Category Theories

Few theories of intelligence have travelled as far beyond psychology as Howard Gardner's Multiple Intelligences Theory.

Intelligence is usually measured by giving people tasks and studying the pattern among their scores. But the mind doing those tasks is not a collection of test scores.

Most explanations of the positive manifold begin with a pattern that already exists: cognitive abilities are correlated, so what common influence might be producing the correlations?

A general factor can describe what cognitive tests have in common. But description leaves a harder question untouched: **what creates that commonality?

PASS reframes intelligence around four kinds of cognitive processing—Planning, Attention, Simultaneous and Successive—rather than beginning with a single IQ factor.

Piaget argued that intelligence develops as children actively construct increasingly powerful ways of organizing experience—not by simply accumulating facts.

Developmental theories ask a question that static ability models cannot answer by themselves: how does a child's way of thinking become an adult form of cognition?

Instead of starting with the correlations among test scores, information-processing approaches ask which mental operations produce intelligent performance.

Godfrey Thomson showed that correlated intelligence-test scores do not logically require one general mental cause. Overlapping samples of many processes can produce a similar pattern.

Open the technical manual of a modern cognitive test and there is a good chance you will encounter three letters: CHC.