Entry 16 of 44
Intelligence
intelligentia — understanding, discernment; inter + legere (to choose between)
Latin
From Latin intelligentia: understanding, discernment, faculty of perception. From inter (between) + legere (to choose, read, gather). Root concept: the capacity to discern differences and choose between them appropriately.
Established meaning
The capacity to learn, understand, and apply knowledge; to reason abstractly; to adapt to novel situations; to recognize error. In psychometrics: general cognitive ability assessed across domains. Intelligence implies a subject who can be assessed against ground truth.
AI industry deployment
'Artificial Intelligence' as an industry category name. 'Intelligent systems' applied to narrow function systems, recommendation engines, and LLMs alike. Intelligence benchmarks typically measure performance on held-out test sets — a proxy that may not generalize.
Semantic gap
The capacity to choose and recognize error
Legere — genuine discernment — has been replaced by benchmark performance. A system that scores well on intelligence benchmarks may fail entirely on problems that differ slightly from benchmark structure.