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 judgement 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, in being cognizant of God, 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. Work in psychology aimed at defining and measuring wisdom, however, suggests that the capacity for good judgement 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.

References

---

1. Sternberg, Robert J. (2003). Wisdom, Intelligence, and Creativity Synthesized, Cambridge University Press, New York.