Cultivating Practical Wisdom (PhD Dissertation)

2013

Practical wisdom (hereafter simply "wisdom") is the intellectual virtue that enables a person to make reliably good decisions about how, all-things-considered, to live and conduct herself. Because wisdom is such an important and high-level achievement, we should wonder: what is the nature of wisdom? What kinds of skills, habits and capacities does it involve? Can real people actually develop it? If so, how? I argue that we can answer these questions by modeling wisdom on expert decision-making skill in complex areas like firefighting. I develop this expert skill model of wisdom using philosophical argument informed by relevant empirical research. I begin in Chapter 1 by examining the historical roots of analogies between wisdom and practical skills in order to motivate the expert skill model. In Chapter 2, I provide the core argument for the expert skill model. I then use the remaining chapters to pull out the implications of the expert skill model. In Chapter 3, I show that the expert skill model yields practical guidance about how to develop wisdom. In Chapter 4, I address the objection, due to Daniel Jacobson, that wisdom is not a skill that humans could actually develop, since skill development requires a kind of feedback in practice that is not available for all-things-considered decisions about how to live. Finally, in Chapter 5, I apply the expert skill model to the question, much discussed by virtue ethicists, of whether a wise person deliberates using a comprehensive and systematic conception of the good life.

Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 2013

Practical wisdom is the intellectual virtue that enables a person to make reliably good decisions about how, all-things-considered, to live. As such, it is a lofty and important ideal to strive for. It is precisely this loftiness and importance that gives rise to important questions about wisdom: Can real people develop it? If so, how? What is the nature of wisdom as it manifests itself in real people? I argue that we can make headway answering these questions by modeling wisdom on expert skill. Presenting the main argument for this expert skill model of wisdom is the focus of this paper. More specifically, I’ll argue that wisdom is primarily the same kind of epistemic achievement as expert decision-making skill in areas such as firefighting. Acknowledging this helps us see that, and how, real people can develop wisdom. It also helps to resolve philosophical debates about the nature of wisdom. For example, philosophers, including those who think virtue should be modeled on skills, disagree about the extent to which wise people make decisions using intuitions or principled deliberation and reflection. The expert skill model resolves this debate by showing that wisdom includes substantial intuitive and deliberative and reflective abilities.

Topoi, 2024

What are the relations among wisdom, virtue, and expertise? Wisdom can be defined broadly as knowledge about how to live well. At the least, the task of living well requires some conception of what it means for a life to be good as well as the knowledge and skill needed to actualize the good in one's spheres of life. While this idea is easy to assert, it is difficult to examine empirically. This is because the scientific study of wisdom immediately runs up against the challenge of the fact/ value dichotomy. While psychological science seeks to study "what is", the "wisdom" of any given decision, act or person is something that can only be assessed against some conception of the good. Thus, the study of wisdom calls on us to seek ways to bridge the fact/value dichotomy. In this paper, we pursue this goal. We suggest that the study of wisdom requires the integration of at least two forms of inquiry: psychological-empirical analyses of the development of knowledge and skills, and philosophical-conceptual inquiries into what it means to live a good life. In elaborating this approach, we first differentiate the concepts of wisdom, wise decision-making, and wisdom-supporting skills. Then we describe conceptual and empirical tools for assessing the development of wisdom-supporting skills as well as an evaluative framework for assessing the "wisdom" of any given act of decision-making. To illustrate these ideas, we report the results of a study demonstrating how the capacity for wise decision-making can be cultivated through participation in a program devoted to fostering the development of wisdom-supported skills.

Developing the Virtues: Integrating Perspectives, 2016

In this paper, I discuss the roles of motivation and practical wisdom in a skill model of virtue, where the development of virtue is seen as primarily a matter of skill acquisition. I start by discussing a frequent objection to this approach, which is that motivation plays a key role in our evaluations of virtue, but not of skillfulness. In response, I argue that the psychological research on expertise reveals that motivation also plays a key role in achieving and maintaining expertise. Furthermore, skillful performers can be evaluated on the extent to which they are committed to achieving the ends of their skill. Thus, the kinds of motivational assessments we make with respect to virtue can be captured on the skill model. In regards to practical wisdom on the skill model of virtue, I argue that much of what is attributed to having practical wisdom can already be found in expertise. However, there is an element to practical wisdom that does not find an analogue in expertise, and this involves understanding how practices fit into an overall conception of the good life. By contrast, being an expert in a skill does not require reflection on how the ends of that skill integrates into a well-lived life. Following this, I discuss whether practical wisdom should be understood to be itself a skill. While such an argument might seem to strengthen a skill model of virtue, I argue that what remains central to practical wisdom, in terms of a broad knowledge of what is good and bad for people, does not seem to fit the model of a skill, even if that knowledge is developed through experience. Nevertheless, while practical wisdom is not a singular skill, it can (and needs to) play a unifying role in helping us to arrive at all-things-considered judgments. Finally, this chapter considers how practical wisdom needs to be developed in a way sensitive to relations of power.

Topoi, 2024

Practical wisdom eliminativism has recently been proposed in both philosophy and psychology, on the grounds of the alleged redundancy of practical wisdom (Miller 2021) and its purported developmental/psychological implausibility (Lapsley 2021). Here we respond to these challenges by drawing on an improved version of a view of practical wisdom, the "Aretai model", that we have presented elsewhere De Caro et al. forthcoming). According to this model, practical wisdom is conceptualized: (i) as virtuousness tout court, i.e., as the ratio essendi of the virtues, and (ii) as a form of ethical expertise. By appealing to the first thesis, we counter the charge of psychological implausibility, while we rely on the second thesis to address the accusation of redundancy. In conclusion we argue that the Aretai model implies a significant paradigm shift in virtue ethics. Practical wisdom emerges as both necessary and sufficient for virtuousness, thereby downsizing -without eliminating entirely -the role that individual virtues play in our ethical lives.

Current Psychology, 2022

Narrowing the debate about the meaning of wisdom requires two different understandings of wisdom. (a) As action or behaviour, wisdom refers to well-motivated actors achieving an altruistic outcome by creatively and successfully solving problems. (b) As a psychological trait, wisdom refers to a global psychological quality that engages intellectual ability, prior knowledge and experience in a way that integrates virtue and wit, and is acquired through life experience and continued practice. Thus, we propose a two-dimensional theory of wisdom that integrates virtue and wit. Wisdom can be further divided into "humane wisdom" and "natural wisdom" according to the types of capability required. At the same time, we propose that wisdom classification should integrate the views of Sternberg and Wang and be divided into three types: domain-specific wisdom, domain-general wisdom, and omniscient/ overall wisdom. We then discuss three pressing questions about wisdom, and consider five issues important to the future of wisdom research in psychology.

2015

The paper is a reflection on the role of practical wisdom in ethics. By explaining and trying to understand the essence of practical wisdom, the author has endeavoured to determine whether it can be treated as a central ethical category, and if so, then why. In these analyses, author has referred to the concept of Aristotle, universally acknowledged as the classical one. Characterizing and describing that concept, she tries to answer three questions: 1) What is practical wisdom? 2) What function does it perform in ethics? 3) What is the relationship between practical wisdom and other ethical categories? The article is divided into four parts. Each of them concerns different aspects of the analysis of practical wisdom. As a result, the author has come to several important conclusions: Practical wisdom 1) enables appropriate action, i.e. success in action; 2) refers not only to the means-to-ends relationship, but refers to the end itself; 3) is imperative, because it tells what to do; 4) referring to the unusual situation, it allows to understand that every general principle is limited; 5) it is the intellectual ability to recognize how to achieve happiness.

The Cambridge Handbook of Wisdom, Eds. Robert Sternberg and Judith Gluek, 2019

Practical wisdom (hereafter simply ‘wisdom’), which is the understanding required to make reliably good decisions about how we ought to live, is something we all have reason to care about. The importance of wisdom gives rise to questions about its nature: what kind of state is wisdom, how can we develop it, and what is a wise person like? These questions about the nature of wisdom give rise to further questions about proper methods for studying wisdom. Is the study of wisdom the proper subject of philosophy or psychology? How, exactly, can we determine what wisdom is and how we can get it? In this chapter, we give an overview of some prominent philosophical answers to these questions. We begin by distinguishing practical wisdom from theoretical wisdom and wisdom as epistemic humility. Once we have a clearer sense of the target, we address questions of method and argue that producing a plausible and complete account of wisdom will require the tools of both philosophy and empirical psychology. We also discuss the implications this has for prominent wisdom research methods in empirical psychology. We then survey prominent philosophical accounts of the nature of wisdom and end with reflections on the prospects for further interdisciplinary research.

Reaching understanding is one of our central epistemic goals, dictated by our important motivational epistemic virtue, namely inquisitiveness about the way things hang together. Understanding of humanly important causal dependencies is also the basic factual-theoretic ingredient of wisdom, on the anthropocentric view proposed in the paper. It appears at two-levels. At the first-level of immediate, spontaneous wisdom it is paired with practical knowledge and motivation (phronesis), and encompasses understanding of oneself (a distinct level of self-knowledge having to do with one’s dispositions- capacities, vulnerabilities, and ways of reacting), of other people, of possibilities of meaningful life and of relevant courses of events. It is partly resistant to skeptical scenarios, but not completely. On the second and reflective level, understanding helps fuller holistic integration of one’s first-order practical and factual-theoretic knowledge and motivation, thus minimizing potential and actual conflicts between all these components. It also participates in the reflective control, whose exercise is needed for full reflective wisdom, the crucial epistemic-practical virtue or human excellence.

Human Development, 2004

Paul B. Baltes and his colleagues, who are among the most prominent contemporary wisdom researchers, define wisdom as ‘expert knowledge in the domain fundamental pragmatics of life.’ By contrast, this article argues that the definition, operationalization, and measurement of wisdom should not be reduced to expertise and that the term wisdom should be reserved for wise persons rather than expert knowledge. In fact, evidence from their research confirms that Baltes et al. primarily assess expert or intellectual knowledge in the wisdom domain ‘fundamental pragmatics of life’ rather than how wise people are. As an alternative, a model of wisdom is presented that defines, operationalizes, and measures wisdom as an integration of cognitive, reflective, and affective personality characteristics.