Abstract
Despite increased philosophical and psychological work on practical wisdom, contemporary interdisciplinary wisdom research provides few specifics about how to develop wisdom (Kristjánsson 2022). This lack of practically useful guidance is due in part to the difficulty of determining how to combine the tools of philosophy and psychology to develop a plausible account of wisdom as a prescriptive ideal. Modeling wisdom on more ordinary forms of expertise is promising, but skill models of wisdom (Annas 2011; De Caro et al. 2018; Swartwood 2013b; Tsai 2023) have been challenged on the grounds that there are important differences between wisdom and expert skills (Hacker-Wright 2015, p. 986; Kristjánsson 2015, pp. 98, 101; Stichter 2015, 2016, 2018). I’ll argue that we can both vindicate the promise of skill models of wisdom and begin to specify practically useful strategies for wisdom development by attending to a reflective process that I call Case-Based Critical Reflection. I begin by demonstrating the process as it arose in a notable example from everyday life, illustrating how the process can be usefully applied to a case study of interest to wisdom scientists, and explaining its philosophical pedigree. After isolating the key features that make it relevant to wisdom development, I argue that attending to the importance of Critical Reflection can defuse prominent objections to skill models of wisdom.
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Notes
The kind of reflection Gandhi is recommending thus aims at developing and testing one’s own existing moral beliefs and judgments by taking seriously alternative views in order to yield guidance about the concrete circumstances of one’s own life. So far, then, the process resembles what psychologist Igor Grossmann and colleagues call Perspectival Metacognition (Grossmann et al. 2020, p. 109). Perspectival Metacognition (PMC) refers to “aspects of metacognition” that “afford greater understanding of and balance between potentially divergent interests on the issue at hand,” including epistemic humility, consideration of diverse perspectives, and balance of viewpoints (ibid). Nevertheless, this process is not sufficient to provide specific and plausible guidance for concrete situations (Kristjánsson et al. 2021; Swartwood 2020), such as the nuisance monkeys. Metacognitive processes such as epistemic humility and consideration of diverse perspectives are parts of good decision-making about what one ought to do precisely because they are necessary for most intellectual or decision-making challenges humans face. Doctors wouldn’t succeed at diagnosing illnesses if they didn’t attend to the limits of their knowledge or identify and examine competing explanations of clinical data. Yet medical schools surely need to supplement these laudable intellectual habits with discipline-specific reasoning skills if they’re going to produce accomplished diagnosticians.
Cp. Grossmann et al. (2020, p. 109): “On their own, moral aspirations such as fairness, justice, loyalty, or purity are abstract concepts, void of pragmatic nuances necessary to implement moral concerns in a person’s life.”
Critical Reflection thus falls into what Stichter (2021, p. 105) calls the “goal setting” and “reflecting after acting” phases of action, which he argues are the domain of wisdom.
For example, the process requires the addition of strategies for identifying plausible descriptive beliefs about how the world is and works, strategies for obtaining self-knowledge, strategies for reflecting on what is conducive to one’s own well-being (Tiberius 2023), strategies for understanding one’s own and others’ behavior and mental states (Hursthouse 2006), and so on.
Compare what Kristjánsson et al (2021, pp. 246–47) call the “integrative function” and the “blueprint function” of phronesis.
See also Wright et al (2020, 24), who endorse Russell’s point that “practical wisdom employs the same global understanding of the human good that is relevant to every virtue,”; Kamtekar (2004, p. 460): practical wisdom organizes a person’s “desires, beliefs about the world, and ultimate goals and values” and does so in such a way that a person’s “motivations are organized so that they do not conflict, but support one another”; and Stichter (2018, 378): “The role of practical wisdom is to make value judgments regarding what it is to live well, what constitutive ends make up living well, and what other ends we could pursue consistent with that overall conception of living well.” Stichter argues elsewhere that “wisdom … requires reflection on our values, goals, and practices, not on how to balance existing goals in particular situations (which is going to be the work of other virtuous skills)” (2021, p. 105). This suggests that Stichter sees only what I have called the critical function as essential to wisdom, while the integrative and specificatory functions are the domain of the character virtues. I find other ways of conceptualizing the relationship between wisdom and the virtues more compelling (De Caro et al. 2018), but that is not essential for my argument here.
Importantly, the process of Critical Reflection can be given more principled or more particularist interpretations, depending on which of the two case-based reasoning strategies are emphasized. If we emphasized the strategy of testing analogies, Critical Reflection could be a process that focuses heavily on the context and details of specific situations. If we emphasized the strategy of developing principles, Critical Reflection could be a process that focuses heavily on general principles that apply across a range of situations. For my purposes here, I will assume only that Critical Reflection needs to include some mix of the two strategies.
Compare what Tsai (2023, Chap. 1.1) calls the Species Thesis (“wisdom is a species of skill”) and The Analogy Thesis (“wisdom is analogous to skill”). Tsai argues that “[t]he Analogy Thesis is too modest because it does not provide or imply any ontological status for wisdom” (ibid). Depending on what the analogy is supposed to show, however, Tsai may be underselling the power of the Analogy Thesis to tell us important things about wisdom.
Tsai offers a different reply, arguing that the presence of expertise in low-validity environments casts doubt on the strict necessity of feedback for expertise (2023, Chap. 5.3), and the fact that the goal of living well can be analyzed into a hierarchy of sub-goals shows that it is possible to get adequate feedback on wisdom (2023, Chap. 5.3–5.5). My goal is to show that this reply is more compelling if it is illustrated using a specific reflective process, like Critical Reflection, that can provide specificatory, integrative, and critical feedback on our judgments about how to live well.
De Caro et al (2018) make a similar point about wisdom and the character virtues.
An earlier version of this argument was presented in an invited webinar hosted by the Aretai Center on Virtues on 14 April 2023. I thank Maria Silvia Vaccarezza for the invitation and Prof. Vaccarezza and the other participants for their thoughtful and generous feedback on my argument. Thanks go to Ian Stoner for characteristically incisive feedback on an earlier draft of the paper and to Avani Shah f or helpful discussion of additional cases where applying the general value of ahimsa can be challenging. I also benefitted from the feedback of two anonymous reviewers.
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Swartwood, J.D. Practice for Wisdom: On the Neglected Role of Case-Based Critical Reflection. Topoi (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-023-10000-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-023-10000-z