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[Music] welcome back to awakening from the meaning crisis last time we took a look at the work of Stanovich and sort of culminating ideas coming out of the rationality debate tried to expel and the notion for you of need for cognition
Vervaeke's lecture links rationality, mindfulness, and open-mindedness to wisdom, then critiques Schwartz & Sharpe's view of practical wisdom as integrating virtues.
Key Takeaways
- Wisdom centrally involves systematically overcoming self-deception through reflective, recursive use of rationality.
- Insight and therapeutic change require coordinating System 1 leaping with System 2 inference, via mindfulness and open-mindedness.
- Virtues must be optimized in relation to each other, not maximized independently.
- Practical wisdom is better understood as contextually sensitive, procedural, and situational knowing than as theoretical expertise or rules.
What the video covers
- Recaps prior episodes on the rationality debate, Stanovich's dual-process theory, and the 'disruption' of System 2 by System 1 leaping to conclusions.
- Argues that therapeutic insight depends on cognitive leaping, so therapy requires coordinating System 1 and System 2 rather than suppressing one.
- Proposes mindfulness and active open-mindedness as complementary cognitive styles that, when coordinated, enhance relevance realization.
- Frames wisdom as the reflective, recursive use of rationality to improve rationality, centrally the ability to overcome self-deception, following McGee and Barber.
- Draws on Dweck and mindset research to show that how people identify with their intelligence shapes their problem-solving and self-deception.
- Examines Schwartz and Sharpe's 'Practical Wisdom: Aristotle Meets Positive Psychology,' critiquing the feature list of virtues from Peterson and Seligman.
- Argues that virtues are not logically independent and should be optimized relative to one another, not maximized individually.
- Notes that sometimes the wise response is aspirational: recognizing the need to develop a virtue one does not yet have.
- Discusses the distinction between theoretical knowledge, procedural knowledge, and situational awareness, and criticizes treating wisdom as expertise or rule possession.
- Raises concerns about pragmatism as a foundation for the 'metahuman' notion of wisdom, to be developed further in later discussion.
Chapters
- 00:00Recap: Rationality Debate and Dual-Process Theory
- 03:45Insight, Therapy, and Coordinating Mindfulness with Open-Mindedness
- 03:57Wisdom as Recursive Rationality and Self-Deception
- 07:08Positive Psychology and the Virtues Framework
- 10:17Virtues as Interdependent: Optimizing Rather Than Maximizing
- 17:17Practical Wisdom, Expertise, and Procedural Knowledge
- 27:32Critiquing Pragmatism and Looking Ahead
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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talked a little bit more about problem finding and the generation of a problem Nexus and then also the the affective component of that wonder and curiosity and sort of balancing them off together and then more specifically looked at
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Stanovich his theory of foolishness which he calls disruption Aelia and we looked at the idea of dual processing s1 and s2 and the idea that what makes you foolish is s one's functioning that makes you leap to conclusions interferes
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with the inferential processing of s2 you leap to conclusions inappropriately and that's what causes you to be biased in your processing self-deceptive foolish etc and then what active open-mindedness does is it for grounds s2 and protects it from undue
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interference from s1 and that's all very good in a theoretical context but we took a look at work at the work of jacobs and Teasdale and said but in a medic sari in a therapeutic context the opposite is the case
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what you need is you need that machinery of leaping to work well and we took a look at the work of baker senate and cece showing that that ability to leap cognitive leaping is actually very powerfully predictive of insight and
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that's what you need in therapy you need insight powerful kinds of insight to break you out of the ways in which you're confronting you know existential entrapment and inertia ignorance and you cannot infer your way through transformative qualitative change
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so I proposed and Teasdale also has independently proposed this that we need a cognitive style of that four grams s1 puts us into a state for triggering insight tends to background and constrain as to processing that in faretta t'v processing and that's
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mindfulness we know we have evidence that mindfulness facilitates insight and mindfulness is also increasingly being incorporated into therapeutic settings precisely for its capacity to generate cognitive flexibility and afford insight so we're noticing that what we're needing is right right because the
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relationship between s 1 and s 2 is opponent and not adversarial we're going to need some higher-order way of coordinating these two cognitive styles active open mindedness and mindfulness so that we can optimize the enhancement in rationality of the relevance
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realization that is at the core of our intelligence and then took time before we passed to explicit theories psychological theories of wisdoms to note this idea right that how you are relating to your intelligence and applying your intelligence to itself the
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degree to which you problematize your own intelligence and try and improve it we can see that as rationality and then I suggested to you I propose to you the possibility that when I do this when I recursively and reflectively use my
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rationality to enhance and optimize my rationality is by enhancing perhaps the relationship between the component styles of mindfulness and active open mindedness then I'm moving towards wisdom we took a look at that and in connection with this we took a look at
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the work of Dweck and again making the argument that the relay the way you relate to your higher cognitive processes your meaning making problem-solving capacity is not just the intellectual or information processing deeply existential and we saw saw the
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work on mine setting and that write the way you identify with your intelligence the way you're framing how you're identifying with your intelligence has a tremendous impact on your need for cognition your problem-solving your behavior your proclivity towards
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deception self-deception etc okay so we've learned a lot along the way that I think has given us a good framework with which we can critically and constructively engage with some of the I think representative theories of wisdom let's remember earlier on that we have
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already take a look at a central review of some of those theories the work of McGee and Barber showing us that one of they were not trying to give a comprehensive theory of wisdom they were just trying to find a central feature
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and the central feature was seeing through a lesion and into reality and then we took that up as how does one get comprehensively reliably systematically better at dealing with self-deception and that's how we got into the rationality debate that's how we're here
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so we we've done a lot to unpack that intuition well it's more than an intuition it's a conclusion of the argument the very careful argument made by McGee and barber that at the core of wisdom is what I would argue is with
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rationality the systematic and reliable ability to overcome self-deception now let's take all of this and as I said let's put it into dialogue with some existing theories the first theory I want to take a look at isn't a
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comprehensive theory of wisdom but nevertheless it's instructive because it brings up some core components of the theory of wisdom and it does something that's exemplary something we need to consider it discusses the relationship between wisdom and virtue which is an
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idea that's taken up explicitly by one of the core theories of wisdom which is the work of bolts and starting they're known as the Berlin paradigm but before we do that in order to examine the connection between wisdom
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and virtue I want to take a look at the work of Schwartz and Sharpe and fortune sharp and it's 2006 is the main article later on there was a book written I think 2010 called practical wisdom which is much more extensive but
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I'm relying on this article because I think that was a sort of clear and concise presentation of the argument the art the article is called practical wisdom Aristotle meets positive psychology or Aristotle you know about and he's been
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invoked and discussed repeatedly the positive psychology remember we talked about this when we're talking about for a cognitive science remember what positive psychology is about positive psychology is the idea that we should study the mind not only how it breaks
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down into its parts we should also study it in terms of how it excels as an integrated system as a whole because that excellence that excelling beyond can often reveal powers and principles that work within our mind that normal cognition and pathological
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cognition do not reveal so positive psychology studies states that are considered excellent now what Schwartz and sharp are interested in is they're interested in some work done by Peterson not Jordan Peterson and other Peterson Peterson and Zelig men where they're discussing
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virtue and they're discussing virtue of course as a form of human excellence and so they study they lists a bunch of virtues and Schwartz and Sharpe sort of stand aside from that and they note some difficulties with this idea this list of
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virtues you know you should be honest you should be courageous right things like that notice what we have here the the presentation of the virtues carries with it the strong implication that they're logically independent from each other or to use language you're familiar
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with what we're given is a feature list of virtues we're given a feature list of virtues without any indicator of how they relate to each other and see in fact there seems to be the assumption that they're logically independent from
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each other a very questionable assumption right and instead what we should be looking for is a feature schema we should be looking for a structural functional organization that helps to explicate and explain how virtues relate to each other so it's
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important to note that the feature list carries with it the implication that what you should simply do is maximize each virtue and occur and right away that tells you an inadequacy of the feature list I mean if I maximize
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honesty if I'm always as honest as I can possibly be I will at times be cruel I will have given up on kindness right if I meet people and say oh I need to tell you you're looking uglier than you did
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yesterday I need to tell you that because it's being honest maximally honest right we don't think of that person as being excellent we think of that person as being an [ __ ] right and so that's important that's
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important right away to notice that we're not trying to maximize the virtues we're trying to get some optimal relationship between them and the ancients had at least these the ancient Greeks had a very stronger version of this they had the idea that the virtues
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were actually significantly interdependent with each other and there's two ways in which they could be interdependent they could form an interdependent system or they could all be different different versions of some core ability I I might come back to that
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if I have time but I want to get into the core argument so the core argument is right we should talk about the relationship between the virtues and as soon as we do that we can see some important issues coming to bear so what
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they do is they they talk about a couple of situations in which we can see virtues in conflict with each other so one example they give is well an example that relates to something I just said they give the
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example of your bridesmaid and right time is running out and you're with the the bride or at least the intended bride what's the metaphysical status before the wedding are you bright like your potential bride I don't know anyways there with that person and right
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there trying on wedding dresses and time is running out and right they're asking you well how do I look and if you it like so--you you're caught between you know being honest being kind and being helpful right you could just
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be totally kind it you look wonderful oh it's beautiful that might not but that's maybe not the right thing to do right you could be honest you look ugly it's hideous right that such a mistake or you could try to be helpful like we
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should we're running out of time um but then what do you say and how do you balance them all do you just give up honesty's you just lie no do you give up Cana Ste kindness you just brutal no do
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you forget that you're trying to be helpful and you're undercut time constraints no what do you do all right the another example they give is right there's the one that's put into me you're grading an assignment for a
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student right now this is the student has you know they they've made terrific progress they've really overcome some barriers they've gone from like you know a low C and they've been improving and they're getting into a high B now if I
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grade this if I try to grade this paper as completely objectively as I possibly can there's a good chance that that feedback will stop that arc will stop that growth and the person will remain a B student but if I if I just give them a little
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bit of encouragement if I if I extend it and is this lying because what I'm what am I doing with marking am i marking what they've done or if I'm on am I also simultaneously indicating what they can
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do so if I give them a little bit more if I push them into the a range that might actually like in a self-fulfilling prophecy lift them into an a-student and what's my moral obligation here is my moral obligation to give them
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brutally objective truth or as my boodle is my moral obligation to make them and afford them to be the best student they can possibly be what do i do what do i do okay what these dilemmas make clear
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is that the virtues are not independent from each other and we're not trying to maximize between them we're trying to optimize between them in an important way now this brings up some very important issues right so what it brings
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up is it brings up some when we take a look at the dilemmas we start to see some important these issues of conflict we start to see some important things about our relationship to the virtues let me read a quote from you real-life
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situations do not come labeled with the needed virtues or strength attached notice notice how this is the categorization the demonstrative reference and and right all the stuff we talked about and notice how they zero right in on it because notice what they
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say next there is thus the problem of here it is and the this word is emphasized in the original there's the problem of relevance which is the relevant virtue to bring to bear and then of course not only is that so that
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you see that do I bring honest is honesty the relevant virtue in these examples is mentorship they're relevant virtue guidance good guidance is kindness is being helpful like what's the what are the relevant virtues and of course what's also shown is the virtues can
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conflict with each other they often pull you into different kinds of behavior different kinds of behavior now let's bring another thing back we often and this is something that Schwartz and sharp are going to make a lot out of we
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often represent virtues with rules and we've talked about this when we talked about rules remember and I write remember this rule and it's this is a a virtue rule be kind do you remember the problem with that right that rule
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doesn't specify its conditions it doesn't specify this is the problem specification it doesn't specify its conditions of application being kind to my son is not the same thing as being kind to my partner it's not the same thing as being kind to my students it's
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not the same thing as being kind to my friends not the same thing as being kind to a stranger that's the same thing as being kind of a stranger on the street and being kind to a stranger somebody
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just met at a Funeral these are all different remember that that's why you can't capture relevance your cognitive commitment in a rule because you just have you'd have to just get an ever expanding penumbra of rules for how to apply and specify that rule
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rule application specification depends on relevance realization in fact unlike Schwartz and sharp I think all the problems they list right the problem of relevance is clearly a problem of relevance realization the problem of conflict is a problem of determining
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which is more important right and the problem as i've just argued of specification is also a problem of determining relevance I would add so they specify these three interconnected problems as I've argued relevance conflict and specificity I would add a fourth that they don't talk
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about and this has to do with the fact that sometimes the best response to a situation is to realize that I need to develop a virtue that I do not have it's an aspirational response rather than a select which of my virtues should
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I apply or there come how do i specified its might be oh jeez I'm lacking a virtue that I need I need to cultivate a virtue that I do not have so I would add in right there in addition to the
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problem of relevance conflict and specificity there's the problem of development the need to aspire to acquire virtues you do not have and I've already shown you how much the developmental process is dependent on capacity for insight and qualitative
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transformative experience etc all right so what are they proposing they're proposing that we need a higher order so here's the virtues right we need a higher order ability that deals with relevance they look put it as a list but
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I've tried to show you how they're related right conflict specificity specification sorry development well what would that be well they argue that's wisdom they argue that that's wisdom wisdom is what you need notice what the argument they're making
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here given the fact that they are not logically independent given that in very many situations right all of these issues are brought to bear and I'm arguing and I think it's fair that this is it's it's centers on ability to
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determine relevance right you need wisdom in order to be wise in fact one of the interpretations of the Greek the ancient Greek idea of the interdependence of the virtues it's not that the virtues are all constraining on each other but that each virtue is just
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a particular way in which you're wise in a situation right so to be kind is how to be most wise in this situation to be honest is how to be most wise in that situation so that version of the
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interdependence of the virtues really really tightly ties the virtues to wisdom either way there is a deep connection between the cultivation and the pursuit of a virtuous way of life and the cultivation of wisdom now this is where Schwartz and sharp and this is
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why their book is entitled practical wisdom and that's why the title of the article is practical wisdom because they call back to Aristotle's distinction right this is the distinction between Sophia which is in philosophy ax and phronesis right both of these words can be
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translated as wisdom this is often translated as theoretical wisdom and this and then that becomes problematic because that's often assimilated to our idea of theoretical knowledge and then we lose a lot of what Sophia is right and then phronesis is often translated
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as practical wisdom so what Schwarz and sharp want to argue is that phronesis is what you need for virtue phronesis is the ability to be very contextually sensitive to exercise good judgment to know what to do in this
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situation so it overlaps very considerably with you know the relationship between preach procedural knowledge knowing how to do various things knowing how to be honest knowing how to be kind and prospective or knowing a situational awareness of what
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is best fitted here what is most appropriate for here right and so you can see clearly why phronesis is relevant and and one of the things they arm they argue which is very interesting is they really resist and I think
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appropriately trying to understand phronesis as having rules so here they're very sort of critical of a Content idea of being virtue being virtuous as sort of specifying as your baby whether or not this is cons for you I it's not
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something I'm going to get into this is certainly a view that many people have that the point the way in which you are virtuous is to have a set of rules moral Commandments and that you follow those rules as best you can and then what and
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what that can lead to and the Schwartz has been critical of this elsewhere in some talks you can find on YouTube for example this has been this then sort of right this can lead to the attempt to try and legislate everything
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to try and specify everything in terms of how we should behave in terms of rules and they're critical of that because first of all it's impossible notice the example of be kind if I try to make a log that we should be kind and
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I have to make laws about all these different ways in which I specified being kind I'd have to make laws that tell me when I should give preference to kindness over honesty across all possible like it's just it's impossible
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right but you can get into an illusion this is part of Schwartz's that you can somehow replace people becoming wise with people having laws now obviously i am not proposing anarchy like that we shouldn't have laws or etc like that
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that's not Schwartz's point he's not proposing that that's absurd what he's proposing is to step back and realize that we should have right this balance between proposing legislation and and requiring from people that they cultivate wisdom okay so he's making
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that argument and I think that's something that we should take into account we should ask ourselves right not just will this legislation reduce harm that's a really important question okay for sure but we should also and I think this is also an important question
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will this legislation tend to make people less likely to pursue the cultivation of wisdom and virtue okay so you have to have to think about that issue short his argument I think that's an argument that should be taken
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seriously and that's why of course he keeps making it anything he's getting a considerable audience around it okay let's go back to the main point they tend to leave this out because they tend to associate Sophia I think unfairly
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with the having of having rules they assimilated I think too much you theoretical knowledge and the possession of propositions of course rules are propositions you're proposing what people should do proposing very strongly right and they see Sophia as
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theoretical knowledge largely propositional i I think that's an unfair representation of Sophia and other people have pointed that this out and so whereas I think look this is about being very contextually sensitive and that's very important because that allows me to
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generate the process needed in this situation I need to start behaving you know in this sort of balance between being kind and honest right but I also need this and I instead of thinking of this as rules and the
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possession of propositions are sort of analogous to the content model let's think of this instead as right the awareness of principles so for me this is about getting you right into a process the contextual sensitivity that the the prospective of situational
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awareness activating the right procedures in the appropriate way so that I fit the situation right that's great but I also need across contextual sensitivity I need to pick up on things that are generalizable across different contexts right and of course that is partially
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what we're trying to do with our laws hence that hence the connection but to reduce this to just the ability to generate propositional knowledge I think is a mistake that's not what Sophia is Sophia is something like a deep kind of
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ontological depth perception it's to be able to see deep underlying principles because what I need to know really and this was Aristotle's point right I need both of them I need to know how to put principles into processes and I need to
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know how to regulate processes with principles that's what it is to put a principle into practice and to practice in a principled manner so I would argue against Schwartz and Sharpe that you need both sofia and from you
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sis you need something that is trying to pick up on cross contextual invariance and you need something that is designing helping you - and of course this is in line with the relevance realization model I have argued something that is
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the aspect of wisdom that is about contextual sensitivity what's different here what's special here how do I fit myself to this specific situation as opposed to how do I generalize across these many situations and what I want is
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an opponent relationship between them so that I can discover powerful principles and put them into effective practice and so that I can regulate my practices with well justified principles so I think that that's a very crucial issue there's
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one other issue about Schwartz and sharp that I want to come back to I think they're right in saying that phronesis is a kind of know-how a procedural knowledge I think it's more it's also perspectival and potentially participatory but at least perspectival
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and one of the things they do is they they talk about this in terms of the language of expertise of being an expert which is different and then what they're trying to do with that contract is write an expert doesn't necessarily possess
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the best theory they write they don't have the knowledge that the expert has the best know-how expertise is a kind of excellence in know-how I think because they've sort of not because they've focused in on from nice is separate from Sofia and they've
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thought of know-how without thinking also of the prospective all-knowing I think this is a mistake here's why I I think that expert eat well I'm trying to be careful here there's a way in which this we can be we
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can equivocate with this word we can just mean that we can what we sometimes use this to me just good like you know excellent you know that's what expertise is and that's a very loose way of talking but if you're trying to use it
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within psychologically in a more precise manner expertise is a domain-specific thing and we've talked about this before right so I can become a tennis expert like my know-how can rise to a level of authority and notice that my being an
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expert in tennis you've done this before but let's do it again maybe being an expert in tennis doesn't give me any special authority over squash in fact my expertise in tennis can dramatically interfere with my playing squash so
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typically what happens in expertise is it tends to be very domain-specific which is precisely why you can get very focused training on it and become very good like tennis here's my my problem with understanding from Mises and therefore also the relationship with
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virtue on the model of expertise the domain specificity of expertise if we're using the current term carefully is not what I need here right it's not what I need and you're saying ah but phronesis is context-sensitive yes it is and and
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perhaps that's the source of the confusion being context-sensitive isn't the same thing as being having expertise and you say but that sounds similar well let's pull it apart right what from nieces is and so let's do this very
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carefully Vinicius is not like expertise in tennis which I can only apply here and in fact if I try to transfer it to something even similar it will interfere I would argue that what phronesis is is my ability to be
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sensitive in this context and sensitive in this context and sensitive in this context and that is very very different that is very very different from expertise right so what we need is a domain general ability now this is not a
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contradiction your ability to be contextually sensitive is itself a domain general ability I have to be able to be contextually sensitive in many different domains and so I'm arguing that there's a bit of confusion here and if you pull it apart what we need is an
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ability right to be contextually sensitive but in a domain general way across many domains so you know I think things like well intelligence and rationality or I would argue the ability to realize relevance which always has a contextually sensitive component to it
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are much better ways of understanding phronesis then expertise because this those ways of talking are domain general they have each one of them has an aspect that is the domain general ability to be contextually sensitive here and here and
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here and that's important because you know what you're not foolish generally in a domain specific way specific domains may make you more foolish but we all wonderfully have the ability to be foolish in almost every domain of our
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life often many domains simultaneously in a disastrous chaos so I would argue that we shouldn't confuse that phronesis is about context sensitivity with expertise which is locked to a particular domain we should think of something much more like intelligence
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rationality relevance realization which can apply across multiple domains make you a general problem solver and deal with the domain generality of your capacity for foolish and so I think my two main response I so let's draw this together the argument
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for the connection between wisdom and virtue I think is very powerful solid argument the argument that that should make us more hesitant to trying to capture wisdom just with rule so like virtue just with rules I think that's
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that's an argument I'm sympathetic wick I think that's going in the right direction the argument that phronesis is all we need for virtue when I question I think of following Aristotle's that phronesis and Sophia should be in a very
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powerful opponent relationship you know trying to get principles into processes and process is regulated by principles etc and the idea of trying to capture the procedure allottee phronesis with the notion of expertise I think is as a confusion as I've argued and we should
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put that aside okay I now want to pick up on one of the I mean I think this is a fair way of saying it one of the seminal theories psychological theories of wisdom in many ways this theory
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turned the investigation of the psychological investigation of wisdom into an experimental empirical process and so this is the important work of bolts and starting er it's called the Berlin wisdom paradigm they're both working in Berlin obviously they're German and so what I want to do
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is go to there it's you know it's always hard to to tell you what to refer to because they ship their work shows up in multiple articles multiple handbooks on wisdom but the article I think that many people regard as sort of the seminal one
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is an article entitled with them as a meta heuristic yielding sorry I'm getting the wrong quote here sorry here I just want to get into it wisdom a metahuman to orchestrate mind and virtue towards excellence okay so sorry for that little delay
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wisdom a metahuman in brackets pragmatic to orchestrate mind and virtue towards excellence so notice right here the title tells you that they've accepted deeply accepted the point by made by Schwartz and sharp that there's a deep connection between
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wisdom and virtue orchestrating mind and virtue towards excellence there's already the deep connection to positive psychology but also notice something the invocation of the term am at a heuristic and the notion of pragmatics tells us that relevance realization is playing a
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very significant role in this theory at least I will argue that okay so let's first of all deal with this notion that they put in brackets of pragmatics because they're sort of picking up on a couple different related
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but not identical meanings associated with that term one is having to do with I think like the pragmatic aspects of language pragmatics so there's syntax semantics semantics and pragmatics then we talked about this when we talked about grace and
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conversational implicature right that you always are conveying much more than you're saying and that how that depends on capacity for relevance realization and you can see and so there's that sense of that dealing with how much our communication and more broadly our
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cognition goes beyond what we can directly propositional II represent that's definitely there there's another meaning of pragmatics and that has to do with pragmatism which I haven't talked about I'm going to talk about it later I want to talk briefly about James and so
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the idea behind pragmatism is so sorry I like I said there's a there's so much there but the idea about pragmatism I would argue a way of understanding it at least the way of understanding James James is one of my heroes James was both
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a great psychologist and a great philosopher and he was interested so he's kind of a protocol goon of scientist and he but he isn't interested just in cognition he's interested in much very much and you know what it is
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to live a good life he he starts some of the earliest work on you know that the study of mystical experiences and religion psychological investigation so he's he's just a really pivotal figure for me and for many people but one way I
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would argue is what Brooke what James was on about is that you should evaluate your knowledge claims ultimately in terms of their efficaciousness how much they can be viably used in your life in order to adapt you to the world and so
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one one way of thinking about this is your propositional claims ultimately have to be grounded in your procedural abilities I could James doesn't use this language but I could find passages in James that clearly point to it I would
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argue that your you know your your your propositional knowing has to be grounded in your procedural abilities which have to be grounded in your perspectival which have to be grounded ultimately and your your participatory James was very interested in the phenomena of
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conversion when people go through these massive identity changes and how that changes the world that they can live in now I think that's deeply right but there are also some problems with pragmatism I'll come back to this so
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I'll just mention it now I think there is a confusion at least a potential confusion between truth and relevance and and that can be problematic now why does all of that matter well because as I just tried to show you pragmatism
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tries to situate your what James would call sort of your intellectual claims right into this deeper lived experienced viable ability to fit your world to develop your connectedness to develop yourself both of those I think can plausibly be brought back together in
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the notion that you know what we're talking about and then and then then this just goes so well with the invocation of the term meta heuristic our heuristic for managing your heuristics we can draw this together and this term together meta heuristic right
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we can draw this right all together with well having to deal with realizing relevance this is in vote not not an in terms of the theoretical account I've given but the idea that zeroing in on relevant information is crucial to wisdom this is
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invoked throughout the article by bolts and onager let's be clear I don't think they are explicitly making a case the way I am what I'm saying is they're invoking ideas and making use of them that ultimately deeply presuppose the
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villa the ability for relevance realization now they have an account of the five criteria you need in order to be wise and the point about this is to try and specify what these medical inspection of mind and virtue together
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so that we become excellent human beings excellent persons they try to specify this in terms of five criteria the point of the criteria are these are these are the features that are needed to judge someone wise and also these are features
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that can be empirically investigated okay so what are these criteria so rich factual knowledge about the fundamental pragmatics of life right so this is this is in some sense like Sophia this person has a deep grasp of the facts they're
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the principles of the practice under mental pragmatics of life they also need rich procedural knowledge about the fundamental pragmatics of life and this goes back to the mcgee and barbara point right that wisdom is not so much what
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you know but how you know it's very much about knowing how to put these principles into practice into process now they they of course have now done propositional and procedural knowledge I think they should have gone deeper they
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obviously are going to need participatory knowledge because they have to explain how we go through traumatic developmental change because presumably qualitative changed is what's needed for wisdom hence the term excellence all right and of course they are missing the perspective of knowing
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that connects the procedural knowing to you know specific contexts situational awareness okay so that I think is important I think they're pointing towards this prospective all-knowing and how it ultimately plugs into participatory when they invoke the next criteria they call it lifespan
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contextualism lifespan contextualism like I say this is a kind of respectable knowing this is the way in which you're you know you're taking the big picture your ability to zoom out and then from that big picture zoom in as needed right
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so it's this perspective all-knowing and that I think is very crucial I think it has a lot to do with our capacities for self-regulation and we've talked about that now the next one I want I want to state it then I want to challenge it
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this is they call it relativism of values and priorities right I find that a hard criterion to be be beats or to tethered to I if they're using this term carefully I don't think that many of the people that I would regard as
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quintessentially wise were moral relativists I do not think Socrates or Plato were moral relativist I think they're clearly the opposite I I think it's unlikely that the Buddha morale was a moral relativists or jesus of nazareth was a moral relativist i
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think we are falling prey to thinking that our liberal democratic values are constitutive of wisdom I'm not arguing against these values that is not what I am doing here I'm arguing against tying the notion of wisdom to those values I
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think what might be on offer here what they're actually talking about is a capacity for tolerance and perhaps the way we could understand that then is instead of a kind of relativism we can understand it in terms that we can apply
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to Socrates of a fallibilism which is a claim that you should never assert certainty right we can we can easily attribute that to Socrates and things analogous Jesus is regular condemnation of self-righteousness seems to be appropriate here so a kind of
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fallibilism and then link to something that you've heard me mention multiple times humility humility a recognition an appreciation of your status your limits etc so if we bring in fallibilism and humility rather than requiring wise people to demonstrate moral relativism I
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think we can plausibly apply this criteria to many exemplars of wisdom from the past the fifth one and I think this is very crucial is recognition and management of uncertainty recognition and management of uncertainty so this is to say right we are in the finitary
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predicament most of the time we can't do algorithmic processing we cannot pursue certainty we have to act as best we can with you with within unavoidable contexts of uncertainty so you can see why I see why I think this
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theory is sort of dripping in the machinery of relevance realization I think the term meta heuristic is very good I think the meta meta heuristic is something that coordinates between heuristics it might be something like an optimization within a dynamical system
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like I argued you know trade-off between compression and particularization things like that they at times though tend to talk about this meta heuristic as a form of expertise and I've already made the criticism I think that's a mistake I think that understanding
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wisdom as expertise is to mislead us again it causes us to over focus on the important procedural knowledge to the exclusion of the perspective of another participatory it also confuses you know the context sensitivity with you know being being domain-specific and we
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shouldn't do that and I've made that argument I'm not going to make it again instead I want to point out that what they tend to be arguing for is a very very comprehensive kind of cognitive flexibility and that that and
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adaptability that your cognition is flexible enough that it can adapt itself to different situations in a very efficacious manner what's important is that they started to generate semi empirical work well how do you do this well you you basically train independent
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judges to be able to evaluate these criteria in people's behavior their spoken behavior things like that and then what you do is you put people into various situations often situations that might involve moral dilemmas other more practical challenges and you
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get those people to relate on how they would deal with those difficult situations you try to find some situations that we would prototypically do do this for we would say for somebody who handled them well in that situation
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in that situation we would be quite happy with with attributing wisdom to them they'd say yeah if somebody man into this situation really well that would be good evidence for me for calling them wise now what you do is
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reverse engineer that take those situations that if solves successfully would generally lead to the attribution of wisdom give them to a bunch of people evaluate how in the answers that people are giving not just sort of vaguely how
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well the they answer it but do they answer it in a way that exemplifies these five criteria and then you can judge how well people are doing in solving these problems and so what you got was some of the first attempts
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to start to empirically measure wisdom by putting people see what they're doing this is analogous on how we test intelligence and rationality we give people a bunch of tests across situations and we try to see how they do
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and that's and then we start to generate from that a measure of how wise they are I think this is as I said this is just quintessentially important so one of the things I want to bring out they talked
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about the cognitive styles that are important for being wise and that's that is important sort of a judicial style somebody who's good at making judgments the reason why I'm not going into that detail is that relying on sort of
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notions from Sternberg and others about particular kinds of styles and I don't really have time to go into that in depth at that would be a large chunk on itself what what what it shows what it shows is how important that the
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the capacity for good judgment is for wisdom and we sort of knew that but as I'm trying to as I'm trying to argue we're getting a sense of how like in terms of relevance realization right and [Music] the ability to zero in on relevant
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information we're getting a sense of what that good judgment means now one of the things I want to draw from bolts installing er or one of the experimental results because this points to more recent and important work by Igor
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Grossman is they gave people this experimental task in which they have to try and solve these problems and they put them into three conditions in one condition they could discuss the problem with a significant other before responding in another condition they
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could imagine a virtual or internal dialogue notice that Matt imagine a virtual and internal dialogue remember the Stoics and internalizing Socrates right third condition they were just given more time to think about it and what they found is that the first and
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second group clearly outperformed group three you're wiser if you talk to other people and that's sort of like duh yeah but if it's duh why do we carry around this [ __ ] mythology of complete individualism so that's one interesting
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finding this has goes back to the platonic dialogue that in discussion with others we get to a level of wisdom that we cannot get to on our own now what was interesting that's all in itself an interesting what was
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interesting is also there was no important difference between Group one and group two talking to another person and imagining simulating in your mind talking to another person but just that was just as good if you can internalize other people they can give you the
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metacognitive ability to overcome your biases now why this I think is important as I think this points to more recent work done by a colleague of mine Igor Grossman and I thought mentioned his work already the Solomon effect
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Solomon of course the biblical figure of wisdom which is if you have some what's going on with that talking with other people well part of it I think is the Solomon effect right if I describe a problem to you from the first-person
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perspective which I'm liable to do especially in an individualistic culture like ours right I will tend to be very locked in because again remember remember the whole thing about internalization when I'm in a perspective it's biasing me and one of
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the things I can't see be my framing is often transparent to me I can't see it I'm seeing through it that's when I'm in the first-person perspective I'm sort of locked here in my perspective because it is my problem
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ah if you get people to do we describe the same problem from the third-person perspective and notice the word I'm gonna have they often have an insight they often notice something they hadn't noticed before they pick up and make
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something salient irrelevant that wasn't salient or relevant from within their first-person perspective so moving to moving outside and looking back through somebody's eyes from a third-person perspective on your cognition can enhance your capacity for these wisdom tests this is what I mean why balton
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starting there although they're not invoking it or theoretically discussing it right they are relying on perspectival knowing in their experimental work so we're starting to make our way through these theories of wisdom we've taken a look at Schwartz
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and sharp we've seen how the the connection between wisdom and virtue is being established bolts and starting are picking up on that and they're starting to get us into some of the fundamental machinery of what it is to be a wise
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person I want to continue that next time and also bring up some important criticisms of the work of bolt and sawing there you see me already make one I don't think this ability should be understood as expertise make some other ones and those
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criticisms will take us into the important seminal work on wisdom by Monica are dealt and then we'll also take a look at the work of Sternberg and then I will return and propose or at least explain to you an account a
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proposal made by myself and Leo Ferraro in 2013 about how to try and draw this together in terms of this machinery that I've been advocating and then I want to subject that theory my own theory to I think some pretty significant criticisms
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and then point and I hope that will point us towards how we can then reintegrate the account of wisdom with the encounter with the account of enlightenment and ultimately we situate us back with awakening from the meaning crisis thank you very much for your time
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and attention [Music] you [Music] you
Topics:wisdomrationalitymindfulnessactive open-mindednessdual process theoryrelevance realizationvirtuepractical wisdomAristotleJohn Vervaeke
