Humans have an innate capacity for language. Our species has evolved over tens of thousands of years of natural selection the capacity, variable as all traits are, to acquire and process language. But this doesn’t mean that the man with a keen linguistic facility is an intelligent man.
It is important to understand that intelligence and language are distinct things. Intelligence in humans refers to cognitive abilities that involve abstraction and reasoning, while language is the faculty for the transduction and processing of symbolic and semiotic information.
People can speak well and know a lot while not being very intelligent. People can be highly intelligent and have difficulty in conveying thought in speech and writing or both. Put another way, those who lack the capacity for higher-order abstraction and reasoning often sound intelligent when they are really not very intelligent at all; then there is the neurodivergent individual who struggles to express himself but who can readily see and accept the truth.
Working in academia for more than thirty years, I am constantly reminded of the fact that people can obtain advanced degrees, publish in scientific journals, and give talks without notes and without stammering, while at the same time believing the most absurd and impossible things, for example that men can be or become women.
It is important to be aware of this distinction so as not to be beguiled by the glib individual. I am talking about the man who speaks or writes in a way that is confident and fluent but insincere and superficial. The glib individual might come across as overly smooth or persuasive, but he is shallow or dismissive of complex issues and obvious things. He lacks a genuine concern for others or a depth understanding of the subject matter.
A chief indicator that an individual is not very intelligent is the easy resort to sophistry rather than a serious effort to use valid logic and sound inference. When a person attempts to affirm the absurd or impossible he exposes his lack of intelligence, since facility in valid logic and sound inference would cause him to reject the absurd and impossible whatever his facility in language.
freedom and reason 