Do Howard Gardners Multiple Intelligences Add Up?
John White Many school improvement projects, in Britain as in North America, are currently influenced by the work of the Harvard psychologist, Howard Gardner. His 1983 book Frames of Mind and subsequent publications have claimed that there is no reason to associate intelligence only with the logico-linguistic skills tested by IQ tests, but that there are ‘multiple intelligences’ covering also musical, bodily-kinaesthetic, spatial and other fields. In this publication John White subjects Howard Gardner’s theory to philosophical critique. The essay focuses on the criteria used to identify the different intelligences, and therewith the psychological and aesthetic theories on which Gardner relies. Claiming to discover serious difficulties in Gardner’s argument for multiple intelligences, White then builds up an alternative account of the nature of intelligence and compares it with the traditional account found in the writings of Galton, Burt, Jenson and most recently in Hernstein’s and Mur
