would like to take a moment to move away from these various intelligence theories and talk about the question I first raised, which was whether or not there was one general intelligence or multiple intelligences. Since a lot of the study, taken together, seems to point in the direction of one general intelligence. And I will confess, on a personal note, that I often have difficulties with the concept of general intelligence. There are so many distinct traits, after all, that we can measure an individual. And so, I've been very suspicious of this notion for a long time. But there were two things that motivated me so much. I brought up the first one when I was talking about some of the issues with multiple intelligence theory.
And that's why does it all have to be intelligence? Does that word matter, really? Does that word have some meaning, in fact? And maybe it does, but maybe it doesn't, because it doesn't really matter when I go and listen to an orchestra, whether or not I claim that musicians have a high level of musical intelligence or a very high level of musical skill. Listening to it is always wonderful.
And when an instructor I had compared genera intelligence to athleticism, another thing that made me better understand and appreciate it. On the one hand, there are many, many factors that will make it possible for anyone to do well in sports: coordination of the eyes, pace, rapid reflexes, muscle mass. And just because someone in one sport is doing well doesn't mean they're going to do well in another sport. There is no reason to believe that a good volleyball player is going to be someone who has a gold medal in figure skating.
But that said, some kind of general athletic ability does seem to exist. And so it helped me a lot to think about intelligence like athleticism, because while you can break it into things like quantitative abilities and spatial awareness, there may be some kind of general intelligence underlying it, just like there may be some general athleticism underlying it.
GOD BLESSSS....