I listed Gardner's > > eight criteria or 'signs' of > > an intelligence: > > > > Potential isolation by brain damage. > > The existence of idiots savants, prodigies and other exceptional > > individuals. > > An identifiable core operation or set of operations. > > A distinctive development history, along with a definable set of > > 'end-state' performances. > > An evolutionary history and evolutionary plausibility. > > Support from experimental psychological tasks. > > Support from psychometric findings. > > Susceptibility to encoding in a symbol system.
Michael Smith wrote: > Yeah, but what's the basis for all these "criteria"? Isn't it > just a way of ginning up an apparent general faculty or > faculties whether or not they actually exist? Posing the > question in this elaborately way guarantees the answer. > Have you stopped beating your wife? Yes or no! It's not a "question." Gardner used these as criteria in _empirical_ research (going beyond the study of Latin and the OED). For example, a human ability isn't a kind of intelligence if it can't be lost due to brain damage. These criteria were needed, as I understand it, to keep the number of different kinds of intelligences down, so that they actually contribute something to our knowledge. me: > > If one is teaching, it's good to have > > some guidance for the different dimensions of human skills. Michael Smith: > It's not good enough for a teacher to know what his inmates, > er students, are good at, and what not? How does the teacher > gain from this "dimensionalization" of skills? Is there any real > pedagogical payoff here? well, we don't want to go from the empirical all the way to the empiricist. Actual experience with real-world students is very important to teaching. But it helps to have a broader framework. To my mind, it makes the most sense to go back in forth -- in a dialectic, if you will -- between the concrete and the abstract, rather than being caught up in either total observation of "facts" or total abstract theorizing. -- Jim Devine / "The trick for radicals has been and will be to make of earth a heaven, but without blind faith." -- Mike Yates.
