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Sapience is the ability of an organism or entity to act with judgment. Judgment is a mental facility that is a particular form of intelligence or may be considered an additional facility, above intelligence, with its own properties. Robert Sternberg [1] has segregated the capacity for judgment from ordinary meanings of intelligence, which is closer to the sense of clever than to wisdom. Good judgment in making decisions about complex life or social decisions is a hallmark of being wise.
The word sapience is derived from the Latin verb sapere, which means 'to taste' but with the sense of tasting the meaning of life. It is generally interpreted in the English-speaking world as meaning to be wise, and the present participle forms part of Homo sapiens, the Latin binomial nomenclature created by Carolus Linnaeus to describe the human species. Linnaeus had originally given humans the species name of diurnis, meaning man of the day. But he later decided that the dominating feature of humans, was wisdom, hence application of the name sapiens. Ironically it seems he never considered humans to be just another kind of animal, it seems he held deep religious convictions (of the time) that man was a product of special creation and his giving a biological name was intended to emphasize man's uniqueness and separation from the rest of the animal kingdom.
While precise definitions of sapience vary, it is agreed that most humans (unless intellectually incapacitated) possess it. However, psychological research aimed at defining and measuring wisdom suggests that the capacity for good judgment varies widely in form and strength. It is an open question if humans are, as a species, particularly sapient in terms of making wise, long-term, maximum benefit for the maximum number, decisions. It is also open to question if other animals have some kind of sapience, even if in lower levels.
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- ^ Sternberg, Robert J. (2003). Wisdom, Intelligence, and Creativity Synthesized. New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521802385.