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After reading this article you will learn about the classical views on intelligence.
While scientific and empirical attempts to understand and define “intelligence” are barely a hundred years old, philosophers had always tried to understand, “intelligence” and there were different approaches. The earliest view of intelligence was that it was a very general capacity, endowed in people to different degrees. Such a view was called the “monarchic” view.
According to this view, the degree of intelligence possessed by an individual influences or even determines his degree of success or failure in all spheres of action. Intelligence was viewed as an all powerful capacity, without which no human action was possible.
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A person’s ability in all spheres of activity ranging from very simple actions like holding a pencil, to arriving at an epoch-making scientific discovery, was determined by a fixed quantum of intelligence, he or she is endowed with. Naturally it was believed that every individual was born with a certain predetermined amount of intelligence.
Briefly this view held that every person is born with a fixed amount of intelligence which enters into all his or her actions excluding basic biological reflexes. It may be seen that such a view provided the background to the classification of people as dull, stupid, average, very intelligent, genius etc.
This view, however was confronted by a few basic questions like what are the factors responsible for individual differences, how can we explain the fact that the same individual is very successful in certain actions and not others, etc. Thus an individual who is very good at learning mathematics may not be so good at learning the languages. Such individual differences and individual variations could not be adequately explained by such a view.
The emergence of what is known as faculty psychology ushered in a new view of intelligence known as the oligarchic view. Faculty psychology attempted to explain behaviour by postulating the view that there are a few basic faculties or abilities which are innate, like thinking, memory, intelligence, and speech, which are the basic operations involved in various mental activities.
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These limited number of operations or faculties were assumed to be innate and independent of each other. The oligarchic view, however, suffered from a few limitations. One limitation was that the different psychologists who advocated the faculty theory could not arrive at a single agreed list of faculties. Different psychologists came out with different lists of faculties.
A more serious limitation was that an “intelligent” act or operation was found to depend very much on memory and thinking and other faculties which were claimed to be independent. Any act considered to be involving intelligence was invariably found to involve thinking, memory and other abilities. It was therefore questioned whether one could regard intelligence as an independent faculty.
A third approach to understand intelligence was called the “anarchic” approach. This approach was mainly advocated by Sir G. H. Thompson and is also referred to as the sampling theory. According to this view based on genetics, intelligence involves the operation of a large number of genes or genetic factors. Any particular “intelligent” act depends on a sample of the genes or genetic factors.
In view of this, the view practically admitted the impossibility of defining intelligence precisely. This view however did not gain much acceptance. The classical views presented above as may be seen were mostly based on opinions, conjectures and the biases of the thought.
These were, not based on empirical evidence and psychology, which was fast progressing on the way to become an exact science, started looking for more empirical and scientific ways of studying, analysing and understanding intelligence.