Sensu


Sensu is a Latin word meaning "in the sense of". It is used in a number of fields including biology, geology, linguistics, semiotics, and law. Commonly it refers to how strictly or loosely an expression is used in describing any particular concept, but it also appears in expressions that indicate the convention or context of the usage.

Common qualifiers

Sensu is the ablative case of the noun sensus, here meaning "sense". It is often accompanied by an adjective. Three such phrases are:
Søren Kierkegaard uses the phrase sensu eminenti to mean "in the pre-eminent sense".
When appropriate, comparative and superlative adjectives may also be used to convey the meaning of "more" or "most". Thus sensu stricto becomes sensu strictiore and sensu strictissimo.
Base phraseComparativeSuperlativeMeanings
sensu strictosensu strictioresensu strictissimoin the strict/stricter/strictest sense
sensu latosensu latioresensu latissimoin the broad/broader/broadest sense
sensu amplosensu amplioresensu amplissimoin a relaxed/more relaxed/most relaxed sense

Current definitions of the plant kingdom offer a biological example of when such phrases might be used. One definition of Plantae is that it consists of all green plants, all red algae and all glaucophyte algae. A stricter definition excludes the red and glaucophyte algae; the group defined in this way could be called Plantae in sensu stricto. An even stricter definition excludes green algae, leaving only land plants; the group defined in this way could be called Plantae in sensu strictiore.
Conversely, where convenient, some authors derive expressions such as "sensu non strictissimo", meaning "not in the narrowest possible sense".
A similar form is in use to indicate the sense of a particular context, such as "Nonmonophyletic groups are... nonnatural in that ..." or "... computation of a cladogram ..."
Also the expression sensu auctorum is used to mean "in the sense of certain authors", who can be designated or described. It normally refers to a sense which is considered invalid and may be used in place of the author designation of a taxon in such a case.

Qualifiers and contexts

A related usage is in a concept-author citation, indicating that the intended meaning is the one defined by that author. Such an author citation is different from the citation of the nomenclatural "author citation" or "authority citation". In biological taxonomy the author citation following the name of a taxon simply identifies the author who originally published the name and applied it to the type, the specimen or specimens that one refers to in case of doubt about the definition of a species. Given that an author was the first to supply a definite type specimen and to describe it, it is to be hoped that his description would stand the tests of time and criticism, but even if it does not, then as far as practical the name that he had assigned will apply. It still will apply in preference to any subsequent names or descriptions that anyone proposes, whether his description was correct or not, and whether he had correctly identified its biological affinities or not. This does not always happen of course; all sorts of errors occur in practice. For example, a collector might scoop a netful of small fish and describe them as a new species; it then might turn out that he had failed to notice that there were several species in the net. It then is not clear what he had named, so his name can hardly be taken seriously, either s.s. or s.l.
After a species has been established in this manner, specialist taxonomists may work on the subject and make certain types of changes in the light of new information. In modern practice it is greatly preferred that the collector of the specimens immediately passes them to specialists for naming; it is rarely possible for non-specialists to tell whether their specimens are of new species or not, and in modern times not many publications or their referees would accept an amateur description.
In any event, the person who finally classifies and describes a species has the task of taxonomic circumscription. Circumscription means in essence that anyone competent in the matter can tell which creatures are included in the species described, and which are excluded. It is in this process of species description that the question of the sense arises, because that is where the worker produces and argues his view of the proper circumscription. Equally, or perhaps even more strongly, the arguments for deciding questions concerning higher taxa such as families or orders, require very difficult circumscription, where changing the sense applied could totally upset an entire scheme of classification, either constructively or disastrously.
Note that the principles of circumscription apply in various ways in non-biological senses. In biological taxonomy the usual assumption is that circumscription reflects the shared ancestry perceived as most likely in the light of the currently available information; in geology or legal contexts far wider and more arbitrary ranges of logical circumscription commonly apply, not necessarily formally uniformly. However, the usage of expressions incorporating sensu remains functionally similarly intelligible among the fields. In geology for example, in which the concept of ancestry is looser and less pervasive than in biology, one finds usages such as:
Readers unfamiliar with technical aspects of taxonomy might find it helpful first to think of everyday examples of the principles. When dealing with groups and parts of groups of different types of things, taxonomists sometimes wish to speak of the full set under consideration, and sometimes just a subset, but almost always want to refer to some particular part, to the exclusion of other elements; in issuing an instruction to poll the opinions of twenty-one members of a village community, a competent pollster would not accept the reactions of two heads of households, three infants, four dogs, five cats, six rats, and a tramcar. That would be taking sensu lato beyond good sense.
Instead the instruction should specify which sense should apply, such as sensu stricto :
or sensu lato :
The important thing is that in each example the instruction circumscribed the appropriate subjects; that means that the interviewer could tell which people were wanted and correspondingly, which were to be left out.
The circumscription could be in terms of very specific criteria:

or the criterion could be very casual, even vague:

However simple that may sound, it is fundamental both in formal science and in everyday affairs. Circumscription amounts to the basis for telling things apart, which in turn is the rational basis for all diagnoses, formal or informal.
In biological taxonomy, as the next section describes, the same principles apply, but they deal in various ways with circumscribing living things according to any relevant criterion. In modern biology the criterion usually has something to do with which creature descended from which kind of ancestor, in which ways it changed in the process, and by how much. However, in more general taxonomies, although the principles of circumscription are fundamentally similar, the criteria could be largely different in type as well as in detail.
In short, in every discipline the sense of circumscription in taxonomy must reflect the nature of the subject matter.

Examples in practical taxonomy

Sensu is used in the taxonomy of living creatures to specify which circumscription of a given taxon is meant, where more than one circumscription can be defined.
Examples: