Readers have asked me to express my views on Howard Gardner. In 1983, he set a prerequisite and eight criteria for calling something an intelligence:

• Prerequisite: A set of skills that solve problems and progress from the elementary to the advanced. The skills are not a set list. Those who have them often create new performances and discover new problems hitherto unknown. The skills must be socially valued.

• Criterion 1: Autonomy on the physiological level, that is, it has it own locus in the brain so that trauma to that area can destroy or spare it.

• Criterion 2: Autonomy on the psychological level, that is, we find individuals who excel in one area of competence even though they do not in others.

• Criterion 3: It is triggered by a specific input, that is, by certain kinds of internally or externally presented information.

• Criterion 4: It should have a developmental history, that is, it matures by stages.

• Criterion 5: It should have evolutionary antecedents.

• Criterion 6: Its autonomy is confirmed by tasks that differentiate it from other intelligences.

• Criterion 7: Its autonomy is confirmed by measurement, that is, instruments that rank people for its distinctive tasks indicate that it does not correlate (to a significant degree) with other measured intelligences.

• Criterion 8: It is susceptible to being expressed in a symbolic system.

Applying these criteria, Gardner (1983) derived seven intelligences:

1. (1) Linguistic. Mastery of the meaning of words and the syntax of language, with an ear for sound and an eye for imagery important for those few who become stylists or go on to write literature or poetry. Both they and rhetoricians must be aware of how language affects emotions.

2. […]