Type: article
Abstract: We have been debating what intelligence is for two and a half thousand years, and we are no closer to a definition that generalises. Psychometrics, cognitive-developmental theory, pluralism, the computational and connectionist paradigms, and the embodied and enactive paradigms each capture something real, and each fails as a general account. I argue that this is not a failure of effort, but a sign that we have been looking for the wrong kind of thing. Intelligence resists definition, but it does not resist recognition. What we do, in practice, is recognise it - and that recognition is graded, observer-relative, and dependent on task and context. Drawing on cases from across the biological continuum, and on the behaviour of current AI systems, I set out a description rather than a definition: a profile of six components, assessed as a shape rather than collapsed into a score. The framework I describe is deliberately medium-neutral: I treat the question of whether intelligence requires a biological substrate as open, rather than settled in either direction. That intelligence is something we recognise rather than something we define points to a more pragmatic resolution. For most practical purposes - deciding what to trust a system with, and under what oversight - "Is it intelligent?" is the wrong question. The better question, more modest and answerable, is "Does the system do what we need it to do, well enough, in the setting where we need it?"
Author: Riley, Jeff
Institution: Monash University
Language: English
Subfield: Philosophy
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7172477988