https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=EUcFqb-DxOA
Welcome back to Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. Last time we took a look at the work of Stanovic and sort of culminating ideas coming out of the rationality debate. Tried to expand the notion for you of need for cognition, talked a little bit more about problem finding and the generation of a problem nexus, and then also the affective component of that wonder and curiosity and sort of balancing them off together. And then more specifically looked at Stanovic’s theory of foolishness, which he calls Disrationalia. We looked at the idea of dual processing, S1 and S2, and the idea that what makes you foolish is S1’s functioning that makes you leap to conclusions interferes 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 foregrounds S2 and protects it from undue interference from S1. And that’s all very good in a theoretical context, but we took a look at the work of Jacobs and Teasdale and said, but in a therapeutic context, the opposite is the case. What you need is you need that machinery of leaping to work well. We took a look at the work of Baker Sennett and Cece showing that that ability to leap, cognitive leaping, is actually very powerfully predictive of insight. And 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 existential entrapment and inertia, ignorance, and you cannot infer your way through transformative, qualitative change. So I proposed, and Teasdale also has independently proposed this, that we need a cognitive style that foregrounds S1, puts us into a state for triggering insight, tends to background and constrain S2 processing, that inferential, argumentative processing, and that’s mindfulness. 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, because the relationship between S1 and S2 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 realization that is at the core of our intelligence. It 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 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 proposed to you the possibility that when I do this, when I recursively and reflectively use my rationality to enhance and optimize my rationalities 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 the work of Dweck and again making the argument that the way you relate to your higher cognitive processes, your meaning making, problem solving capacity is not just intellectual or information processing, it’s deeply existential and we saw the work on mind setting and that 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 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 already took a look at a central review of some of those theories, the work of McGee and Barber showing us that they were not trying to give a comprehensive theory of wisdom, they were just trying to find a central feature and the central feature was seeing through illusion 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 and that’s how we’re here. So 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 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 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 idea that’s taken up explicitly by one of the core theories of wisdom which is the work of Balz and Staudinger known as the Berlin paradigm. But before we do that in order to examine the connection between wisdom and virtue I want to take a look at the work of Schwartz and Sharp. Schwartz and 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 I’m relying on this article because I think that was a sort of clear and concise presentation of the argument. The article is called Practical Wisdom, Aristotle meets Positive Psychology. Aristotle you know about and he’s been invoked and discussed repeatedly. The positive psychology, remember we talked about this when we were talking about 4E cognitive science. Remember what positive psychology is about? Positive psychology is the idea that we should study the mind not only how it breaks 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 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, another Peterson. Peterson and Zeligman where they’re discussing virtue and they’re discussing virtue of course as a form of human excellence. And so they study, they list a bunch of virtues and Schwartz and Sharp sort of stand aside from that and they note some difficulties with this idea, this list of virtues. You know you should be honest, you should be courageous, things like that. Notice what we have here. 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 with. What we’re given is a feature list of virtues. We’re given a feature list of virtues without any indication of how they relate to each other. In fact there seems to be the assumption that they’re logically independent from each other. A very questionable assumption. 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 important to note that the feature list carries with it the implication that what you should simply do is maximize each virtue and right away that tells you an inadequacy of the feature list. I mean if I maximize 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. If I meet people and say, oh I need to tell you, you’re looking uglier than you did yesterday. I need to tell you that. Because it’s being honest. Maximally honest. We don’t think of that person as being excellent, we think of that person as being an asshole. And so that’s important. That’s 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 ancient Greeks, had a very stronger version of this. They had the idea that the virtues 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 versions of some core ability. I might come back to that if I have time, but I want to get into the core argument. So the core argument is, 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 they do is 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 example of you’re a bridesmaid and time is running out and you’re with the bride or at least the intended bride. What’s the metaphysical status before the wedding? Are you a bride? Like a potential bride? I don’t know. Anyways, they’re with that person and they’re trying on wedding dresses and time is running out and they’re asking you, well how do I look? So you’re caught between being honest, being kind, and being helpful. You could just be totally kind. You look wonderful. Oh, you’re beautiful. That’s maybe not the right thing to do. You could be honest. You look ugly. It’s hideous. Such a mistake. Or you could try to be helpful. We’re running out of time, but then what do you say? And how do you balance them all? Do you just give up honesty? Do you just lie? No. Do you give up kindness? Are you just brutal? No. Do you forget that you’re trying to be helpful and you’re under time constraints? No. What do you do? Another example they give is, this is the one that’s pertinent to me, you’re grading an assignment for a student. Now this student has, they’ve made terrific progress. They’ve really overcome some barriers. They’ve gone from a low C and they’ve been improving and they’re getting into a high B. Now if I 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 just give them a little bit of encouragement, if I extend it, is this lying? Because what am I doing with marking? Am I marking what they’ve done or am I also simultaneously indicating what they can 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 brutally objective truth or 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 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. So, the first thing I want to talk about is the value of what it brings 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 situations do not come labeled with the needed virtues or strengths attached. Notice how this is the categorization, the demonstrative reference, and all the stuff we talked about. And notice how they zero right in on it because notice what they say next. There is thus the problem of, here it is, and this word is emphasized in the original, there is the problem of relevance, which is the relevant virtue to bring to bear. And then of course, there’s the problem of not only is that, so you see that, do I bring, is honesty the relevant virtue in these examples? Is mentorship the relevant virtue? Guidance, good guidance? Is kindness, is being helpful? What are the relevant virtues? And of course, what’s also shown is the virtues can 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 often represent virtues with rules. We’ve talked about this when we talked about rules. Remember, and I, right, remember this rule and this is a virtue rule, be kind. Do you remember the problem with that? That rule doesn’t specify its conditions, it doesn’t specify, this is the problem with 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 not the same thing as being kind to my friends. It’s not the same thing as being kind to a stranger. It’s not the same thing as being kind to a stranger on the street and being kind to a stranger. Somebody I’ve 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. Rule application, specification, depends on relevance realization. In fact, unlike Schwartz and Sharp, I think all the problems they list, the problem of relevance, it’s clearly a problem of relevance realization, the problem of conflict is a problem of determining which is more important and the problem, as I’ve just argued, of specification is also a problem of determining relevance. I would add, so they specify the problem of relevance and conflict. I would add a fourth that they don’t talk 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 idea, which of my virtues should I apply or how do I specify it, it might be, oh geez, I’m lacking a virtue that I need. I need to cultivate a virtue that I do not have. So I would add in, in addition to the 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 that developmental process is dependent on capacity for insight and qualitative 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 put it as a list, but 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 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 it centers on the ability to determine relevance, right? You need wisdom in order to be wise. In fact, one of the interpretations of the ancient Greek idea of the interdependence of the virtues is not that the virtues are all constraining on each other, but that each virtue is just 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 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 Schwartzen-Schar and this is 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 Philosophia and Phronesis, right? Both of these words can be translated as wisdom. This is often translated as theoretical wisdom 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 as practical wisdom. So what Schwartzen-Schar 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 situation. So it overlaps very considerably with the relationship between procedural knowledge, knowing how to do various things, knowing how to be honest, knowing how to be kind, and prospectable knowing, a situational awareness of what is best fitted here, what is most appropriate for here, right? And so you can see clearly why Phronesis is relevant and one of the things they argue, which is very interesting, is they really resist, and I think appropriately, trying to understand Phronesis as having rules. So here they’re very sort of critical of a Kantian idea of being virtuous as sort of specifying whether or not this is Kant’s view, it’s not 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 what that can lead to, and Schwartz has been critical of this elsewhere in some talks you can find on YouTube for example, this has been sort of, right, this can lead to the attempt to try and legislate everything, 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 law that we should be kind then I have to make laws about all these different ways in which I specify 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. 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 et cetera like that, 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 this balance between proposing legislation and requiring from people that they cultivate wisdom. Okay, so he’s making 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, for sure, but we should also, and I think this is also an important question, will this legislation tend to make people less likely to pursue the cultivation of wisdom and virtue? So you have to think about that, is Schwartz’s argument, I think that’s an argument that should be taken seriously, and that’s why of course he keeps making it, and 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 with the having of rules. They assimilate it, I think, too much to 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 theoretical knowledge, largely propositional. I think that’s an unfair representation of Sophia and other people who have pointed this out. So whereas I think, look, this is about being very contextually sensitive and that’s very important because that allows me to generate the process needed in this situation. I need to start behaving in this sort of balance between being kind and honest, right? But I also need this, and instead of thinking of this as rules and the possession of propositions or sort of analogous to the Kantian model, let’s think of this instead as the awareness of principles. So, prognosis is about getting you into a process, the contextual sensitivity, the perspectival situational awareness, activating the right procedures in the appropriate way so that I fit the situation. That’s great. But I also need a cross contextual sensitivity. I need to pick up on things that are generalizable across different contexts, right? And of course, that is partially what we’re trying to do with our laws, 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 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 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 Sharp that you need both Sophia and prognosis. You need something that is trying to pick up on cross contextual invariance, and you need something that is designing, helping you to, and of course, this is in line with the relevance of the contextualization model I’ve argued. Something that is 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 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 one other issue about Schwartz and Sharp that I want to come back to. I think they’re right in saying that prognosis is a kind of know-how, procedural knowledge. I think it’s more, it’s also perspectival and potentially participatory, but at least perspectival. And I think that one of the things they do is they talk about this in terms of the language of expertise, of being an expert, which is different. And what they’re trying to do with that contrast is, an expert doesn’t necessarily possess the best theory, 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 focused in on prognosis separate from Sophia and they’ve thought of know-how without thinking also of the perspectival knowing, I think this is a mistake. Here’s why. I think that expertise is a kind of a tool. I think that expertise is a tool that we, well, I’m trying to be careful here. There’s a way in which this we can be, we can equivocate with this word. We can just mean that we can, we sometimes use this to mean 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 within psychology in a more precise manner, expertise is a domain specific thing. And we’ve talked about this before. So, I can become a tennis expert. My know-how can rise to a level of authority. And notice that my being an expert in tennis, we’ve done this before but let’s do it again, my 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, 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 at like tennis. Here’s my problem with understanding fronisis and therefore also the relationship with virtue on the model of expertise. The domain specificity of expertise, if we’re using the term carefully, is not what I need here. It’s not what I need. And you’re saying, ah, but fronisis is context sensitive. Yes, it is. And perhaps that’s the source of the confusion. Being context sensitive isn’t the same thing as having expertise. And you say, but that sounds similar. Well, let’s pull it apart. What fronisis is, and so let’s do this very carefully, fronisis 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 fronisis is, is my ability to be 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. So what we need is a domain general ability. This is not a 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 ability 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, are much better ways of understanding fronisis than 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 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 life, often many domains simultaneously in a disastrous chaos. So I would argue that we shouldn’t confuse that fronisis is about context sensitivity with expertise, which is locked to a particular domain. We should think of something much more like intelligence, 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 foolishness. And so I think my two main response, so let’s draw this together. The argument for the connection between wisdom and virtue I think is very powerful. Solid argument. The argument that should make us more hesitant to trying to capture wisdom just with, sorry, virtue just with rules. I think that’s an argument I’m sympathetic with. I think that’s going in the right direction. The argument that fronisis is all we need for virtue is that we need virtue. I question, I think following Aristotle that fronisis and Sophia should be in a very powerful opponent relationship, trying to get principles into processes and processes regulated by principles, et cetera. And the idea of trying to capture the procedurality of fronisis with the notion of expertise I think is a confusion as I’ve argued, and we should 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 turned the investigation of, the psychological investigation of wisdom into an experimental empirical process. And so this is the important work of Balz and Staudinger. And so this is the important work of Balz and Staudinger. And so this is the one of the seminal theories of wisdom. It’s called the Berlin wisdom paradigm. They’re both working in Berlin. Obviously they’re German. And so what I want to do is go to their, it’s always hard to tell you what to refer to because 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 is an article entitled, wisdom as a metaheuristic yielding, sorry, I’m getting the wrong quote here. Sorry here, I just want to get into it. Wisdom a metaheuristic pragmatic to orchestrate mind and virtue towards excellence. Okay, so sorry for that little delay. Wisdom a metaheuristic and then 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 Sharpe that there’s a deep connection between wisdom and virtue. Orchestrating mind and virtue towards excellence, there’s already the deep connection to positive psychology. But also notice something. The interest in the term metaheuristic and the notion of pragmatic tells us that relevance realization is playing a 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 pragmatic. Because they’re sort of picking up on a couple different related 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 and pragmatics. And we talked about this when we talked about Grice and conversational implicature, right, that you always are conveying much more than you’re saying and how that depends on capacity for relevance realization. And so there’s that sense of dealing with how much our communication and more broadly our cognition goes beyond what we can directly propositionally 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 when I talk briefly about James. And so the idea behind pragmatism is, so sorry, like I said, there’s so much there. But the idea about pragmatism, I would argue, a way of understanding it, at least a way of understanding James. James is one of my heroes. James was both a great psychologist and a great philosopher and he was interested so he’s kind of a proto-cognitive scientist. But he isn’t interested just in cognition. He’s interested very much in what it is to live a good life. He starts some of the earliest work on the study of mystical experiences and religion, psychological investigation. So he’s just a really pivotal figure for me and for many people. But one way I would argue is 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 one way of thinking about this is your propositional claims ultimately have to be grounded in your procedural abilities. James doesn’t use this language but I could find passages in James that clearly point to it, I would argue, that 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 in your participatory. James was very interested in the phenomena of 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 I’ll just mention it now. I think there’s a confusion, at least a potential confusion between truth and relevance and that can be problematic. Now, why does all of that matter? Well, because as I’ve just tried to show you, pragmatism tries to situate what James would call your intellectual claims 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 the notion that what we’re talking about and that this just goes so well with the invocation of the term metaheuristic, a heuristic for managing your heuristics, we can draw this together and this term together metaheuristic, we can draw this all together while having to do with realizing relevance. This is invoked not in terms of the theoretical account I’ve given but the idea that zeroing on unrelevant information is crucial to wisdom. This is invoked throughout the article by Balz and Stoniger. 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 ability for relevance realization. Now, they have an account of the five criteria you need in order to be wise. The point about this is to try and specify what these metaheuristics are that bring about an excellence in our life, an orchestration of mind and virtue together so that we become excellent human beings, excellent persons. They can be used to bring about a change in the way we think about things. They can be tried to specify this in terms of five criteria. The point of the criteria are these are the features that are needed to judge someone wise and also these are features that can be empirically investigated. Okay, so what are these criteria? So, rich factual knowledge about the fundamental pragmatics of life. So, this is in some sense like Sophia. This person has a deep grasp of the facts, the principles of the fundamental pragmatics of life. They also need rich procedural knowledge of the fundamental pragmatics of life. So, about the fundamental pragmatics of life. This goes back to the McGee and Barber point that wisdom is not so much what you know, but how you know. It’s very much about knowing how to put these principles into practice, into process. Now, they of course have now done propositional and procedural knowledge. I think they should have gone deeper. They obviously are going to need participatory knowledge because they have to explain how we go through dramatic developmental change because presumably qualitative change is what’s needed for wisdom, hence the term excellence. And of course, they are missing the perspectival knowing that connects the procedural knowing to specific contexts, situational awareness. Okay, so that I think is important. I think they’re pointing towards the idea of the perspective towards this perspectival knowing and how it ultimately plugs into participatory when they invoke the next criteria. They call it lifespan contextualism, lifespan contextualism. Like I say, this is a kind of perspectival knowing. This is the way in which you’re taking the big picture, your ability to zoom out and then from that big picture zoom in as needed. So it’s this perspectival knowing and that I think is very crucial. I think it has a lot to do with our capacities for self-regulation. We’ve talked about that. Now the next one, I want to state it and then I want to challenge it. This is, they call it relativism of values and priorities. I find that a hard criterion to be tethered to. If they’re using this term carefully, I don’t think that many of the people that I would regard as quintessentially wise were moral relativists. I do not think Socrates or Plato were moral relativists. I think they’re clearly the opposite. I think it’s unlikely that the Buddha was a moral relativist or Jesus of Nazareth was a moral relativist. I think we are falling prey to thinking that the moral relativists are moral relativists and 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 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 to Socrates. A fallibleism, which is a claim that you should never assert certainty, we can easily attribute that to Socrates and seeing as analogous Jesus’ regular condemnation of self-righteousness seems to be appropriate here. A kind of fallibleism and then linked to something that you’ve heard me mention multiple times, humility. A recognition, an appreciation of your status, your limits, etc. So if we bring in fallibleism and humility rather than requiring wise people to demonstrate moral relativism, I 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 the idea that we recognize the recognition and management of uncertainty. So this is to say we are in the finitary predicament, most of the time we can’t do algorithmic processing, we cannot pursue certainty, we have to act as best we can within unavoidable contexts of uncertainty. So you can see why I think this theory is sort of dripping in the machinery of relevance realization. I think the term metaheuristic is very good. I think a metaheuristic is something that coordinates between heuristics. It might be something like an optimization within a dynamical system, like I’ve argued, trade-off between compression and particularization, things like that. They at times though tend to talk about this metaheuristic as a form of expertise, and I’ve already made the criticism. I think that’s a mistake. I think that understanding wisdom as expertise is to mislead us. Again, it causes us to over-focus on the important procedural knowledge to the exclusion of the perspectival and the participatory. It also confuses the context sensitivity with being domain specific, and we shouldn’t do that. 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 comprehensive kind of cognitive flexibility and adaptability. 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 some empirical work. How do you do this? Well, you basically train your brain to understand how to evaluate these criteria in people’s behavior, their spoken behavior, things like that. Then what you do is you put people into various situations, often situations that might involve moral dilemmas or other more practical challenges, and you 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 this for. We would say for somebody who handled them well themselves in that situation, we would be quite happy with attributing wisdom to them. They’d say, yeah, if somebody managed this situation really well, that would be good evidence for me, for calling them wise. Now what you do is reverse engineer that. Take those situations that, if solved 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 well they answer it, but do they answer it in a way that exemplifies these five criteria. Then you can judge how well people are doing in solving these problems. What you got was some of the first attempts 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. 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. One of the things I want to bring out … They talked about the cognitive styles that are important for being wise. That is important. A judicial style, somebody who’s good at making judgments. The reason why I’m not going into that detail is they’re relying on notions from Sternberg and others about particular kinds of styles. I don’t really have time to go into that in depth. That would be a large chunk on itself. What it shows is that the way that people are doing things is that they’re not really doing it in a way that’s going to be a large chunk on itself. What it shows is how important the capacity for good judgment is for wisdom. We knew that, but as I’m trying to argue, we’re getting a sense of, in terms of relevance realization and information, we’re getting a sense of what that good judgment means. One of the things I want to draw from Balz and Stoninger, one of the experimental results, because this points to more recent and important work by Igor 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 could imagine a virtual or internal dialogue. Notice that. Imagine a virtual and internal dialogue. Remember the Stoics and internalizing Socrates? Third condition, they were just given more time to think about it. What they found is that the first and second group clearly outperformed group three. You’re wiser if you talk to other people. That’s sort of like duh. Yeah, but if it’s duh, why do we carry around this bullshit mythology of complete individualism? That’s one interesting finding. This 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 in itself an interesting, what was 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, that was just as good. If you can internalize other people, they can give you the metacognitive ability to overcome your biases. Now why this I think is important is I think this points to more recent work done by a colleague of mine, Igor Grossman, and I’ve mentioned his work already, the Solomon effect. Solomon of course, the biblical figure of wisdom, which is if you have, what’s going on with that talking with other people? What’s going on with that talking with other people? Well part of it I think is the Solomon effect. If I describe a problem to you from the first person perspective, which I’m liable to do especially in an individualistic culture like ours, I will tend to be very locked in because again, remember the whole thing about internalization? When I’m in a perspective, it’s biasing me and one of the things I can’t see, my framing is often transparent to me. I can’t see it. I’m seeing through it. And when I’m in the first person perspective, I’m sort of locked here in my perspective because it is my problem. If you get people to re-describe the same problem from the third person perspective, and notice the word I’m going to have, they often have an insight. They often notice something they hadn’t noticed before. They pick up and make something salient, irrelevant, that wasn’t salient or relevant from within their first person perspective. So 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 Balz and Staudinger, although they’re not invoking it or theoretically discussing it, 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 and Sharp. We’ve seen how the connection between wisdom and virtue is being established. Balz and Staudinger 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 person. I want to continue that next time and also bring up some important criticisms of the work of Balz and Staudinger. You’ve seen me already make one. I don’t think that this ability should be understood as expertise. I’ll make some other ones and those criticisms will take us into the important seminal work on wisdom by Monica Ardelt. 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 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. And then point, and I hope that will point us towards how we can then reintegrate the account of wisdom with the account of enlightenment and ultimately re-situate us back with awakening from the meaning crisis. Thank you very much for your time and attention.