What Is Intelligence?

Would you like to try an interesting experiment that will provide you with some understanding of why so many people regard the IQ with such awe and respect?

Ask as many individuals as you can to define intelligence. When I write my paper for money, I often face with IQ and intelligence issue. The chances are that you will get a different definition from everyone you ask. And yet, though it is very difficult to define, most people seem to feel that they know what intelligence is. That is one reason for the appeal of the I Q: the need for a precise definition disappears if the concept can be expressed by means of a number.

But if an intelligence quotient has any meaning, we should first know what intelligence is.

Psychologists have been trying for years to define intelligence in a way that will meet with general acceptance. But each definition is inadequate in one respect or another, with the result that there are almost as many definitions of intelligence as there are psychologists.

The most simple definitions explain intelligence in one of various ways: as mental ability, ability to think, ability to understand, ability to learn, ability to grasp facts and meanings, ability to solve problems, and so on. Often it is defined as a capacity, rather than an ability, to do such things.

The more complex definitions usually include several of the factors mentioned above, as well as others. For example, David Wechsler recently defined intelligence as:

• the ability to learn;
• the ability to think or reason;
• the ability to deal effectively with one's environment;
• the ability to profit from experience.

Frank S. Freeman, another psychologist, has defined it as: the capacity to integrate experiences and to meet a new situation by means of appropriate and adaptive responses, the capacity to learn, the capacity to perform tasks regarded by psychologists as intellectual, the capacity to carry on abstract thinking.

A third well-known psychologist, George D. Stod-dard, formulated the following, more complex definition: "Intelligence is the ability to undertake activities that are characterized by: difficulty, complexity, abstractness, economy, adaptiveness, social value, emergence of originals — and to maintain such activities under conditions that demand a concentration of energy and a resistance to emotional forces.

Binet and Simon, who pioneered in measuring intelligence, defined it as "a fundamental faculty, the alteration or the lack of which is of the utmost importance for practical life. This faculty is judgment, otherwise called good sense, practical sense, initiative, the faculty of adapting one's self to circumstances. To judge well, to comprehend well, to reason well, these are the essential activities of intelligence."

Other experts have called intelligence "the ability to succeed with intellectual tasks," "the capacity to acquire capacity," "innate, general, cognitive ability," "the capacity to discern relevant qualities and relations, and to educe relevant correlates," and even "that which is measured by intelligence tests."

One of the world's foremost authorities on the subject has gone so far as to define intelligence as a word which "does not possess any definite meaning."

Such definitions are full of jargon and need to be defined themselves. But they do show how difficult it is to define intelligence and how widespread the differences of opinion and definition are.

The general term "intelligence" has been broken down by the psychologist E. L. Thorndike into three separate categories which he defined as: social intelligence, or the ability to understand and deal with people; concrete intelligence, or the ability to under stand and deal with things; abstract intelligence, or the ability to deal with verbal and mathematical symbols.

Behind these definitions there are three basic conceptions of the nature and structure of intelligence. The first sees intelligence as being the expression of a basic, general ability which everyone possesses in differing amounts. This general ability is drawn upon whenever we engage in any activity. The extent to which we can succeed in mastering these activities depends on the extent of our general ability.

A second conception of intelligence denies the existence of any general ability. Instead, it sees intelligence as the sum of many separate elements of ability. Every mental act involves the use of several of these elements; each different mental act requires a different group of these elements.

The third conception defines intelligence as the expression of an undetermined number of basic factors or primary mental abilities, each of which is used for a different type of mental operation.

There are many theories of intelligence, but for the most part they are variations and refinements of these three.

The fact that there are so many different definitions and theories of intelligence is largely responsible for the enormous number of different IQ tests, each of which measures something different because the theory behind each test is different. But these differences of definition pale into insignificance when compared to the differences which exist over the question of the source of intelligence.

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