Sentience–sapience relations are of particular interest because they contribute to determinations of what a human being is, how human beings are different from other animals, meanings that we can give to artificial intelligence, relations between artificial intelligence and human intelligence, and how human beings should behave. Sentience is what we share with other animals – the capacity to receive sensory impressions in an unmediated form from the various environments that we inhabit. This is exclusively a biological phenomenon. Sapience, on the other hand, is a marker of intelligence and learning.

What this means is that, despite the repeated denials by sociobiologists and philosophical determinists, human intelligence is composed of a vast number of volitional and intentional acts. Our approach to understanding the concepts and practices of intelligence, sapience and learning, and the relations between them, is transgressive, as is, and should be, all our work on social categories. What this means is that our thinking and our writing cannot be enframed in genetic, epigenetic, deterministic, physicalist and scientistic understandings of mind-to-world and world-to-mind relations. It is also an acknowledgement that these enframings generally and specifically carry a heavy load – a burden of slavery, discrimination, inequality, carelessness and cruelty.

‘Our thinking and our writing cannot be enframed in genetic, epigenetic, deterministic, physicalist and scientistic understandings of mind-to-world and world-to-mind relations.’

The genealogy of intelligence, sapience and learning, comprises many horrific applications, some of them originating from the now-discredited work of Francis Galton. Galton subscribed to a deterministic version of science, incorporating unchallenged beliefs in innate superiority. His book Hereditary Genius (1869) argued that intellectual talents were largely inherited and distributed unequally among the population. His own family tree, and that of other wealthy families, featured prominently in his analysis.

One of Galton’s most significant, and most dangerous, contributions was to develop the field of eugenics, advocating for selective breeding to enhance human intelligence. This has been used to justify the selective extermination and sterilisation of different social and ethnic groups, a practice which led to the holocaust, and still continues in some places today, for example, the targeting of the Uyghurs in China (US Department of State, 2023).

Figure 1: Francis Galton at M. Bertillon’s Biometrics Laboratory, 1893 (Creative Commons Licence)

An example of this cruelty and discrimination can be found in the history of the United States of America. In August 1964, the North Carolina Eugenics Board was convened to decide if a 20-year-old black woman should be sterilised. She was a single mother with one child who lived in a home for African American adults with intellectual disabilities in Goldsboro. She had been forced to take an IQ test, resulting in a score of 62, and was said to have displayed ‘aggressive behaviour and sexual promiscuity’ (Price et al., 2020, p. 1). Both her parents were dead and she had received only a limited education. Because of all these factors, the Board decided that she was not capable of rehabilitation. Instead, they decided, for the protection of the community, that she should be sterilised. The reason given was that she was ‘feebleminded’ (Price et al., 2020, p. 1) and it was thought unable to assume responsibility for herself and her child. Her forced sterilisation was one of nearly 60,000 sterilisations in 32 states in the US during the 20th century (Kluchin, 2009). 

The North Carolina Eugenics Board that made this sterilisation order was composed of white, economically affluent, men, who believed that American society would be improved by increasing the number of Anglo-Saxon and Nordic children, whose parents it was assumed would have high IQs, and in turn by restricting the number of children of immigrant, black and indigenous people and those with disabilities. In plain sight and with no attempt to conceal their motivation, a majority population declared a particular subset of a population to be less capable of good parenting and reproductive capacity. Intelligence as a concept and as a practice was being significantly reformed and reconstituted.

Figure 2: Eugenics Society Exhibition, 1930 (Creative Commons Licence)

What can we learn from these examples of slavery, discrimination, inequality, carelessness and cruelty? In a book, Intelligence, Sapience and Learning: Concepts, Framings and Practices, that we recently published, we make the point among many others, that the language we use and conceptual framing we employ in our work is and should be sensitive to the values, valorisations, and political and social frames that are used in any descriptions we make of our world. All too frequently, authors in the field we work in ignore this important idea.

References

Galton, F. (1869). Hereditary genius: An inquiry into its laws and consequences. Macmillan and Co.

Kluchin, R. (2009). Fit to be tied: Sterilization and reproductive rights in America 1950-1980 (pp. 17-20). Rutgers University Press.

Price, G., Darity Jr. W., & Sharpe, R. (2020). Did North Carolina economically breed-out blacks during its historical eugenic sterilization campaign?. American Review of Political Economy, 15(1), 1–14. https://doi.org/10.38024/arpe.pds.6.28.20

Scott, D., & Leaton Gray, S. (2024). Intelligence, Sapience and Learning: Concepts, Framings and Practices, London and New York: Routledge.

US Department of State (2023). Uyghurs in China. US Government. https://www.state.gov/reports/2023-country-reports-on-human-rights-practices/china/