Intelligence Vs General Intelligence Essay

The first attempts of defining intelligence can be found in the Ancient world, where philosophers as Plato or Aristotle initiated the unfinished research on this topic. Since then, many people have postulated their own theories not only about what intelligence is but about its components too.

From Aristotle’s definition of the intellect in De anima as “essential nature activity [...] it alone is immortal and eternal . . . and without it nothing thinks” to Cattel’s (1987) view of general intelligence as a conglomeration of over 100 abilities working together in various ways in different people to bring out different intelligences, trends in intelligence viewpoints have varied immensely. This variability in theories and tendencies makes very hard to make a unique definition of intelligence, and even harder to describe the factors that compose it.

However, the theory with highest scientific consensus is the CHC or Cattel-Horn-Carroll Model, which is the composition of two of the main theories that were developed during the twentieth century: Raymond Cattel and Horn’s Gf-Gc theory (1971) and the Three-Stratum theory of Carroll (1997). McGrew (1997) and Flannagan (1998) proposed the first version of this model,

However, still others keep trying to prove that this relationship is causal (Laidra, Pullmann, & Allik, 2007), stating that student academic achievement heavily relies on general intelligence level. Another point of view less popular is that academic achievement and intelligence are non other that the same construct. Nonetheless, although there is controversy about the type of relationship between these two constructs, it is clear that there is a correlation between