by Marian Mccain

Created on: November 30, 2006   Last Updated: May 08, 2007

Intelligence, Knowledge and Wisdom - an important trinity

It is hard to talk about intelligence and wisdom without also talking about knowledge.

These are three different things, and all three are equally important, but they are often muddled up in people's minds. First, let's take intelligence.

As Stephen Jay Gould explains very well in his book The Mismeasure of Man,' the history of so-called intelligence testing' is full of some pretty awful examples of bad science and a whole lot of instances of irrationality and prejudice masquerading as scientific truth. (Example: for many years it was generally believed that black people were less intelligent that white ones, which of course is utter nonsense).

You may find this hard to believe, but for a very long time the only definition of intelligence was that which can be measured by intelligence tests'. I kid you not! So the intelligence tests which are still widely administered today are built on some very shaky foundations.

What actually is intelligence then? Well until recently, the way most people understood it was that it is the ability to think logically, clearly, laterally if necessary (i.e. to be able to solve problems in novel and creative ways) and to be able to grasp concepts easily and be able to make connections between them.

In 1995, Daniel Goleman came up with the idea that there was also another sort of intelligence called emotional intelligence' which was the ability to understand and control one's feelings and postpone gratification. Since then, a whole lot more kinds of intelligence have been suggested, leading to the theory that we are all endowed to a greater or a lesser degree with not just one but many different types of intelligence. This is known as the theory of multiple intelligences'. Here's a recent list of different sorts of intelligence:
Kinaesthetic (Body Smart)
Linguistic (Word Smart)
Logical (Number Smart)
Interpersonal (People Smart)
Intrapersonal (Myself Smart)
Musical (Music Smart)
Visual/Spatial (Picture Smart)
Naturalistic (Nature Smart)

But however you define it, it is clear that when we talk about intelligence we are talking about innate levels of mental ability. Intelligence is about how we know and how well we know, not about WHAT we know.

What confuses many people, I think, is that the intelligence tests we took at school often included general knowledge questions. These, of course, don't measure intelligence at all, since you usually have to be a member of the same culture as the person

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