Frames of Mind

Science never yields a completely correct and final answer.

It becomes necessary to say, once and for all, that there is not, and there can never be, a single irrefutable and universally accepted list of human intelligences.

A human intellectual competence must entail a set of skills of problem solving—enabling the individual to resolve genuine problems or difficulties that they encounter.

A prerequisite for a theory of multiple intelligences, as a whole, is that it captures a reasonably complete gamut of the kinds of abilities valued by human cultures. We must account for the skills of a shaman and a psychoanalyst as well as of a yogi and a saint.

One might go so far as to define a human intelligence as a neural mechanism or computational system which is genetically programmed to be activated or "triggered" by certain kinds of internally or externally presented information.

An intelligence should have an identifiable developmental history, through which normal as well as gifted individuals pass in the course of ontogeny.

The roots of our current intelligences reach back millions of years in the history of the species. A specific intelligence becomes more plausible to the extent that one can locate its evolutionary antecedents, including capacities (like bird song or primate social organization) that are shared with other organisms.

Periods of rapid growth in human prehistory, mutations that may have conferred special advantages upon a given population, as well as evolutionary paths that did not flourish, are all grist for a student of multiple intelligences.

Using the methods of the cognitive psychologist, one can, for example, study details of linguistic or spatial processing with exemplary specificity.

Much of human representation and communication of knowledge takes place via symbol systems—culturally contrived systems of meaning which capture important forms of information. Language, picturing, mathematics are but three of the symbol systems that have become important for human survival and human productivity.

While it may be possible for an intelligence to proceed without its own special symbol system, or without some other culturally devised arena, a primary characteristic of human intelligence may well be its "natural" gravitation toward embodiment in a symbolic system.