This month’s Socrates Café question:

“What makes someone intelligent?”

IQ, therefore I am.

5 Responses to “February ‘10 Socrates Café”
  1. Andrea says:

    A person is intelligent if he/she has intelligence. Duh.

    Seriously, though. Being intelligent is not just about being bookish or being a good student. Words and text can go in one ear and out the other, but an intelligent person takes what he/she has learned, and APPLIES it to life and to other learning. Intelligence requires not only knowledge, but UNDERSTANDING. We, as humans, are intelligent beings because we can REASON. A person is emotionally intelligent because he/she can try to FIGURE OUT another human being with more ease than others who aren’t so emotionally intelligent. Ancient Greek philosophers were all about CRITICAL THINKING to find the TRUTH. Basically, we ALL are intelligent, because we seek to find the Truth. Some people are just more intelligent than others because they have a greater mental capacity for the Truth.

  2. Brian says:

    Long ago I came up with the idea that there are many different kinds of intelligence. For example, animal cunning is very different from book learning which is very different from tactical knowledge. Bearing that in mind, I just Googled the idea Wikipedia and found that Howard Gardner proposed the same idea in 1983. He provided these different types of intelligence:

    Bodily-kinesthetic
    Interpersonal
    Verbal-linguistic
    Logical-mathematical
    Intrapersonal
    Visual-spatial
    Musical
    Naturalistic

    What makes intelligence is a mix of these different elements, with everyone being better in some things and worse in others. That being said, I would have to venture that what makes someone intelligent is being excellent at one of these things, or good at a few of them, or above-average at several of them.

  3. Andrea says:

    I totally remember those now! I was totally just focusing on logical. Nice, Brian!

  4. Joe Kossey says:

    Following up on the Andrea’s comment and the concept of **applying** what one learns and integrating some ideas from cognitive psychology, I propose that persons of intelligence excel at problem solving, being able to effectively analyze, synthesize, and use prior knowledge, including facts, concepts, and rules and/or procedures. Exceptionally intelligent people can do this across all “domains of learning” as Bloom defined them, namely, the cognitive, psychomotor, and affective. (For more info, search ‘Bloom’s Taxonomy.’)

  5. Russian Paul says:

    yes and Tod, did you know that it is also to be intellignet but you do NOT have to have the IQ! in some countries it is not a number that we have, but it is OK. I like what you say, Andrean! I am also a person who will talk with BIG words to say THINGS that I mean much more importantly! he haa! but it is true that TRUTH is to figure out REASONS and INTELLIGENCING is only for the two or more times before you can have musical or animal smartness. but you also see that animals are not as smart as you think because you can see that dogs sometimes eat foops or will also be sick and then EAT their sickness! so animals are not so smart as music, like a person who can play giutar and also many notes VERY fast!