Practical Wisdom

My doctoral dissertation, along with some of my subsequent research, focuses on practical wisdom (the fancy philosophy term for the understanding that enables a person to make reliably good decisions about how they ought to live and conduct themselves).  Specifically, I am interested in exploring ways to combine philosophical reasoning and empirical research when examining what wisdom is like and how we can get it.  

"Practice for wisdom: On the neglected role of case-based critical reflection," (2024), Topoi.  [doi] [read-only published version] [author's copy]

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, Vaccarezza, and Niccoli 2018; Swartwood 2013b; Tsai 2023) have been challenged on the grounds that there are important differences between wisdom and expert skills (Hacker-Wright 2015, 986; Kristjánsson 2015, 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. 

"Philosophical foundations for the study of wisdom," (2022), in R. J. Sternberg & J. Glück (Eds.), The Psychology of Wisdom: An Introduction.  Cambridge University Press.  [doi]

This is an invited chapter for a textbook on wisdom, intended for use in undergraduate and graduate psychology courses or more generally for people interested in learning more about wisdom and wisdom research.  

Chapter summary:  A person with practical wisdom reliably grasps how to live and conduct themselves.  But what is practical wisdom, how can we get it, and how can we study it?  This chapter will introduce some prominent philosophical arguments and answers to these questions.   After distinguishing practical wisdom from other types of wisdom, the chapter explains why studying wisdom requires combining both philosophy and empirical science.  To illustrate the contribution of philosophy, the chapter describes a core philosophical conception of wisdom and invites the reader to think through some philosophical puzzles it gives rise to.   The chapter is supplemented with a glossary of key terms, comprehension questions, discussion questions, and an overview of my research and its practical implications.

"Can we measure practical wisdom?," (2020),  The Journal of Moral Education, 49(1): 71-97. [doi] [pdf]

Abstract: Wisdom, long a topic of interest to moral philosophers, is increasingly the focus of social science research.  Philosophers have historically been concerned to develop a rationally defensible account of the nature of wisdom and its role in the moral life, often inspired in various ways by virtue theoretical accounts of practical wisdom (phronesis).  Wisdom scientists seek to, among other things, define wisdom and its components so that we can measure them.  Are the measures used by wisdom scientists actually measuring what philosophers have in mind when they discuss practical wisdom?  I argue that they are not.  Contemporary measures of wisdom and its components may pick out some necessary prerequisites of practical wisdom, but they do not measure a philosophically plausible practical wisdom or its components.  After explaining the argument and defending it against objections, I consider its implications.  Should wisdom scientists ignore the philosophical conception of practical wisdom in favor of other conceptions, revise their methods to try to measure it, or continue the interdisciplinary study of practical wisdom without expecting to measure it?  I make a preliminary argument for the third option.  

"Philosophical foundations of wisdom," (2019), with Valerie Tiberius, in R. J. Sternberg & J. Glück (Eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Wisdom (pp. 10–39). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.  [pre-print] [doi]

Abstract: 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. 

"Wisdom as an expert skill," (2013), Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 16 (3): 511-528.  [pdf] [doi]

Reissued in  in Virtual Issue 1 of Ethical Theory and Moral Practice: Virtues, Skills, and Moral Expertise (2015). 

Abstract: 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. 

"Expert skill: a model of wisdom," invited blog post for the University of Chicago's Center for Practical Wisdom. Nov 6, 2013.  [link]

In this short blog post I explain why I think empirical research and philosophy are both necessary for a plausible account of wisdom and give a brief overview of how they are combined in the expert skill model of wisdom (defended in my dissertation and "Wisdom as an expert skill").  

Cultivating Practical Wisdom, (2013), doctoral dissertation; supervisor: Valerie Tiberius.  [link] [pdf]

Abstract: 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. 

"Wisdom revisited: a case study in normative theorizing," (2011), with Valerie Tiberius, Philosophical Explorations 14 (3): 277-295.  [pdf] [doi]

Abstract: Extensive discussions of practical wisdom are relatively rare in the philosophical literature these days. This is strange given the theoretical and practical importance of wisdom and, indeed, the etymology of the word "philosophy." In this paper, we remedy this inattention by proposing a methodology for developing a theory of wisdom and using this methodology to outline a viable theory. The methodology we favor is a version of wide reflective equilibrium. We begin with psychological research on folk intuitions about wisdom, which helps us to avoid problems caused by reliance on the possibly idiosyncratic intuitions of professional philosophers. The folk theory is then elaborated in light of theoretical desiderata and further empirical research on human cognitive capacities. The resulting view emphasizes policies that the wise person adopts in order to cope with the many obstacles to making good choices.