Gardner's examples of high levels of development in the intelligences reflect his own
value judgments. He has in mind the achievements of selected poets, composers,
religious leaders, politicians, scientists, novelists and so on. It is Gardner’s value
judgments, not his empirical discoveries as a scientist, that are his starting point.
I have tried to show that whether we look towards the beginning or towards the end of
the development process, we find apparently insuperable problems in identifying
mental counterparts to physical growth. Since developmentalist assumptions are
central to Gardner's MI theory, the latter is seriously undermined.
‘susceptibility to encoding in a symbol system’
Gardner writes:
following my mentor Nelson Goodman and other authorities, I conceive of a
symbol as any entity (material or abstract) that can denote or refer to any other
entity. On this definition, words, pictures, diagrams, numbers, and a host of
other entities are readily considered symbols (1983:301).
It is important to see how wide the range of Gardner’s symbols is. They include not
only obvious ones like words and mathematical symbols, but also paintings,
symphonies, plays, dances and poems. It is because works of art are symbols in his
view that he can connect many of his intelligences with their own kind of symbolic
entities. For instance, it is not only words which are the symbols associated with
linguistic intelligence: this also contains such symbols as poems. Symbols in music
include musical works; in spatial intelligence paintings and sculptures, in b/k
intelligence dances; in intrapersonal intelligence introspective novels like Proust’s.
But the notion that a work of art is itself a symbol is problematic in aesthetics. The
main difficulty is: what is it symbolizing? Take a work of abstract art. Or a poem by
Sylvia Plath. What are these symbols of?
The whole theory of symbolization in art from Suzanne Langer to Nelson Goodman is
deeply problematic.
We can discuss this further later if you’d like. For the moment my claim is that this
criterion ‘susceptibility to encoding in a symbol system’ rests on a highly dubious
aesthetic theory. It is a long way from empirical science.