Gessler asked:

In studying epistemology and educational psychology I have found a gap in some of the research
done. Dr. Howard Gardner developed a theory of multiple intelligences, or different types of smart
(visual, textual, aural, logical-mathematical, etc.) but no-one in the field of epistemology has taken this
theory and run with it. I would like to do some research in this area, and cannot find anything that I
can start with. Dr. Gardner has been very helpful in answering my e-mails and sending me materials,
but I have found nothing on the philosophy side of the issue. Got any ideas?

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In general, I think your best bet would be to look into the philosophy/ psychology of the creative
process; of art, if you wish. I don't think you'll find specificreferences to different types of
"intelligence" (please be careful with that concept, ok? It's really ugly.)... but you will find references to
the creative process in general and to various manifestations of it. People who come to mind
immediately are: Goodman and Arnheim (who really is a psychologist, as I'm sure you're aware), but
there are many others.

Here are some refs that might lead further:

Arnheim, R. Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye.Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, 1974.

Dienes, Z., and J. Perner. "A Theory of Implicit and Explicit Knowledge." Behavioral and Brain
Sciences22, no. 735-808 (1999).

Gibson, J. J. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception.Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum
Associates, 1986.

Kozbelt, A. "Artists as Experts in Visual Cognition." Visual Cognition8, no. 6 (2001): 705-23.

Lehar, S. "Gestalt Isomorphism and the Primacy of Subjective Conscious Experience: A Gestalt
Bubble Model." Behavioral and Brain Sciences(2003).

Tsur, R. "Metaphor and Figure-Ground Relationship: Comparisons from Poetry, Music, and the Visual
Arts." PsyART: A Hyperlink Journal for Psychological Study of the Arts4 (2000).

and:

Goodman, N. Languages of Art.2nd ed. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1976.

Goodman, N. Ways of Worldmaking.5th ed. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1988.

and:

Deliege, I. "Introduction: Similarity PerceptionCategorizationCue Abstraction." Music Perception18,
no. 3 (2001): 233-43.

Dissanayake, E. "Antecedents of the Temporal Arts in Early Mother-Infant Interaction." In The Origins
of Music,edited by N. L. Wallin, B. Merker and S. Brown, 389-410. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press,
2000.

Gasche, R. The Tain of the Mirror.Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986.

Gendlin, E. "Words Can Say How They Work." Synthesis Philosophia10, no. 19-20 (1995): 67-80.

Kosuth, J. Art after Philosophy and After: Collected Writings, 1966-1990.Cambridge, MA: The MIT
Press, 1991.

Levinson, J. Music, Art, and Metaphysics: Essays in Philosophical Aesthetics.Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1990.

Mehler, J., and S. Franck, eds. Cognition on Cognition.Edited by J. Mehler, Cognition Special Issues.
Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1995.

and:

BonJour, L. "Rethinking Intuition: The Psychology of Intuition and Its Role in Philosophical Inquiry."
British Journal of the Philosophy of Science52 (2001): 151-58.

Clark, A. Microcognition: Philosophy, Cognitive Science, and Parallel Distributed Processing.Edited
by M. A. Boden. 4th ed, Explorations in Cognitive Science.Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1993.

Guilford, J. P., and R. Hoepfner. The Analysis of Intelligence,Mcgraw-Hill Series in Psychology. New
York, NY: McGraw-Hill, 1971.

Veale, T., and M. T. Keane. "Conceptual Scaffolding: A Spatially Founded Meaning Representation
for Metaphor Comprehension." Computational Intelligence8, no. 3 (1992): 494-519.

That's about what I can come up with, offhand. I'm sure you've encountered much of it... I think what's
necessary is a comparative, synthetic, study of this issue. A fascinating question. Of course, if you go
back to Aristotle, you'll find in his works all sorts of categorizations of various intellectual activities and
types. But I don't know anyone who's really followed through with that in philosophy, in any specific
way, aside perhaps from Goodman.

Another perspective on different ways of thinking, if not different types of intelligence, would be the
phenomenologists and their contrasting of "scientific" and "natural" kinds of thinking and
"being-in-the-world" (which I have many problems with... but that's another issue). Here you'd have to
go to Husserl, Heidegger, perhaps Derrida, for example... and Dreyfus might be another source. In
fact, Drefus is quite nice, and approachable, and you might ask him about this issue. He wrote, e.g.,
Dreyfus, H. L. "Samuel Todes's Account of Non-Conceptual Perceptual Knowledge and Its Relation
to Thought." RatioXV, no. 4 (2003): 393-409.

Good hunting.

Steven Ravett Brown

I'm a secondary school teacher with a background in philosophy. perhaps the problem is that
gardner's theory has to do with LEARNING whereas epistemology deals with KNOWLEDGE. you
might need to look for clearer links between the two — even going so far back as Plato's ideas of an
immortal soul, implying we are born knowing everything and a teacher's job is merely to guide us to
recognise this. Curly topic — good luck with it.

Lyn Renwood