PRACTICAL INTELLIGENCE

Among the most interesting and important pages of any handbook are the few pages devoted to the table of contents. More than simply an aid to finding a page number of interest, the table of contents provides at least one view – the editor's – of what constitutes a field at a given time. At a point early in the process of editing a handbook, the editor must put together a proposed table of contents. In doing so, a snapshot of the landscape that makes up a field as it exists in the mind of the editor is created. When more than one handbook or other similarly comprehensive reference work targets the same field at different points in time, comparing tables of contents can provide clues to identifying which issues and areas of inquiry are old and which are new.

Comparing the table of contents of the present edition to that of the former Handbook of Human Intelligence (Sternberg, 1982) is informative about the location of practical intelligence in the landscape of human intelligence, at least as revealed by two snapshots taken almost two decades apart by the same editor. Simply put, the former handbook did not devote a chapter to practical intelligence, although related issues such as the contextual basis of intelligence are evident. In fact, practical intelligence is not even an entry in the index of the previous work.