All Topics  
Sapience

 

 
   Email Print
   Bookmark   Link
 

 

Sapience
 
 
  Topics Sapience Topic Home

Sapience is often defined as wisdom
Wisdom

Wisdom is knowledge, understanding, experience, discretion, and Intuition , along with a capacity to apply these qualities well towards finding solutions to problems....
, or the ability of an organism or entity to act with appropriate judgment
Value judgment

A value judgment is a judgment of the rightness or wrongness of something, or of the usefulness of something, based on a personal view. As a generalization, a value judgment can refer to a judgment based upon a particular set of Values#Personal and cultural values or on a particular value system....
. Judgment is a mental faculty which is a component of intelligence or alternatively may be considered an additional faculty, apart from intelligence, with its own properties. Robert Sternberg
Robert Sternberg

Robert J. Sternberg , is an American psychologist and psychometrics and the Dean of Arts and Sciences at Tufts University. He was formerly IBM Professor of Psychology and Education at Yale University and the President of the American Psychological Association....
  has segregated the capacity for judgment from the general qualifiers for intelligence, which is closer to cognizant aptitude than to wisdom.






Discussion
Ask a question about 'Sapience'
Start a new discussion about 'Sapience'
Answer questions from other users
Full Discussion Forum



Encyclopedia


Sapience is often defined as wisdom
Wisdom

Wisdom is knowledge, understanding, experience, discretion, and Intuition , along with a capacity to apply these qualities well towards finding solutions to problems....
, or the ability of an organism or entity to act with appropriate judgment
Value judgment

A value judgment is a judgment of the rightness or wrongness of something, or of the usefulness of something, based on a personal view. As a generalization, a value judgment can refer to a judgment based upon a particular set of Values#Personal and cultural values or on a particular value system....
. Judgment is a mental faculty which is a component of intelligence or alternatively may be considered an additional faculty, apart from intelligence, with its own properties. Robert Sternberg
Robert Sternberg

Robert J. Sternberg , is an American psychologist and psychometrics and the Dean of Arts and Sciences at Tufts University. He was formerly IBM Professor of Psychology and Education at Yale University and the President of the American Psychological Association....
  has segregated the capacity for judgment from the general qualifiers for intelligence, which is closer to cognizant aptitude than to wisdom. Displaying sound judgment in a complex, dynamic environment is a hallmark of wisdom.

The word sapience is derived from the Latin
Latin

Latin is an Italic language, historically spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. Through the Military history of the Roman Empire, Latin spread throughout the Mediterranean and a large part of Europe....
 word sapientia, meaning wisdom. Related to this word is the Latin verb
Verb

In syntax, a verb is a word that usually denotes an action , an occurrence , or a state of being . Depending on the language, a verb may vary in form according to many factors, possibly including its grammatical tense, grammatical aspect, grammatical mood and grammatical voice....
 sapere, which means "to taste, to be wise, to know"; the present participle of sapere forms part of Homo sapiens
Human

A human being, also human or man, is a member of a species of bipedalism primates in the family Hominidae . Mitochondrial DNA evidence indicates that modern humans originated in east Africa about 200,000 years ago....
, the Latin binomial nomenclature created by Carolus Linnaeus
Carolus Linnaeus

Carl Linnaeus was a Sweden botanist, physician, and zoologist, who laid the foundations for the modern scheme of binomial nomenclature. He is known as the father of modern alpha taxonomy, and is also considered one of the fathers of modern ecology....
 to describe the human
Human

A human being, also human or man, is a member of a species of bipedalism primates in the family Hominidae . Mitochondrial DNA evidence indicates that modern humans originated in east Africa about 200,000 years ago....
 species. Linnaeus had originally given humans the species name of diurnus, meaning man of the day. But he later decided that the dominating feature of humans was wisdom, hence application of the name sapiens. His chosen biological name was intended to emphasize man's uniqueness and separation from the rest of the animal kingdom.

In science fiction
Science fiction

Science fiction is a broad genre of fiction that often involves speculations based on current or future science or technology. Science fiction is found in books, art, television, films, games, theatre, and other media....
, sapience describes an essential
Essentialism

In philosophy, essentialism is the view that, for any specific kind of entity, there is a set of characteristics or properties all of which any entity of that kind must possess....
 human property that bestows "personhood" onto a non-human. It indicates that a computer
Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science which aims to create it. Major AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents,"...
, alien
Extraterrestrial life

Extraterrestrial life is defined as life which does not originate from Earth. It is the subject of astrobiology and its existence remains hypothetical, because there is no credible evidence of extraterrestrial life which has been generally accepted by the mainstream scientific community....
 or other object will be treated as completely human character, with similar rights, capabilities and desires as any other human character. The words sentience
Sentience

Sentience is the ability to feel or perceive subjectivity. It is an important concept in philosophy, particularly in the philosophy of animal rights and in eastern philosophy, as well as in science fiction and the study of artificial intelligence, although in each of these fields the term is used slightly differently....
, self-awareness
Self-awareness

Self-awareness is the concept that one exists as an individual, separate from other people, with private thoughts and individual rights. It may also include the understanding that other people are similarly self-aware....
 and consciousness
Consciousness

Consciousness is a difficult term to define, because the word is used and understood in a wide variety of ways, so that it frequently happens that what one person sees as a definition of consciousness is seen by others as about something else altogether....
 are used in similar ways in science fiction.

See also

  • Sentience
    Sentience

    Sentience is the ability to feel or perceive subjectivity. It is an important concept in philosophy, particularly in the philosophy of animal rights and in eastern philosophy, as well as in science fiction and the study of artificial intelligence, although in each of these fields the term is used slightly differently....
  • Self-awareness
    Self-awareness

    Self-awareness is the concept that one exists as an individual, separate from other people, with private thoughts and individual rights. It may also include the understanding that other people are similarly self-aware....
  • Metacognition
    Metacognition

    Metacognition is knowledge of one's cognitive processes and the efficient use of this self-awareness to self-regulate these cognitive processes ....
     - considered to be one of the definitions of sapience
Also used as a Christian/fore name in the late 16th century

External links