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dependent on cultural context, and, above all, too subjective to be measured by answers to a mere list of test questions. Intelligence seemed to him, as it does to many other thoughtful people who are not themselves expert in testing, more like beauty or justice than height or weight. Before something can be measured, it must be defined, this argument goes. 38 And the problems of definitionfor beauty, justice, or intelligence are insuperable. To people who hold these views, the claims of the intelligence testers seem naive at best and vicious at worst. These views, which are generally advanced primarily by nonspecialists, have found an influential spokesman from the academy, which is mainly why we include them here. We refer here to the theory of multiple intelligences formulated by Howard Gardner, a Harvard psychologist.
    Gardner’s general definition of intelligent behavior does not seem radical at all. For Gardner, as for many other thinkers on intelligence, the notion of problem solving is central. “A human intellectual competence must entail a set of skills of problem solving,” he writes, “enabling the individual to
resolve genuine problems or difficulties
that he or she encounters and, when appropriate, to create an effective product—and also must entail the potential for
finding or creating problems—
thereby laying the groundwork for the acquisition of new knowledge.” 39
    Gardner’s view is radical (a word he uses himself to describe his theory) in that he rejects, virtually without qualification, the notion of a general intelligence factor, which is to say that he denies
g.
Instead, he argues the case for seven distinct intelligences: linguistic, musical, logical-mathematical, spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, and two forms of “personal intelligence,” the intrapersonal and the interpersonal, each based on its own unique computational capacity. 40 Gardner rejects the criticism that he has merely redefined the word
intelligence
by broadening it to include what may more properly be called talents: “I place no particular premium on the word
intelligence,
but I do place great importance on the equivalence of various human faculties,” he writes. “If critics [of his theory] were willing to label language and logical thinking as talents as well, and to remove these from the pedestal they currently occupy, then I would be happy to speak of multiple talents.” 41
    Gardner’s approach is also radical in that he does not defend his theory with quantitative data. He draws on findings from anthropology to zoology in his narrative, but, in a field that has been intensely quantitative since its inception, Gardner’s work is uniquely devoid of psychometric or other quantitative evidence. He dismisses factor analysis: “[G]iven the same set of data, it is possible, using one set of factoranalytic procedures, to come up with a picture that supports the idea of a ‘g’ factor; using another equally valid method of statistical analysis, it is possible to support the notion of a family of relatively discrete mental abilities.” 42 He is untroubled by the fact that tests of the varying intelligencesin his theory seem to be intercorrelated: “I fear… that I cannot accept these correlations at face value. Nearly all current tests are so devised that they call principally upon linguistic and logical facility. … Accordingly, individuals with these skills are likely to do well even in tests of musical or spatial abilities, while those who are not especially facile linguistically and logically are likely to be impaled on such standardized tests.” 43 And in general, he invites his readers to disregard the thorny complexities of the classical and revisionist approaches: “When it comes to the interpretation of intelligence testing, we are faced with an issue of taste or preference rather than one on which scientific closure is likely to be reached.” 44
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    Given these different ways