On what intelligence is.

Abstract

Despite much controversy over the exact definition of intelligence, most researchers agree that it is a concept labelled by a word, or even several related concepts labelled by a word. The present study applies recent theorizing about the nature of concepts in general to clarify the notion (or notions) of intelligence. This theorizing defines a concept as a person's unique and individual information about a category and a category as a set of things in the world. An example of a concept/category pair is 'dog', with the category being the set of all dogs and an individual's concept of dog being his or her personal knowledge of dogs. This knowledge can be used to place things in or out of the category. Different individuals may have somewhat different knowledge about the same category and a single word may label several different concept/category pairs. A concept of intelligence thus consists of information about a general category labelled by the word 'intelligence'. This study analyses three major concept/category pairs of 'intelligence': (1) Spearman's g; (2) intelligence as a property of behaviour; and (3) intelligence as a set of abilities. Each concept contains different information, refers to a different category, and should be used in different ways. Several recurrent issues, such as whether the word 'intelligence' refers to a thing and what things are intelligent (e.g. animals, computers), can be resolved by considering each issue in relation to these concept/category pairs. For instance, the word 'intelligence' refers to a thing only if one uses the g concept. Similarly, only humans are intelligent according to the g concept but animals and computers may be considered intelligent if the other concepts are applied. Recent theorizing on the nature of concepts can be used to clarify other important psychological notions.