Last time we finished up looking at Baltes and Saudinger and made some criticisms that led into important criticisms made by Monica Ardelt. Then we looked into Ardelt’s theory and the way it brought in an important distinction about not just having a good theory of wisdom, but the process of becoming a wise person, and then the emphasis on ‘what are the features of a wise person?’ as opposed to ‘what are some of the central claims made by a theory of wisdom?’. Then we talked about how Monika insightfully brings together the cognitive, the reflective, and the affective.
I pointed out how we’ve got relevance realization grasping the significance (at least the cognitive directly because of the invocation of Kekes). I would also point out that I think that’s at least implicit in the reflective machinery, and there’s deep potential connection there with both perspectival knowing and the cultivation of rationality (at least perspectival rationality), and the affective ties to agape (which I’ve already argued has very important connections to relevance realization). That afford Ardelt’s theory a powerful way of connecting wisdom to meaning in life as something different from connecting wisdom to virtue, and that’s a very important thing to do.
We still noted some criticisms, largely it’s still a product theory, it doesn’t have an independent account of foolishness and a processing theory of how one becomes wise. In that sense it’s not picking up as well as it could the philosophical heritage given to us by people like Socrates and Plato and Aristotle and Marcus Aurelius and so on.
We then took a look at the theory of Sternberg, just an extremely pivotal figure in the cognitive science of wisdom. I pointed out his ideas about adopting, shaping, and selecting are clearly ideas about relevance realization; he invokes implicit processing, tacit knowledge you know in order to bring understanding in that intuitive grasping of the significance of information (I think that’s what he’s implying). We talked about how he involves a balancing of interests, and there’s the intrapersonal (how you’re connected to yourself), the interpersonal (how you’re connected to other people), and the extrapersonal (how you’re connected to the world). So that’s (at least implicitly) important connections to meaning in life in the way we’ve been talking about throughout this course. He invokes balance throughout, and I tried to make a good case that you should see that as optimization and directly relevant therefore to accounts of optimization of processing that we discussed with connection to relevance realization.
There were some issues I had with Sternberg; the idea that all wise people, all of this machinery is directed towards the common good, that strikes me as anachronistic. I think a less contentious claim would be that it’s directed towards virtue and meaning in life for oneself and others in some unspecified way. There was also the invocation of values as affecting or constraining the whole process; again it was unclear to me what this is. There’s an ambiguity here, it could be the relatively trivial claim that the wise person is being regulated by normativity—you know, by considerations what’s true and good and beautiful—and that would be definitional (and therefore relatively trivial) because wisdom is a normative term or it could be that specific values are being invoked here, but if that’s the case they should be specifically stated and justified for why those ones are chosen, and explicitly explain how those specific values make an impact on specific aspects of the machinery. So that’s all sort of missing and needs to be addressed. It’s ultimately a product theory, not a process theory. Sternberg does have a theory of foolishness, but it’s not independently generated and it doesn’t really pick up on the centrality of seeing through illusion and into reality.
Episode 44: Theories of Wisdom