Howard Gardner : the myth of Multiple Intelligences

Since 1983 there have been several modifications of MI theory.

[a] The original seven intelligences have now been extended to include „the naturalist
intelligence’ and - possibly - „existential intelligence’ (1999a: ch4). Naturalist
intelligence is picked out by reference to a valued social role found across many
cultures: people expert in recognizing and classifying the varieties of plants and
animals in their environment. This is the „first cut’. Naturalist intelligence is then
shown to satisfy all or most of the „criteria’.

Again there are the by now familiar doubts about how well the criteria are met. But a
prior question is why the new naturalist intelligence came to be proposed in the first
place. Gardner tells us that „those valued human cognitions that I previously had to
ignore or smuggle in under spatial or logico-mathematical intelligence deserve to be
gathered under a single, recognized rubric’ (1999a:52). This seems to imply that,
having reviewed the full gamut of intellectual activities, he realized that the taxonomic
aspects of biology had been given short shrift in his original scheme.

This thought is reinforced by what he says on existential intelligence - to do with „big
questions’ about one’s place in the cosmos, the significance of life and death, the
experience of personal love and of artistic experience (pp53-65). Religious and
philosophical thinking are also parts of the intellectual world; and these, too, were ill-
represented in the 1983 scheme.

All this lends strength to the suggestion that what really powers MI theory is the
attempt to identify all major divisions of the intellectual life. Crucial to the theory, as
we have seen, is the „first cut’.

[b] Since 1983, too, Gardner has become bolder about the significance of MI theory.
What began as a response to an external funder’s request - the extension of a pre-
existing interest in development in the arts as well as in Piagetian areas into a more
global survey of „human potential’ - has generated

a new definition of human nature, cognitively speaking. Whereas Socrates
saw man as the rational animal and Freud stressed the irrationality of human
beings, I (with due tentativeness) have described human beings as those
organisms who possess a basic set of seven, eight, or a dozen intelligences
(1999a:44).

This is a bold claim. If my contention that Gardner has not succeeded in picking out
the intelligences is right, his claim won’t do. In any case, why make intellectual

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