ABSTRACT
A topic of perennial and currently prevailing interest, both in educational psychology and in public discussions, is the nature of intelligence and its relation to learning and performance, in and out of school. But because we cannot be sure, at the outset, that intelligence is a single, unitary entity I prefer to think of the problem as having to do with the nature of mental abilities. I emphasize the adjective mental and the plural form of the noụn. The adjective directs our attention to the fact that we are concerned with operations of the mind; the plural form of the noun implies adopting the initial position that there may be many kinds of mental abilities — to be brought under a single concept of intelligence only if the evidence so warrants.
