>>44909182>>44909142Canon also plays a huge factor into this too:
The anime canon has Pokemon thinking and acting more human like though its inconsistent with itself and the dex entries at times. Still at the end of the day in the anime world a regular Meowth learned how to talk... he didn't magically gain higher intelligence or anything like that he just learned how to talk. And he's the most 'human' Pokemon we've ever seen, so it implies that MOST pokemon have 'human-level' intellect they just can't naturally speak to humans in a understandable language to show us that.
The video game canon doesn't have anything like meowth in it, and doesn't show Pokemon as these intelligent beings, but more as slightly smarter animals... which contradicts Pokedex Entries same as the anime does, but in this canon/world we really don't see a lot of Pokemon on Pokemon heart to hearts like we do in the anime. We can't really see what Pokemon are thinking or saying without a translator. The best we've got is Rotom Dex/Phones, so there's that, they just don't translate for us... for some reason.
The Mystery Dungeon canon is similar to the others sometimes contradicts the Pokedex by having MOST Pokemon be more human-like naturally. In this world we see Pokemon on Pokemon heart to hearts and interactions, this world's Pokemon are equal to people (except when they are explicitly unintelligent like Slowpoke) and even have a more tribal human like society and community. This world's Gardevoir's aren't exactly super high IQ genius level smart, just protective as their dex implies and IIRC in Team Charm the Gardevoir of that group signified "Intelligence", but that really could have just been her role in the group, but not really a universal statement to all Gardevoirs.
Basically all the canons are poorly defined and not consistent, so its really hard to land on how smart they, or in general, any pokemon is.
