Understanding Human Intelligence: Features, Thought, and Judgments
Features of Intelligent Behavior
The difference between human intelligence and animal intelligence places humans at a higher order. Human intelligence is reflected in specific behaviors, including:
- Intentionality: Intelligence involves not only pursuing predefined goals but also creating and inventing new ones. Unlike the routine behavior of animals, humans can plan and develop new techniques.
- Adaptability: Humans not only adapt to their environment but also modify it to suit their needs through technological advancements.
- Ability to Reason: Intelligence seeks solutions to problems through deductive or inductive reasoning, enabling adaptation to the environment.
- Abstract Thinking: This includes the ability to create abstract symbols and understand relationships between them.
- Forecasting: Intelligence allows us to anticipate future events based on cause-and-effect relationships and empirical data.
Thought Forms
“Thinking” is a broad term encompassing various mental processes like questioning, problem-solving, reviewing, evaluating, reasoning, imagining, and remembering. Specifically, thought is the ability to form concepts and understand relationships between judgments and reasoning.
Concepts
Aristotle defined a concept as a mental representation formed by abstracting information. Concepts represent the essence of things, disregarding their accidental particularities. Key characteristics include:
- Universality: Concepts apply to every element within a particular class.
- Abstraction: They represent things regardless of individual characteristics.
For example, “home,” “tree,” or “woman” refer to common properties defining all houses, trees, and women. A concept’s understanding is the set of features it represents, and its extent is the set of elements to which these characteristics apply.
Judgments
Judgments are mental operations where something is affirmed or denied about a subject. Each judgment consists of a subject, verb, and predicate. For example, “Martina is studious.” Logically, judgments indicate relationships between concepts. “Humans are rational” asserts that “rational” applies to “humans.” The verbal expression of judgments is through declarative sentences.
Types of Judgments
Judgments can be true or false. If a statement corresponds to reality, it is true. For example, “Horses are animals” is a true judgment. False judgments occur when the statement does not reflect reality. There are also:
- Analytical Judgments: These are a priori judgments whose truth or falsity can be determined without experience. If the predicate is derived from the subject, the judgment is true. For example, “A triangle has three angles.”
- Synthetic Judgments: These are a posteriori judgments whose truth or falsity is determined empirically. The relationship between subject and predicate is contingent. For example, to determine if a statement is true, it must be checked empirically.