Is there one or multiple intelligences?
For most of the 20th century, the answer to the above question was resolved in a quite different way than it is answered today.
It was assumed that behind every truly human process lay the capacity to direct, adapt, and criticize, as Binet said. This capacity was understood to be general and present in all individuals and in all situations and contexts.
Thus, intelligence was understood as the capacity to understand and interpret reality and, therefore, was the capacity that favored our adaptive processes. From this perspective, it was used by the teacher when explaining, by the student when learning, by the writer, the painter, the artist, the citizen, the athlete, the ruler, and the scientist.
It was a unitary capacity, written in the singular, stable, fundamentally inherited, and used in the multiple human processes and activities required to think and adapt to the world.
The above interpretation dates back centuries, when Saint Augustine himself affirmed that intelligence was the principal author and driving force of the universe and the one that would allow us to achieve wisdom to a greater extent.
This previous conceptualization of intelligence has been seriously discussed since the end of the last century, particularly in the last two decades, by leading representatives of contemporary psychology, especially Gardner, Feuerstein, and Sternberg.
Gardner postulated the existence of multiple intelligences, valued differently by human societies and cultures. To achieve this, he highlighted the cultural nature of intelligence, empirically and neurologically pointing out that both the problems humans solve and the skills required to confront them are culturally determined.
Therefore, he believes that universal intelligence tests cannot exist, since they would not correspond to the multiple human cognitive abilities or to the diverse contexts. Based on neurophysiological studies, Gardner supports the flexibility and plasticity of human capacities and finds evidence of the multiplicity of capacities, highlighting seven in particular: linguistic, logical-mathematical, intrapersonal, interpersonal, spatial, musical, and bodily.
Sternberg proposes a diverse, though not multiple, view of intelligence. From the perspective of information processing, Sternberg identifies three types of intelligence: analytical, practical, and creative, and establishes that success in life will be associated with the level of balance displayed, not with the prominent presence of any of them.
Analytical intelligence is what has historically been called intelligence and is fundamentally associated with the processes of analysis and information processing.
This type of intelligence is the most demanded and addressed by schools and is expressed primarily in the skills to analyze, evaluate, and make judgments and comparisons, supporting logical and convergent thinking. Creative intelligence is practically unknown to mainstream schools and is expressed in skills of invention, discovery, and innovation, supporting divergent thinking.
Practical intelligence, essential for success in life, is expressed in the processes of adaptation to everyday contexts and in the skills of application, implementation, execution, and utilization. The latter is the most contextualized and historically and culturally determined.
Feuerstein, for his part, claims modifiability as the essential characteristic of human intelligence. For him, modifiability is the quintessential characteristic of intelligence; it is the character of characters, the only permanent one. In this sense, human beings are unpredictable, as it will always be possible to modify the expected path of their development; at any age, at any time, and regardless of the condition that caused the current cognitive weakness. The condition for this to occur is the existence of cultural mediators such as parents and teachers, who interpose themselves between the stimuli and the subjects to guarantee structural modification.
As can be seen, today there is greater consensus on the diverse, relative, contextualized, and variable views of intelligence.
In this sense, it seems very pertinent to echo the formulation made more than fifty years ago by Henry Wallon, who argued that the human being should be characterized in three dimensions: cognitive, socio-affective, and praxiological. The first dimension would be linked to knowledge, the second to affection and feelings; and the last, to practice. In everyday language, we would say that human beings think, love, and act, or that they are made up of the brain, the heart, and the muscles.
From this perspective, it seems quite appropriate to speak of three types of intelligence: one analytical, the other practical, and the other socio-affective. Each of them is relatively independent and autonomous from one another, as can be verified by anyone who recognizes the existence of people who are highly capable of analysis, interpretation, and reading, but very clumsy in everyday life or in managing socio-affective contexts. Do you perhaps know someone who is very brilliant cognitively, but with serious limitations in their affective, social, and emotional life? Or do you know someone who is very brilliant analytically, but with undeniable limitations in solving everyday problems related to managing money, schedules, and even their own time?
Consequently, today we should not speak of a single intelligence, but of three: analytical or cognitive, sensitive affective, personal or evaluative, and finally, practical intelligence.
To understand this last difference, a brief quote from a previous book is very pertinent, in which I revisit a very curious anecdote reported by Sternberg:
Sternberg (1996) recounts how Jack—who considers himself the smartest in the class—happily mocks his classmate Irvin, whom he has identified as the stupidest in the class. Every time they meet, Jack poses the same problem to Irvin: "Hey, Irvin! Here are two coins. Take whichever one you want. It's yours." After examining the coins—a larger nickel and a dime—Irvin always chooses the nickel, to Jack's delight. An adult who has been observing the scene approaches Irvin to point out that, even though the dime is smaller, it has more value than the nickel.
“I know that!” Irvin replies. “But if I picked up the dime, Jack would never ask me to choose between the two coins again. Instead, he’ll keep asking me again and again. I’ve already gotten more than a dollar from him for nothing more than choosing the nickel.” (Sternberg quoted by De Zubiría, 2002)
To go deeper: A child's behavior may be due to a different intelligence style.