The Components Of Intelligence

There are several important components of intelligence: rationality entails consistency, autonomy, and an unwillingness to make assumptions, no matter how appealing or "small" they are.  Each one of these interlocks with the others to constitute intelligence, which is nothing other than sheer rationality.  This is because the absence of just one of these renders a person's alignment with reason merely partial.  Otherwise, a person might avoid some philosophical assumptions while accepting others without even thinking about it, or they might have a worldview with no assumptions and fallacies but have simply inherited it from someone else without contemplation as opposed to initially thinking of some things on their own or at least carefully examining the claims they encounter.

Take just one of these components by itself.  Without consistency, one's grasp of reason is haphazard and incomplete at best.  There is no thorough level of intelligence without consistent intentionality.  Short of intentionally reasoning truths out, there is only blind assumptions that may or may not be true, but either way assumptions are epistemologically invalid and therefore irrational.  Short of consistently clinging to reason, moreover, a person is either only partly devoted to rationality and thus cannot be truthfully regarded as intelligent in any holistic sense.  They might be rational in some cases, but they lack any sort of deeper alignment with reason.  The same is true if someone looks to others instead of reason itself (or to others in some cases to prompt certain thoughts and then to reason alone to evaluate those concepts).

Now, when it comes to autonomy being an inseparable part of rationality/intelligence, this does not mean that someone who has ideas brought up to them by others before they would have potentially thought them up completely on their own is not rational or autonomous; it means that even in these situations someone will never think that someone's personal allegiance to an idea confirms its truth or even serves as partial evidence for it.  Reason will still have constant and foremost emphasis.  A truly rational person will at least autonomously reflect on what others have mentioned or prompted before believing something they did not think of solely on their own in one way or another.

Almost everyone acts and speaks as if they want to be thought of as rational.  Almost everyone can also be easily baited into revealing their contradictory beliefs or statements and admitting their ultimate lack of autonomy.  This is one of the greatest ironies about the broad societal approach to rationality.  There are only assumptions and uncertainties, sometimes avoidable ones, where there is no genuine rationality, and yet it is assumptions that are defended publicly by non-rationalists in the name of alleged truths.  It takes a true rationalist to rise above this common lack of intellectual depth by not halfheartedly, randomly, or insincerely looking to reason as that which reveals all knowable facts and distinguishes what can be known from what cannot be proven.  Rationality, or intelligence, is within everyone's reach but only selectively acknowledged by many.