As you would expect, the topic of wisdom is rich and complex. The free posts here are meant to provide a taste of the topic, with the paid posts offering about five times as much material. But let’s start our investigation of wisdom by addressing the obvious prior question:
Is Duane Johnson a great actor?
Well, it depends on what you mean. He is a great actor-entertainer, for sure. Just look at the revenues for his many movies. Millions of us find him entertaining. But he’s no great drama-actor, in the sense that Daniel Day-Lewis or Frances McDormand are. If we are wondering whether he gives convincing, nuanced portrayals of emotionally sophisticated and complicated characters in dramas, well, then no: he is not a great actor. Even he would probably admit that.
It’s easy to see how in a conversation, two people could appear to be disagreeing over whether Johnson is a great actor even though in reality they aren’t disagreeing at all. Instead, they are merely using different conceptions of what it is to be a “great actor”. When one person says “He is definitely a great actor” and the other person responds with “No way. His movies are fun but there’s no way he’s a great actor”, they could easily be talking past one another. If they managed to make their meanings clear, then they may well realize that they agree completely in their assessments of Johnson’s acting ability.
So, if you want to write an essay regarding the greatest actors of all time, your essay has to start by ignoring acting entirely. It has to be a linguistic-psychological investigation first, in order to figure out what the people you’re engaging with mean by “great actor”. After that, you can turn to considering Robert De Niro, Meryl Streep, Jim Carrey, and Lucille Ball.
Does life begin at conception?
Well, it depends on what you mean. I remember running a research seminar for PhD students. We started talking about disagreement over abortion, and one student--who was training to be a priest--said that at least one thing we can all agree on is the fact that the main moral issue regarding abortion is whether “life begins at conception”. The debate starts there, or so he thought.
He was wrong. I started out by saying to him that everyone agrees that a fertilized egg is alive in the biological sense. It’s not at all like a rock or piece of dirt. Moreover, it’s clearly a human living thing; it’s not canine or feline for instance. Just as clearly, even if something is a naturally-occurring human living thing hardly means there is anything wrong with intentionally killing it. Think of a pimple on your butt: it’s living and human (it ain’t canine or feline) but it’s okay to kill it. Eventually, we figured out that he meant by “life” is a conscious human, or perhaps a conscious living entity. He wanted to start the debate there.
Nope. Even that improvement wasn’t terribly helpful: what do you mean by “conscious”? Philosophers have figured out that that term has literally around a dozen different meanings, some much different from others, and it’s clear that a fertilized egg inside a womb is “conscious” in only the most primitive of those meanings. Later in our discussion he realized that the main issue, at least by his lights, was not the current level of consciousness but its natural future level. In reality, he had never even begun to think intelligently about the morality of abortion even though he was training to be a priest and had thought about abortion for years.
This stories illustrate the importance of what I will call relevant ambiguity: when a word, phrase, or sentence has
(i) multiple common ways of understanding it
(ii) that are significantly different from one another but
(iii) are easy to confuse with each other in such a way that it causes trouble in communication.
Professional philosophers have detailed how a colossal number of key terms, such as “free will”, “consciousness”, “cause”, “meaning”, “morally right”, “justice”, “knowledge”, “belief”, and “certainty” are relevantly ambiguous in the sense of (i)-(iii). The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy offers many examples.
If we want to think wisely about a complex issue, in many cases we are going to have to do some preliminary linguistic clarification work. Otherwise, we end up like my confused PhD student. When thinking about wisdom, we have to start with linguistic clarification, or we end up unwittingly running different concepts together, which leads to much equivocation, talking past one another, illusory disagreement as well as agreement, and fruitless debate.
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Joe Posnanski, Tommy Lasorda, and Greg Maddux each have a great deal of wisdom when it comes to baseball. Posnanski is a sports writer and baseball historian. His 2021 book The Baseball 100 is a delight to read, as are his other books about baseball. Lasorda was a baseball manager for decades, at the top of the profession. Maddux was a baseball pitcher with almost supernatural knowledge of the art of pitching and outwitting hitters. When it comes to baseball, each had great wisdom.
What the three men have in common is extremely impressive knowledge of the subject. That’s what unites them and makes them have wisdom about baseball--in one sense of “wisdom”. What separates them is the fact that their extremely impressive knowledge targets three quite different aspects of that common subject, baseball.
Of course, wisdom isn’t limited to baseball. A person can have wisdom about singing, dancing, architecture, childcare, or road repair. Call this subject-specific wisdom.
We use “wise” and “wisdom” in a quite different although related way: being wise means knowing how to live life exceptionally well. For sure, subject-specific wisdom is valuable, but most of us want the kind of wisdom that is possessed by the guy in the robe with the long beard who lives at the top of the mountain: wisdom regarding how to live extraordinarily well. We will call it mountaintop wisdom. Let’s focus on that person on the mountain, regardless of their sexuality, gender, or beard length.
The phrase “Knowing how to live one’s life exceptionally well” is relevantly ambiguous too, just like “wisdom”, “great actor”, “life”, and “conscious”. I know how to live my life exceptionally well when it comes to strength training, health, and intellectual conduct. But that hardly means I know how to live my life well when it comes to sexual intimacy, taking care of dying parents, dealing with acquaintances, or navigating office politics. Similarly, a person might know how to live one’s life well when it comes to their relationships with loved ones but be incompetent when it comes to dealing with strangers, or physical health, or emotional health. There are many quite different aspects to your life, and “knowing how to live one’s life exceptionally well” can cover some but not all of them.
There are at least three important aspects of life that are typically associated with mountaintop wisdom.
Moral Wisdom. The person on the mountaintop consciously knows how to treat others in an exceptionally fair, just, moral manner--and she actually lives their life that way too, as long as she is not prevented from doing so. She acts in a morally just way, for good reasons, regardless of the details of what morality amounts to.
Psychological Wisdom. The mountaintop wise person consciously knows how to live life in such a way as to achieve well-being and fulfillment, for both herself and those individuals lucky enough to take her advice or merely be in her social circles. She typically can look into someone’s mind and see the hidden levers that govern their behavior, beliefs, desires, preferences, and choices in life. We are like young children to her, with motives, fears, hopes, and the rest that are almost transparent to her view.
Intellectual Wisdom. This person knows how to conduct her intellectual life extraordinarily well. She is expert at regulating her thinking, judging, and believing activity, knowing how to reason extraordinarily well, to think creatively, to believe something when the evidence is right, to suspend judgment when the evidence is inconclusive, to take into account genuine expertise, to track the quality of her own evidential position, etc.
No matter what we want to say about these three kinds of wisdom, it shouldn’t turn out that one needs a high IQ or lots of sophisticated knowledge in order to be wise. Confucius was wise 2,500 years ago, and his knowledge of almost anything we take for granted today was vanishingly small. One need not be culturally, religiously, or scientifically aware in order to have various kinds of wisdom.
Now, if you think wisdom has something to do with cultural awareness, that’s fine! But now you have left mountaintop wisdom behind and you are focusing on a subject-specific kind of wisdom, or even a combination of multiple subjects and mountaintop wisdom.
I am going to mainly focus on intellectual wisdom, since that’s the only one I’m familiar with. The basic question is this: how do I achieve it?
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Let’s start with sports.
I remember fondly John Madden, a commentator on television for American football. I listened to him when I watched football as a boy. His commentary was often great fun, because he was so passionate and knowledgeable about the sport. He especially loved talking about one football player smashing into another player with great force. Or with great momentum. Or power. Or energy.
But which was it, force, momentum, power, or energy? Madden didn’t know. He used “force”, “momentum”, “power”, “energy”, and related words in a confused manner, not knowing that there are distinct concepts here, with significantly different meanings. For instance, often enough when a player smashes into the quarterback, he does so with plenty of momentum (mass x speed) but zero force (mass x acceleration, which will be zero is the player is running at a constant speed). Eventually, enough scientists (who loved football) wrote him letters attempting to clarify those words, that he got better at using them, or so I’ve heard.
An expert in physics employs a raft of closely related concepts, and she knows how they relate to one another. An expert car mechanic opens the hood of your car and sees a plethora of parts that are related to one another in complicated ways. A surgeon cuts open your midsection and sees many organs and other body parts, and she knows how they work together. An expert tennis coach watches Roger Federer play and sees the various stages of his serve, and how those stages fit together to make a potent weapon on the court.
In each case, the expert has a command of a group of fundamental notions, and she knows how they work together. That’s our clue for discovering a reliable if imperfect path to intellectual wisdom.
For starters, the wise thinker distinguishes and knows the relations amongst fundamental notions such as these.
Belief, truth, falsehood, fact, opinion, knowledge, rationality, independent thought, reasons, desires, causes, evidence, counterevidence, testimony, belief suspension, persuasion, confidence, expertise, reliability, controversy, objectivity, subjectivity, relative, absolute, vagueness, ambiguity, proof, argument, theory, premise, claim, conclusion, validity, pros and cons, justification, disagreement, intuition, explanation, intelligence, wisdom.
I am in the process of writing a book that reveals the basics of those relations. I hope it turns out well!