Oldenburg, Ninell ; Dhar, Ruchira & Søgaard, Anders: Realist and Pluralist Conceptions of Intelligence and Their Implications on AI Research

_Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence_ 40 (44):37791-37801. 2026In this paper, we argue that current AI (alignment) research operates on a spectrum between two different underlying conceptions of intelligence: Intelligence Realism, which holds that intelligence represents a single, universal capacity measurable across all systems, and Intelligence Pluralism, which views intelligence as diverse, context-dependent capacities that cannot be reduced to a single universal mea