Detecting Intelligence

It is easy to find people who mistake sophisticated words, rhetorical manipulation, a precise memory, and education as indicators of intelligence.  Nevertheless, not one of these things pertains to how intelligent a person is.  A person can speak persuasively without having any substance or consistency behind their words.  A person can remember information accurately without the capacity for thorough, critical analysis of that information.  The same holds for education: that a person has been taught information by others or by self-education does not mean that he or she knows how to comprehend and apply it, much less how to detect the numerous errors that infest false worldviews or identify the very precise facts that often go totally undiscovered by public educators [1].

Intelligence, being nothing more than a person's ability to grasp and reason with the laws of logic, is not present because of any of the aforementioned qualities.  It is something within the intellect of an individual, accessible to them directly via thought, but apparent to others only by outward communication.  However, as already clarified, communication that sounds sophisticated is not necessarily intelligent.  How easy it is to convince people that one is intelligent simply by using words they are not familiar with!  It is also true that a lack of excellence in articulation in no way means that a person lacks intelligence--though many people erroneously believe this as well.

Just because a person is quiet or verbally clumsy does not mean that he or she is unintelligent.  There is a difference, after all, between being unintelligent and not being able to effectively express intelligence.  Some highly intelligent people may even not be concerned with alerting other people to the fact that they possess great intellectual ability.  It is unfortunate that superficial people overlook genuine intelligence while misidentifying some other characteristic as a confirmation of it.  When this occurs on a significant scale, it pollutes a society's understanding of rationality and of how to determine if a person is rational.

As I have explained elsewhere, the best way to examine someone's intelligence--or lack of it--is to learn about their worldview.  Complete worldview consistency, the discovery (on their own) of specific metaphysical/epistemological truths that are rarely acknowledged even by historical and contemporary philosophers [1], and an absence of fallacies are the highest confirmations of their intelligence.  Still, it is important to emphasize that even people who do not communicate intelligence well might possess it anyway.

After all, intelligence is about how a person grasps logic and truth independent of other people being involved.  Pursuing truth is about oneself before it is ever about another person.  To share truths, one must first know them; to know truths, one must exercise rationality, which is the same as exercising intelligence.  As long as you know truths, it doesn't ultimately matter if you are capable of communicating them to another person with great clarity or articulation--it is more important that you know important truths yourself than it is to come across as intelligent to others, especially since so many people are deeply confused about what intelligence is in the first place.


[1].  One example is the following: the laws of logic exist by necessity even if there are no material objects and no minds--even if no God, and thus no creation, exists.  They exist because it is impossible for them not to.  This means that it is impossible for there to be "absolutely nothing" in existence or for there to be nothing outside of one's mind, meaning that the mere necessary existence of logic refutes both anti-realism and solipsism.  Good luck finding a single historical text or lecture that brings up any of these foundational points!