Scott Barry Kaufman, in "Ungifted: Intelligence Redefined" has a graphic itself based on J.D. Wasserman "A History of Intelligence Assessment: The Unfinished Tapestry", which is available online.
Some few tie intelligence to adaptability. Definitions below the fold.
Herbert Spencer (1855): “Instinct, Reason, Perception, Conception, Memory, Imagination, Feeling, Will, &c., &c., can be nothing more than either conventional groupings of the correspondences; or subordinate divisions among the various operations which are instrumental in effecting the correspondences. However widely contrasted they may seem, these various forms of intelligence cannot be anything else than either particular modes in which the adjustment of inner to outer relations is achieved; or particular parts of the process of adjustment” (p. 486).
Alexander Bain (1868): “The functions of Intellect, Intelligence, or Thought, are known by such names as Memory, Judgment, Abstraction, Reason, Imagination” (p. 82).
Hermann Ebbinghaus (1908): “Intelligence means organization of ideas, manifold interconnection of all those ideas which ought to enter into a unitary group because of the natural relations of the objective facts represented by them. The discovery of a physical law in a multitude of phenomena apparently unrelated, the interpretation of an historical event of which only a few details are directly known, are examples of intelligence thought which takes into consideration innumerable experiences neglected by the less intelligent mind. Neither memory alone nor attention alone is the foundation of intelligence, but a union of memory and attention” (pp. 150–151).
Charles S. Myers (1910): “As the organism becomes endowed with an increasingly larger number of mutually incompatible modes of reaction, the intelligent aspect apparently comes more and more to the fore while the instinctive aspect apparently recedes pari passu into the background” (p. 214).
C. Lloyd Morgan (1910): “I regard the presence of implicit expectation (in the lower forms) or explicit anticipation (in the higher forms) as distinguishing marks or criteria of intelligence. In other words for the intelligent organism the present experience at any given moment comprises more or less ‘meaning’ in terms of previously-gotten experience” (p. 220).
H. Wildon Carr (1910): “Intelligence is the power of using categories, it is knowledge of the relations of things. It is a knowledge that gives us the representation of a world of objects externally related to one another, a world of objects in space, or measurable actions and reactions. . . . Intelligence is an outward view of things, never reaching the actual reality it seeks to know” (pp. 232–233).
Alfred Binet and Théodore Simon (Binet, 1911/1916): “Intelligence serves in the discovery of truth. But the conception is still too narrow; and we return to our favorite theory; the intelligence marks itself by the best possible adaptation of the individual to his environment” (pp. 300–301).
William Stern (1914): “Intelligence is a general capacity of an individual consciously to adjust his thinking to new requirements: it is general mental adaptability to new problems and conditions of life” (p. 3).
M. E. Haggerty (1921). “In my thinking the word intelligence does not denote a single mental process capable of exact analytic definition. It is a practical concept of connoting a group of complex mental processes traditionally defined in systematic psychologies as sensation, percep - tion, association, memory, imagination, discrimination, judgment and reasoning “(p. 212).
V. A. C. Henmon (1921): “Intelligence . . . involves two factors—the capacity for knowledge and knowledge possessed” (p. 195).
Joseph Peterson (1921): “Intelligence seems to be a biological mechanism by which the effects of a complexity of stimuli are brought together and given a somewhat unified effect in behavior. It is a mechanism for adjustment and control, and is operated by internal as well as by external stimuli. The degree of a person’s intelligence increases with his range of receptivity to stimuli and the consistency of his organization of responses to them” (p. 198).
Rudolf Pintner (1921): “I have always thought of intelligence as the ability of the individual to adapt himself adequately to relatively new situations in life. It seems to include the capacity for getting along well in all sorts of situations. This implies ease and rapidity in making adjustments and, hence, ease in breaking old habits and in forming new ones” (p. 139).
Lewis M. Terman (1921): “The essential difference, therefore, is in the capacity to form concepts to relate in diverse ways, and to grasp their significance: An individual is intelligent in proportion as he is able to carry on abstract thinking ” (p. 128; emphasis in original).
Edward L. Thorndike (1921): “Realizing that definitions and distinctions are pragmatic, we may then define intellect in general as the power of good responses from the point of view of truth or fact , and may separate it according as the situation is taken in gross or abstractly and also according as it is experienced directly or thought of” (p. 124; emphasis in original).
L. L. Thurstone (1921): “Intelligence as judged in every-day life contains at least three psychologically differentiable components: a) the capacity to inhibit an instinctive adjustment, b) the capacity to redefine the inhibited instinctive adjustment in the light of imaginally experienced trial and error, c) the volitional capacity to realize the modified instinctive adjustment into overt behavior to the advantage of the individual as a social animal” (pp. 201–202).
Herbert Woodrow (1921): “Intelligence . . . is the capacity to acquire capacity” (p. 208).
E. G. Boring (1923): “Intelligence as a measurable capacity must at the start be defined as the capacity to do well in an intelligence test. Intelligence is what the tests test” (p. 35).
Édouard Claparède (1924): “[Intelligence is] the ability to solve new problems” (quoted by Langfeld, 1924, p. 149).
Godfrey H. Thomson (1924): “[Intelligence is] the ability to meet new situations with old responses and to discard those responses which prove unsuccessful” (quoted by Langfeld, 1924, p. 149).
David Wechsler (1939): “Intelligence is the aggregate or global capacity of the individual to act purposefully, to think rationally and to deal effectively with his environment” (p. 3).
Anne Anastasi (1986): “Intelligence is not an entity within the organism but a quality of behavior. Intelligent behavior is essentially adaptive, insofar as it represents effective ways of meeting the demands of a changing environment” (pp. 19–20).
Jonathan Baron (1986): “I define intelligence as the set of whatever abilities make people successful at achieving their rationally chosen goals, whatever those goals might be, and whatever environment they are in. . . . To say that a person has a certain level of ability is to say that he or she can meet a certain standard of speed, accuracy, or appropriateness in a component process defined by the theory in question” (p. 29).
J. W. Berry (1986): “At the present time intelligence is a construct which refers to the end product of individual development in the cognitive-psychological domain (as distinct from the affective and conative domains); this includes sensory and perceptual functioning but excludes motor, motivational, emotional, and social functioning . . . it is also adaptive for the individual, permitting people to operate in their particular cultural and ecological contexts” (p. 35).
J. P. Das (1986): “Intelligence, as the sum total of all cognitive processes, entails planning, coding of information and attention arousal. Of these, the cognitive processes required for planning have a relatively higher status in intelligence. Planning is a broad term which includes among other things, the generation of plans and strategies, selection from among available plans, and the execution of those plans. . . . Coding refers to two modes of processing information, simultaneous and successive. . . . The remaining process (attention arousal) is a function basic to all other higher cognitive activities” (pp. 55–56).
Douglas K. Detterman (1986): “In my opinion, intelligence can best be defined as a finite set of independent abilities operating as a complex system” (p 57).
John Horn (1986): “‘What do I conceive intelligence to be?’ This is rather like asking me: ‘What do I conceive invisible green spiders to be?’ For current knowledge suggests to me that intelligence is not a unitary entity of any kind. Attempts to describe it are bound to be futile” (p. 91).
Earl Hunt (1986): “ Intelligence’ is solely a shorthand term for the variation in competence on cognitive tasks that is statistically associated with personal variables. . . . Intelligence is used as a collective term for ‘demonstrated individual differences in mental competence’ ” (p. 102).
James W. Pellegrino (1986): “The term intelligence denotes the general concept that individuals’ responses to situations vary in quality and value as judged by their culture” (p. 113).
Sandra Scarr (1986): “To be an effective, intelligent human being requires a broader form of personal adaptation and life strategy, one that has been described in ‘invulnerable’ children and adults: They are copers, movers, and shapers of their own environments” (p. 120).
Richard E. Snow (1986): “[Intelligence can be defined in several ways:] . . . [1] the incorporation of concisely organized prior knowledge into purposive thinking—for short, call it knowledge-based thinking . . . . [2] apprehension captures the second aspect of my definition—it refers to Spearman’s (1923, 1927) principle that persons (including psychologists) not only feel, strive, and know, but also know that they feel, strive, and know, and can anticipate further feeling, striving, and knowing; they monitor and reflect upon their own experience, knowledge, and mental functioning in the past, present, and future tenses. . . . [3] adaptive purposeful striving. It includes the notion that one can adopt or shift strategies in performance to use what strengths one has in order to compensate for one’s weaknesses. . . . [4] agile, analytic reasoning of the sort that enables significant features and dimensions of problems, circumstances, and goals to be decontextualized, abstracted, and interrelated rationally . . . fluid-analytic reasoning . . . . [5] mental playfulness . . . able to find or create interesting problems to solve and interesting goals toward which to strive. This involves both tolerance of ambiguity and pursuit of novelty. . . . [6] idiosyncratic learning . . . Persons differ from one another in the way they assemble their learning and problem-solving perfor mance, though they may achieve the same score. Persons differ within themselves in how they solve parts of a problem, or different problems in a series” (pp. 133–134; emphasis in original).
Robert J. Sternberg (1986): “Intelligence is mental self- government. . . . The essence of intelligence is that it pro vides a means to govern ourselves so that our thoughts and actions are organized, coherent, and responsive to both our internally driven needs and to the needs of the environment” (p. 141)
For the citations I refer you to J.D. Wasserman.
Some few tie intelligence to adaptability. Definitions below the fold.
Herbert Spencer (1855): “Instinct, Reason, Perception, Conception, Memory, Imagination, Feeling, Will, &c., &c., can be nothing more than either conventional groupings of the correspondences; or subordinate divisions among the various operations which are instrumental in effecting the correspondences. However widely contrasted they may seem, these various forms of intelligence cannot be anything else than either particular modes in which the adjustment of inner to outer relations is achieved; or particular parts of the process of adjustment” (p. 486).
Alexander Bain (1868): “The functions of Intellect, Intelligence, or Thought, are known by such names as Memory, Judgment, Abstraction, Reason, Imagination” (p. 82).
Hermann Ebbinghaus (1908): “Intelligence means organization of ideas, manifold interconnection of all those ideas which ought to enter into a unitary group because of the natural relations of the objective facts represented by them. The discovery of a physical law in a multitude of phenomena apparently unrelated, the interpretation of an historical event of which only a few details are directly known, are examples of intelligence thought which takes into consideration innumerable experiences neglected by the less intelligent mind. Neither memory alone nor attention alone is the foundation of intelligence, but a union of memory and attention” (pp. 150–151).
Charles S. Myers (1910): “As the organism becomes endowed with an increasingly larger number of mutually incompatible modes of reaction, the intelligent aspect apparently comes more and more to the fore while the instinctive aspect apparently recedes pari passu into the background” (p. 214).
C. Lloyd Morgan (1910): “I regard the presence of implicit expectation (in the lower forms) or explicit anticipation (in the higher forms) as distinguishing marks or criteria of intelligence. In other words for the intelligent organism the present experience at any given moment comprises more or less ‘meaning’ in terms of previously-gotten experience” (p. 220).
H. Wildon Carr (1910): “Intelligence is the power of using categories, it is knowledge of the relations of things. It is a knowledge that gives us the representation of a world of objects externally related to one another, a world of objects in space, or measurable actions and reactions. . . . Intelligence is an outward view of things, never reaching the actual reality it seeks to know” (pp. 232–233).
Alfred Binet and Théodore Simon (Binet, 1911/1916): “Intelligence serves in the discovery of truth. But the conception is still too narrow; and we return to our favorite theory; the intelligence marks itself by the best possible adaptation of the individual to his environment” (pp. 300–301).
William Stern (1914): “Intelligence is a general capacity of an individual consciously to adjust his thinking to new requirements: it is general mental adaptability to new problems and conditions of life” (p. 3).
M. E. Haggerty (1921). “In my thinking the word intelligence does not denote a single mental process capable of exact analytic definition. It is a practical concept of connoting a group of complex mental processes traditionally defined in systematic psychologies as sensation, percep - tion, association, memory, imagination, discrimination, judgment and reasoning “(p. 212).
V. A. C. Henmon (1921): “Intelligence . . . involves two factors—the capacity for knowledge and knowledge possessed” (p. 195).
Joseph Peterson (1921): “Intelligence seems to be a biological mechanism by which the effects of a complexity of stimuli are brought together and given a somewhat unified effect in behavior. It is a mechanism for adjustment and control, and is operated by internal as well as by external stimuli. The degree of a person’s intelligence increases with his range of receptivity to stimuli and the consistency of his organization of responses to them” (p. 198).
Rudolf Pintner (1921): “I have always thought of intelligence as the ability of the individual to adapt himself adequately to relatively new situations in life. It seems to include the capacity for getting along well in all sorts of situations. This implies ease and rapidity in making adjustments and, hence, ease in breaking old habits and in forming new ones” (p. 139).
Lewis M. Terman (1921): “The essential difference, therefore, is in the capacity to form concepts to relate in diverse ways, and to grasp their significance: An individual is intelligent in proportion as he is able to carry on abstract thinking ” (p. 128; emphasis in original).
Edward L. Thorndike (1921): “Realizing that definitions and distinctions are pragmatic, we may then define intellect in general as the power of good responses from the point of view of truth or fact , and may separate it according as the situation is taken in gross or abstractly and also according as it is experienced directly or thought of” (p. 124; emphasis in original).
L. L. Thurstone (1921): “Intelligence as judged in every-day life contains at least three psychologically differentiable components: a) the capacity to inhibit an instinctive adjustment, b) the capacity to redefine the inhibited instinctive adjustment in the light of imaginally experienced trial and error, c) the volitional capacity to realize the modified instinctive adjustment into overt behavior to the advantage of the individual as a social animal” (pp. 201–202).
Herbert Woodrow (1921): “Intelligence . . . is the capacity to acquire capacity” (p. 208).
E. G. Boring (1923): “Intelligence as a measurable capacity must at the start be defined as the capacity to do well in an intelligence test. Intelligence is what the tests test” (p. 35).
Édouard Claparède (1924): “[Intelligence is] the ability to solve new problems” (quoted by Langfeld, 1924, p. 149).
Godfrey H. Thomson (1924): “[Intelligence is] the ability to meet new situations with old responses and to discard those responses which prove unsuccessful” (quoted by Langfeld, 1924, p. 149).
David Wechsler (1939): “Intelligence is the aggregate or global capacity of the individual to act purposefully, to think rationally and to deal effectively with his environment” (p. 3).
Anne Anastasi (1986): “Intelligence is not an entity within the organism but a quality of behavior. Intelligent behavior is essentially adaptive, insofar as it represents effective ways of meeting the demands of a changing environment” (pp. 19–20).
Jonathan Baron (1986): “I define intelligence as the set of whatever abilities make people successful at achieving their rationally chosen goals, whatever those goals might be, and whatever environment they are in. . . . To say that a person has a certain level of ability is to say that he or she can meet a certain standard of speed, accuracy, or appropriateness in a component process defined by the theory in question” (p. 29).
J. W. Berry (1986): “At the present time intelligence is a construct which refers to the end product of individual development in the cognitive-psychological domain (as distinct from the affective and conative domains); this includes sensory and perceptual functioning but excludes motor, motivational, emotional, and social functioning . . . it is also adaptive for the individual, permitting people to operate in their particular cultural and ecological contexts” (p. 35).
J. P. Das (1986): “Intelligence, as the sum total of all cognitive processes, entails planning, coding of information and attention arousal. Of these, the cognitive processes required for planning have a relatively higher status in intelligence. Planning is a broad term which includes among other things, the generation of plans and strategies, selection from among available plans, and the execution of those plans. . . . Coding refers to two modes of processing information, simultaneous and successive. . . . The remaining process (attention arousal) is a function basic to all other higher cognitive activities” (pp. 55–56).
Douglas K. Detterman (1986): “In my opinion, intelligence can best be defined as a finite set of independent abilities operating as a complex system” (p 57).
John Horn (1986): “‘What do I conceive intelligence to be?’ This is rather like asking me: ‘What do I conceive invisible green spiders to be?’ For current knowledge suggests to me that intelligence is not a unitary entity of any kind. Attempts to describe it are bound to be futile” (p. 91).
Earl Hunt (1986): “ Intelligence’ is solely a shorthand term for the variation in competence on cognitive tasks that is statistically associated with personal variables. . . . Intelligence is used as a collective term for ‘demonstrated individual differences in mental competence’ ” (p. 102).
James W. Pellegrino (1986): “The term intelligence denotes the general concept that individuals’ responses to situations vary in quality and value as judged by their culture” (p. 113).
Sandra Scarr (1986): “To be an effective, intelligent human being requires a broader form of personal adaptation and life strategy, one that has been described in ‘invulnerable’ children and adults: They are copers, movers, and shapers of their own environments” (p. 120).
Richard E. Snow (1986): “[Intelligence can be defined in several ways:] . . . [1] the incorporation of concisely organized prior knowledge into purposive thinking—for short, call it knowledge-based thinking . . . . [2] apprehension captures the second aspect of my definition—it refers to Spearman’s (1923, 1927) principle that persons (including psychologists) not only feel, strive, and know, but also know that they feel, strive, and know, and can anticipate further feeling, striving, and knowing; they monitor and reflect upon their own experience, knowledge, and mental functioning in the past, present, and future tenses. . . . [3] adaptive purposeful striving. It includes the notion that one can adopt or shift strategies in performance to use what strengths one has in order to compensate for one’s weaknesses. . . . [4] agile, analytic reasoning of the sort that enables significant features and dimensions of problems, circumstances, and goals to be decontextualized, abstracted, and interrelated rationally . . . fluid-analytic reasoning . . . . [5] mental playfulness . . . able to find or create interesting problems to solve and interesting goals toward which to strive. This involves both tolerance of ambiguity and pursuit of novelty. . . . [6] idiosyncratic learning . . . Persons differ from one another in the way they assemble their learning and problem-solving perfor mance, though they may achieve the same score. Persons differ within themselves in how they solve parts of a problem, or different problems in a series” (pp. 133–134; emphasis in original).
Robert J. Sternberg (1986): “Intelligence is mental self- government. . . . The essence of intelligence is that it pro vides a means to govern ourselves so that our thoughts and actions are organized, coherent, and responsive to both our internally driven needs and to the needs of the environment” (p. 141)
For the citations I refer you to J.D. Wasserman.
