Howard Gardner : the myth of Multiple Intelligences



without questioning their credentials. MI theory comes to schools „shrink-wrapped’,
as one teacher put it to me. This is understandable, since schools do not have the time
to investigate all the ideas that come their way that look as if they have some mileage
in the classroom.

The idea that children come hard-wired with a whole array of abilities in varying
strengths is appealing. But is there any reason to think it true?

Everything turns on the claim that the eight or nine intelligences actually exist. The
bare idea that intelligence can take many forms and is not tied to the abstract
reasoning tested by IQ is both welcome and true. But it’s hardly news. Many
philosophers and psychologists have agreed with common sense that intelligence has a
lot to do with being flexible in pursuit of one’s goals. You want to buy a washing
machine and check things out rather than rush into it. You vary your tactics against
your opponent when you are playing tennis. Your child is being bullied at school and
you work out what’s best to do. There are innumerable forms in which intelligence
can be displayed. We don’t need a new theory to tell us this. Long ago the philosopher
Gilbert Ryle (1949:48) reminded us that „the boxer, the surgeon, the poet and the
salesman’ engage in their own kinds of intelligent operation, applying „their special
criteria to the performance of their special tasks’. All this is now widely accepted.

This means that there are as many types of human intelligence as there are types of
human goal. Gardner has corralled this huge variety into a small number of categories.
Is this justified? Is it true that there are just eight or nine intelligences? Or is MI theory
a myth?

The rest of this paper will explore this question. It will examine why Howard Gardner
thinks that these intelligences exist. The crucial text here is a short chapter - of only
eleven pages - in his 1983 book
Frames of Mind in which he first outlined MI theory.
This is Chapter 4 of that book, and is entitled „ What is an Intelligence?’ I shall spend
much of the first part of the essay analyzing this chapter.

How do you know when you’ve got an intelligence?

How does Gardner pick out his intelligences? How does he identify them? In Chapter
4 he writes



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