Intelligence

We have seen where learning disability stands in relation to inclusion phobia, the more fundamental condition that generates it. Another approach to defining it would be to define what it excludes: intellectual ability, and intelligence. We have not yet said what intelligence is, in precise scientific terms. Physics, for example, has Newton’s law of universal gravitation, chemistry Boyle’s law of the volume and pressure of gases, and biology Darwin’s law of evolution. Does the psychology of intelligence have its own equivalent law, one that governs its existence and provides an equally watertight foundation? What does it say? And who was its author? The empirical evidence from history tells us that the answers are respectively no, nothing, and no one. The definition of intelligence is at best a matter of consensus: not a consensus about the definition of something we know is there, but about whether it is there at all. This must therefore apply likewise to learning disability, since the relationship between the two is polar.