Is System 2 Uniquely Human?

Abstract

The paper examines whether it can be said that older authors like Aristotle anticipated the claim that System 2 is uniquely human, made by some dual-system theorists. Anticipation is understood as implying a hierarchical relation between a prior, naïve theory, and a later, more elaborated one. Thus, it is examined whether the claim that System 2 is uniquely human made by dual-system theorists can be understood as a mature and empirically well corroborated articulation of the intuition that humans have unique cognitive capacities, or rather a vague repetition of that intuition. The first part of the paper briefly presents Aristotle’s theory of the soul and modern dual-system theories respectively. In the second part, dual-system theories are examined in more detail using three criteria. It is concluded that dual-system theories do not present a mature articulation the intuition about human uniqueness. Thus, it is not the case that authors like Aristotle anticipated these dual-system claims.