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O N D I S C E R N I N G NEW IDEAS IN P S Y C H O L O G Y

H O W A R D G A R D N E R Boston Veterans Administration Medical Center and Department of Neurology,

Boston University, Boston, MA 02215, LI.S.A.

When con f ron t ed with a rambl ing review that manages to be at once condescending, sarcastic, destructive, and ad hominen, one is sorely t empted to r e spond in kind. I shall strive to avoid this t empta t ion and instead treat (as best I can in a b r i e f commen t ) the major issues raised by Sandra Scarr.

New ideas. Scarr begins and ends her review with commen t s on the alleged novelty of Frames of Mind, and I shall do the same. She accuses me of making bold claims for the novelty of my theory. I do believe that the theory is n o v e l - - f a r m o r e so than Scarf may rea l i ze - -bu t in fact the claims in the book are put for th in a very modes t way. T h e most that Scarf can come up with in her efforts to convict me o f se l f -adver t isement is the te rm "novel" on p. 277 and an allusion to "a largely discredi ted notion of intelligence" on p. 284. In fact, I state at the beg inn ing of" the book (p. 11) that "the idea o f mult iple intelligences is an old one, and I can scarcely claim any great originality for a t t empt ing to revive it once m o r e . . . What I hope to establish is that 'mult iple intelligences' is an idea whose t ime has come." No o ther reviewer has at tacked the book for grandiose claims and several have r e m a r k e d on the tentativeness with which the ideas are put forth. I sense a s t raw-man here.

Citations. Scarf accuses me of describing an o u t - m o d e d view of intelligence (she places the idea a r o u n d 1950) and of failing to cite c o n t e m p o r a r y workers. In fact, however , I cite and review ideas o f the major c o n t e m p o r a r y writers in the field: Cole, De t t e rman , Eysenck, J ensen and Sternberg , a m o n g others. Al though Chap t e r 2 is called "Intel l igence: Earl ier Views", the book is n o t - - a n d does not in any sense p u r p o r t to b e - - a review of earl ier or con ten tporary work on intelligence. I do not cite the work of Scarf, not out o f ignorance (it is generously cited in both editions o f my textbook in deve lopmenta l psychology) hut because I am not conce rned in the book with genetic factors, nor indeed with several o ther of" the classic questions abou t intelligence (e.g. sex differences, continuity across age, social class variables, etc.). I admit to not writing the review that I did not set out to write, tml I feel tlns{,llTed bv the charge of anachronism.

Intelligences. Scarr d a m n s with faint praise nay list o f intelligences and the criteria by which they are selected. But one of the innovative aspects of the work (which she does acknowledge) is the posit ing and invoking of a set o f criteria for

Author's reply to Sandra Scarr (1985) An author's Dame of mind, Vol. 3, No. 1, pp. 93-100.

102 H. Gardner

an intelligence which are not der ived f rom the traditional testing model. By carefully reviewing the critical evidence concern ing a large n u m b e r of candidate intelligences, I eventually arr ive at the par t icular list o f seven. T h e evidence is laid out fi)r all to see and to criticize.

Hav ing posited seven intelligences, I then devote a full chapter to a discussion of some of the p rob lems with the theory. In that chapte r I myself touch upon inost of the problemat ic issues which Scarf introduces as if they were ignored in Frames o /MbM. Moreover , I make it quite clear thai there is nothing magical about the n u m b e r seven and that, for o ther purposes , one might well conic up with a much larger set o f intelleclual competences , as I c o m m e m ¢m p. 50, "'it becomes necessary to say, once and for all, thai there is not, and Ihere can never be, a single i r refutable and universally accepted list o f h u m a n intelligences. T h e r e will never he a mas te r list o f three, seven, or three hund red intelligences". I go on to point out that lists will always reflect the lister's criteria and goals. As for Scarr 's own p roposed list o f intelligences, I can only say that my criteria exist and she (or anyone else) is welcome to apply them to suitable candidates and de t e rmine whe ther they pass nmster . Verdict: criticisms put forth as novel instead signal selective read ing or selective memory .

Politics. I am Dankly amazed hy the claim that the book is politically motivated. Not that I quest ion the possibility o f political motivation per se, but ra ther that there is no a r g u m e n t here, only a series of slurs. Certainly the Van Leer Foundat ion , which i i m d e d the study on which Frames o/Mind is based, inade no e f for t whatever to inf luence the research or the conclusions. T h r e e more books by Rober t LeVine, Israel Schleffler and Merry White will emana te f rom that Project and I defy any individual to find a consistent political agenda in this set o f books.

As an indication of my "politics", I am labeled as a inelnber of a so-called Cambr idge set, and saddled with a set o f accompanying prejudices. Anyone who knows the intellectual geog raphy of Cambr idge is aware that Cambr idge contains the full range of at t i tudes about intelligence and intelligence testing. I have had no contact of any substantive sort with any of the individuals whom Scarf names or alludes to. T h e y would resent as much as I do the claim thai somehow we are in intellectual collusion. I conclude that politics is in the e y e - - a n d the p e n - - o f the beholder .

The t~ub O/ the is.~m': Te.~tmg-. In Fmme.~ O/ Miml I indicate the eno rmous inves tment of the scientific comnmni ty and the conmmni ty at large in a certain fo rm of intellectual a s se s smen t - - lhe shor t -answer t imed test. This investment is appa ren t not only in the intelligence test itself but also in many other assessments such as the SATs, GREs, Miller Analogy Tests and o ther "single-score" ins t ruments which are, on my analysis, close cousins of lhe WAIS or the Stantord-Binet . It is my conviction that many i Inportanl facets of the range of intelligences which I survey cannot be assessed adequately by ins t ruments of this sort. T h e r e f o r e what we normal ly consider to be 'intelligence" or scholastic competence encompasses but a small port ion of the skills and abilities which are actually needed to be compe ten t within h u m a n society. I am happy to re-label them talents, so long as linguistic and logical skills are also so re-labeled.

On discerning new ideas in psychology 103

Critiques o f the book which fall back on intelligence test scores, correlations, longitudinal continuit ies and the like as if they were beyond question exempl i fy the very malady which I have tried to expose. Such critiques assume that the range of" h u m a n capacities can be assessed adequately by pape r and pencil tests, and they treat the statistics s u r r o u n d i n g their usage as if" they were sacrosanct.

I am not one of those who claims that intelligence tests (or their kin) are o f no utility. T h e r e is no question that a consistently high test score is a decent predic tor o f success in school, though certainly it is no more so than school grades, and it is an indi f fe rent pred ic tor o f success outside of school. But I am one o f those who ['eel that far ton much weight has been placed on these scores, which have come to symbolize cognitive meri t tout court. Moreover , I emphatical- ly reject the not ion that the famil iar and long-venera ted word intelligence belongs to a select g r o u p of psychologists and that others are bar red f rom propos ing al ternative conceptual izat ions o f the intellect. Scarf acts as if all reasonable people take intelligence tests with a grain o f sah. One wonders whether she is aware that at least 90% (and probably more) of all p rog rams for gifted chi ldren in this count ry have as the p r imary criterion an I Q score in the ' super ior range ' . This is certainly a fact. Perhaps it is even a political fact.

T h e point I seek to make is simple. I f one assumes ~hat intelligence is an entity (or a set o f entities) that is closely tied to school success, and if one assumes that intelligence(s) can be adequate ly measured by the kinds of pape r and pencil tests devised by psychologists, then one is not going to be open to ideas which call this not ion into question. T o put it ano the r way, one will not recognize such ideas even if one reads a book dew)ted to them.

N e w ide~l.~ revisited. And here I come to what I believe re) he the genuinely innovative aspects o f the theory of mult iple intelligences. As noted, I have chal lenged two dogmas of" educat ional psychology--(1) the belief that intelli- gence is (and should be) a p rope r ty closely linked to skills that lead to success in a m o d e r n secular school setting; (2) the belief that intelligence, however def ined, should be susceptible to assessment in te rms of a certain kind of measure , p ioneered by Binet nearly a centur)~ ago and now enshr ined by the ins t ruments p roduced at the Educat ional Tes t ing Service and elsewhere. Instead, I have p roposed a new defini t ion of an intelligence: a set of" abilities to solve problems, or to fashion products , which are valued within a culture. Moreover , I have p roposed that we identify intelligences on the basis o f sources that have not h i ther to been adequate ly surveyed, when they have even been considered at all: evidence about the evolut ion and organizat ion of" the h u m a n nerw)us system, and evidence about the range of p rob lem solving and product - fash ioning capacities which have been valued t h r o u g h o u t the world over the millenia. I f o ther efforts o f this sort have been launched I, for one, do not know of them. Nor, despite her s t rong declarations, does Scarr provide any evidence of cognate a t tempts by others.

Academic disputes have (unders tandably) the air o f a t empes t in a teapot, and I get little p leasure in st irr ing up the tempest . Typically such disputes impress readers more in te rms o f the rhetorical skills o f the disputants than in terms of the real issues. Fortunately, in this case, there exists a seriotis book whose

104 H. (;aidner

messages have seemed clear enough to most lay as well as most professional r e a d e r s - - p r o v i d e d that they have not been dulled by dogma.