geometry

"Intelligences" vs. "Languages"

I was pleased to see The New York Times article by Siobhan Roberts about Stanislas Dehaene's claim that geometry is a unique human capacity just as is language (link here). He proposes, therefore, that humans have "multiple languages." When I originally developed “multiple intelligences theory” forty years ago, I used the analogy of eight separate computers (one for each intelligence). I was critiquing the notion of a single all-purpose computer which is the construct underlying the standard IQ view of intelligence. (In the vernacular, according to the traditional view, people are either smart, average, or dumb).

At the time that I developed "MI theory," building on the work of Chomsky, Fodor, and others, I was using “natural language” as my prototype intelligence. And within language, my focus fell on syntax—semantics, much less so, pragmatics not at all. 

Reading about Dehaene's use of the term "multiple languages" led me to blog (link here) that he might just as well have used the term "multiple intelligences." Dehaene responded that his use of the term language refers to a formal "computer-like language whose expressions correspond to human mental representations and whose minimal description length captures psychological complexity." He went on to say, "As far as I know, multiple intelligences are not so well defined."

When I reflect on my original list of seven intelligences, I acknowledge that the personal intelligences are not well-described in traditional computational terms. Selma Mehyaoui seems to be alluding to personal intelligences when, responding to Dehaene, she says that language is not just a matter of representation but also involves pragmatics. I also don’t think of bodily-kinesthetic intelligence in traditional computational terms, but as robots become “smarter” they may also reveal the extent to which the uses of the body can be captured in computational language.

However, I submit that four of the original list of multiple intelligences do indeed fit the Chomskian and Dehaene model of language: not only linguistic intelligence and spatial intelligence (Dehaene's geometry language), but also mathematical and musical intelligence.