Absolutism and gradualism are two interesting ways of thinking about intelligence.

But what do these terms actually mean?

I’ll attempt to answer that question here before I present a few thoughts on absolutism.

Absolutism

Absolutism makes the difference in intelligence between humans and animals one of kind.

Humans are intelligent, animals are not. This is because humans, unlike animals, have rational intelligence.

Rational intelligence, on this line of thought, is intelligence tout court.

One implication of the absolutist view of intelligence is that there are discontinuities in nature.

Gradualism

Gradualism makes the difference in intelligence between humans and animals one of degree.

Animal intelligence and human intelligence are two points on a continuum. There is nothing that humans have of which animals have nothing.

Animals may be rationally intelligent to some extent but they don’t exhibit the same full-fledged rational intelligence that humans do.

Gradualism doesn’t rhyme with discontinuity; instead, it supports the idea that nature and, more specifically, cognitive abilities and behavioral dispositions are continuous.

Notes on Absolutism

Absolutism isn’t as popular as it once was.

It reflects a Judeo-Christian understanding of man’s place in the universe which doesn’t sit well with materialism and evolutionism — two doctrines that the vast majority of people working in the cognitive sciences today would be very reluctant to give up.

Much criticism has been leveled at absolutism, moreover. Here’s J.M. Coetzee criticizing its implicit anthropocentrism:

Ever since Aristotle’s time we have made the possession of intelligence — intelligence of the kind that enables one to construct intricate machines or ingenious philosophical theories — the crucial test, the test that distinguishes higher from lower, man from beast. Yet why should the crucial test not be a quite different one: for instance, the possession of a faculty that enables a being to find its way home over long distances? Is the explanation perhaps that the latter is one that Homo sapiens would find it hard to pass?
— J.M Coetzee • Foreword to, xi-xii

Coetzee makes it sound as if rational intelligence is just any old kind of intelligence and that another kind of intelligence could serve equally well as the distinguishing mark between humans and animals, high and low.

There is some arbitrariness, that’s true; but it isn’t all arbitrary.

Rational intelligence has given humans an edge compared to other species. No other species has managed to mold its environment as much to its liking as we have, and none is able to control and predict as much of it as we are. This is in large part due to science and engineering, praxes based on rational intelligence par excellence.

For this reason it is not wholly unjustified, and thus not entirely arbitrary, to accord a special place to rational intelligence among its kin.

It is ultimately arbitrary, however, since one might claim that the grounds on which one justifies the special place accorded to rational intelligence are arbitrary.

The ability to mold, control and predict one’s environment is an arbitrary criterion regardless of its evident usefulness in the survival game.

Bibliography

Coetzee, J.M. ‘Foreword’. In Second Nature: The Inner Lives of Animals, by Jonathan Balcombe, ix–xii. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.