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How Boots Befooled the King: Wisdom, Truth, and the Stoics

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Abstract

Can the wise person be fooled? The Stoics take a very strong view on this question, holding that the wise person (or sage) is never deceived and never believes anything that is false. This seems to be an implausibly strong claim, but it follows directly from some basic tenets of the Stoic cognitive and psychological world-view. In developing an account of what wisdom really requires, I will explore the tenets of the Stoic view that lead to this infallibilism about wisdom, and show that many of the elements of the Stoic picture can be preserved in a more plausible fallibilist approach. Specifically, I propose to develop a Stoic fallibilist virtue epistemology that is based on the Stoic model of the moral virtues. This model of the intellectual virtues will show that (in keeping with a folk distinction) the wise person is never befooled, though that person might be fooled.

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Notes

  1. Stobaeus (Anthology 2.11). All direct citations of ancient sources from and about the Stoics are from Long and Sedley (1987).

  2. For a thorough analysis of this exchange between the Stoics and the Academics see Reed (2002).

  3. As Nenad Miščevič has pointed out to me, this is a feature of the Stoic theory to which Augustine objects. However the Stoics are offering a theory of the virtues intended to be applicable within the lives of ordinary people; a virtue epistemology that can guide the beliefs of ordinary people should have the same structure.

  4. This story is from Howard Pyle’s The Wonder Clock, published in 1887, which contain his own composed version of folk tales. The part of the story concerning the “wisdom sack” goes back to the original collection of fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm (1884) where it appears in a story called “The Turnip.”

  5. For an explanation of this similarity between Hellenistic schools see Julia Annas (1995).

  6. “Diogenes [of Babylon] represented the end as: reasoning well in the selection and disselection of things in accordance with nature … and Antipater: to live continuously selecting things in accordance with nature and disselecting things contrary to nature.” (Stobaeus 2.76,9-15)

  7. See Long and Sedley section 65Y.

  8. While we can develop our ability to have impressions over time, we cannot choose to have a particular impression at a particular time.

  9. I am using “intellectual virtue” here to refer to any virtues having to do with our cognitive lives and resulting in beliefs rather than in the behavior that is the standard subject matter of the moral virtues. I am not presupposing that the common-sense distinction I am working with here will parallel the distinction made by Aristotle (1984) and in particular I am rejecting the idea that the intellectual virtues deal with the rational part of the south while the moral virtues concern the appetitive part – for the Stoics view the soul as wholly rational. See Long and Sedley sections 65G and 65I.

  10. The goal of bringing together the moral and intellectual virtues is clearly articulated in Linda Zagzebski’s work (1996), and is also pursued in the work of virtue epistemologists such as Lorraine Code (1987, 2006) and Miranda Fricker (2007).

  11. This concern about belief involuntarism is raised in Alston (1988).

  12. Seneca, Letters 89.4-5. Note that the characterization of wisdom as our highest epistemic good has also been recently defended by Wayne Riggs (2003).

  13. I thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing out to me these references and stressing that for the Stoics wisdom is the heart of all virtues.

  14. Except, of course, when one is making judgments about moral topics, when the moral and intellectual virtues will work together.

  15. This is the parallel of our goal in the moral case. “But doing everything in order to obtain the things in accordance with nature, even if we do not obtain them, is rectitude and the only thing of intrinsic desirability and the only good, according to the Stoics.” (Cicero, On Ends 5.17-20)

  16. Here the Stoics are clearly in agreement with the Aristotelian sentiment that “All men by nature desire to know” (980a25).

  17. Lehrer and Paxson (1969).

  18. Interestingly, this is also a conclusion that Aristotle wants to avoid. But it is questionable whether his attitude to the conventional goods really allows him to say that there is no quantity of those “goods” for which one ought to trade one’s virtue. For an argument that the Stoics’ approach better reaches the Aristotelian ideal see Irwin (1998) and Annas (1995).

  19. One complication here, of course, is that if one knew that if one believed irrationally, then one would believe the truth, it might then become rational for one to believe irrationally. As a result, cases like this are better judged from a third person perspective.

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the audience at the Bled Epistemology Conference in 2011 for their pressing questions and useful suggestions at my presentation of this paper. I would in particular like to thank Kristoffer Ahlstrom, Anne Baril, Nenad Miščevič, Bob Roberts, Valerie Tiberius, James Woodbridge, and an anonymous referee for Acta Analytica.

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Correspondence to Sarah Wright.

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Wright, S. How Boots Befooled the King: Wisdom, Truth, and the Stoics. Acta Anal 27, 113–126 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-012-0158-0

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