So we are pursuing the cognitive science of wisdom because wisdom has always been associated with meaning from the Axial Revolution onward. Wisdom is also important for the cultivation of enlightenment (the response to the perennial problems), it’s also playing a central role in being able to interpret our scientific worldview in a way that allows us to respond to the historical forces, and so wisdom is very important.
We took a look (and continue to look at) McKee and Barber, and we saw their convergence argument that at the core of wisdom is the systematic seeing through of illusion and into what’s real, and this is very much like “as the child is to the adult, the adult is to the sage”, and then two other important aspects of it: that wisdom is much more with ‘how you know’ than ‘what you know’, which means how you come to know it and also how you interpret the knowledge, and that wisdom is therefore, in a related fashion, deeply perspectival and participatory, and that’s why wisdom can be associated with an important form of pragmatic self-contradiction.
We then noted the connection with overcoming self-deception in a systematic fashion, and the emphasis of wisdom on the process rather than the products of knowing, and that both of those took us into the work of Stanovich. Because he famously argues that one of the hallmarks of rationality is valuing the process in addition to valuing the products of our cognition, and that took us also into the discussion of rationality.
Stanovich is a good bridge because for him, the notions of rationality and ameliorating foolishness overlap very strongly, and we got into this notion (which I’ve been sort of comprehensively arguing throughout this course) that rationality has to do with the reliable and systematic overcoming of self-deception and the potential affording of flourishing by some process of optimization of achieving our goals, with the caveat that as we try to optimize we often change the goals that we are pursuing, one reason being that we come to more and more appreciate the value of the process as opposed to just the end result of the process. So in order to pursue that and to deepen our notion of rationality and thereby deepen our notion of wisdom (and of course wisdom has been associated with rationality from the beginning, Socrates and Plato and Aristotle), we took a look at the rationality debate.
I gave you three examples of many possible examples, experimental results that seem to show reliably: that people acknowledge and accept the authority of certain standards, principles of how they should reason, and yet they reliably fail to meet those standards. So one possible interpretation of that (not the only interpretation) is that most people are irrational in nature. As I pointed out, because rationality is existential and not just sort of abstractly theoretical, concluding that people are irrational has important implications for their moral status, their political status, their legal status, even their developmental status. So this is what I keep meaning when I am saying rationality is deeply existential; it is not just theoretical.
Episode 40: Wisdom and Rationality