Episode 45: The Nature of Wisdom

So last time I tried to draw together all the other theories (I don't just mean the psychological theories, although they're the most salient right now, but also the philosophical theories) into an account of wisdom. I presented a model to you, a theory of wisdom developed by myself and Leo Ferraro from 2013, in which we are enhancing inferential processing through active open-mindedness, enhancing insightful processing through mindfulness, we're enhancing the capacity for internalization by internalizing the sage, and cultivating sophrosyne by our salience landscape naturally organizing away from self-deception and tempts us towards the truth (or at least what's true, good, and perhaps beautiful; that's perhaps a better way of putting it).

That coordinates the propositional knowing associated with inference, the procedural knowing associated with insight, the perspectival knowing associated with internalization together. That is directed towards realizing sophrosyne and that can help cultivate a more moral existence, the connection to virtue, mastery (in the sense of coping and caring), and meaning in life.

Of course, one of the criticisms I made was that the notion of meaning in life there was too simplistic, and it needs to be integrated with a much more developed account that's already in the literature. I'm contributing to that by work I'm doing with others on meaning in life; I pointed out that the Vervaeke-Ferraro model is missing participatory knowing, it's missing (or at least I think it misrepresents /misaligns) the relationship between the kinds of knowing. Understanding is missing, transformative experiences are missing, aspiration is missing, gnosis is missing, so all of these things need to be deeply integrated together.

I tried to suggest the beginnings of an account of how we turn basic understanding, which is to grasp the relevance of our knowledge, into profound understanding by integrating the account of understanding with the account of possibilities, so that profound understanding is the generation of plausibility by having convergence onto a contextually sensitive optimal grip that is transformatively transferrable in a highly effective manner in many different problem finding, formulating, and solving in many different domains.

I also brought out the idea that in addition to inspiration (this is a term I'm giving for more sudden insight-laden transformative experience), you can have what Callard calls aspiration, that's more incremental, it still can't be solved in an inferential decision-theoretic fashion (she agrees with Paul on that). She does argue though (and I agree with this argument) that aspiration must be considered a form of rationality which she calls 'proleptic rationality' because you're going to get into a performative contradiction: if my aspiration for rationality and my love of wisdom are not themselves rational processes, I'm kind of in trouble in my model of rationality.

Given all of that philosophy, what's missing (as I argued) is an extensive psychology of aspiration. I know one of my colleagues Juensung Kim is working on exactly that problem, and he's of course doing it in connection with a psychology of wisdom. I did suggest to you that we could see one of Callard's ideas of how we do this: we create something that's double-faced (I argued, ultimately symbolic, having aspects of gnosis in it) that allows us to make the leap, even if it's an incremental one, from who we are now and what we value now to the place where I've acquired some new thing that I value for its own sake. We used the example of music appreciation.

I think the 'summary' portion of the next lecture goes out to about 8 minutes, but I'm cutting it off at about 5, in part because there's a lot of tying together / elaborating / concluding to it.