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Wisdom as an Expert Skill

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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.

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Notes

  1. I discuss this in more detail in Section 4 below.

  2. I should emphasize that I am not engaging in Mengzi interpretation. The quote from Mengzi is simply used to provide a vivid and historically important gesture at the expert skill model.

  3. See Haybron (2008) for a similar argument about the study of happiness. Haybron argues that philosophy provides “reconstructive analysis” of our folk concepts of happiness. The purpose of this reconstructive analysis “is not to explicate but to reconstruct: reworking rough-and-ready folk concepts to get something better suited to thinking clearly about the matters that concern us” (2008, 47).

  4. But see Tiberius and Swartwood (2011) for an argument that empirical research on folk concepts of wisdom can play a role in constructing a normative account of wisdom.

  5. I will be assuming that the good life, or the well-lived life, is the life of virtue. The locus classicus for this claim is Aristotle’s argument that the good life is the life of virtue (Irwin 1999, bk. I.7). All subsequent references to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (hereafter NE) will be to the Irwin translation.

  6. See McDowell (1979, 336), Nussbaum (2001, 299), and Broadie (1993, 234). These authors all take their inspiration from statements made by Aristotle. See the NE 1094b15-1095a1, 1104a1-4.

  7. It is worth noting that even Utilitarians and Kantians acknowledge that experience and judgment, rather than the mere memorization and application of principles, is required for making good moral decisions. For a Rule-Utilitarian example, see Hooker (2000, 131–134). For a Kantian example, see O’Neill (1986).

  8. For a thorough critical defense of this claim, see Little (1997).

  9. See Pritchard (2007) for a review of recent work in epistemology on the different types of understanding and their value. There are a variety of types of understanding: understanding that something is the case, understanding a phenomenon or topic, understanding why something is the case, etc. Epistemologists tend to characterize these different types of understanding in similar ways: they involve a grasp of things that can in turn be described as an ability. See e.g. Zagzebski (2001), Grimm (2006), and Hills (2009). Stephen Grimm, for example, suggests that, following James Woodward, we should characterize understanding as “an ability to answer ‘what-if-things-had-been-different?’ questions” (2006, 532). A person understands how a car engine works when she can tell you how (and if) it would run if it had no oil, was missing a belt, or whatever.

  10. I am indebted here to Alison Hills’ (2009, 98–106) very insightful account of “moral understanding.” According to Hills, moral understanding is understanding why a moral proposition is true. This understanding “involves a number of abilities,” such as the ability to follow an explanation of why the claim is true, an ability to explain why it is true in your own words, and an ability to arrive at the claim from the relevant facts (2009, 102).

  11. On the epistemic importance of non-accidental belief, see Hills (2009, 102), Sosa (2007, 185–8).

  12. See Zsambok (1997, 5) for a description of how the psychological study of expert decision-making in real-world situations (“naturalistic decision-making”) seeks to explain how experts deal with a variety of factors influencing decisions: e.g. “[i]ll-structured problems,” “[u]ncertain, dynamic environments,” “[s]hifting, ill-defined, or competing goals,” “[a]ction/feedback loops,” “[t]ime stress,” “[h]igh stakes,” “[m]ultiple players,” “[o]rganizational goals and norms.” My notion of domains of complex choice is intended to pick out decision-making tasks of this kind, though I’ve simplified the list in a way that isolates the factors important for my argument.

  13. In his examination of the analogy between virtue and skills, Stalnaker (2010, 421) also identifies a variety of different types of skills, including skills of performance, skills of production, and skills of carrying out specific processes.

  14. As I note below, since the argument in this section is an empirical one, “will inevitably” here means something like “is really, really likely to.”

  15. See also Ericsson and Lehman (1996, 283) for an explanation of how both “recognition-based retrieval” and “search” skills are important parts of expertise.

  16. The definition of intuition used here is commonly used by psychologists who study human cognition, e.g. Jonathan Haidt (2001), Timothy Wilson (2002), and Daniel Kahneman (2011).

  17. In areas where sufficient feedback is not available, such as historical forecasting and stock brokering, a person cannot get better at intuitively recognizing good decisions (Kahneman and Klein 2009, 520, 522). In these areas, people using the right algorithms or rules of thumb usually outperform people’s (even purported experts’) unaided judgments (Kahneman and Klein 2009, 523).

  18. Reason-giving ability is part of the account of understanding given by Sosa (2007, 137), who describes understanding as the possession of explanations; cp. Alison Hills’ (2009, 102–3) account of moral understanding, according to which a person understands why a moral proposition is true when she can, among other things, explain why it is true in her own words. Research on expert decision-making indicates that experts have deeper and more abstract knowledge that they can use to make choices about what to do (Feltovich et al. 2006, 50; Phillips et al. 2004, 301). This suggests that expert decision-making skill includes a grasp of reasons for action that can, at least to some extent, be articulated.

  19. Of course, the degree to which intuition (“system 1” cognition) needs correction from reflection and deliberation (“system 2” cognition) will vary depending on the domain of choice. But in general the efficiency provided by intuition comes at a cost of accuracy (Wilson 2002, 50). I think this is especially true when it comes to the domain of wisdom, even after a person has attained a significant degree of wisdom. For another argument that untutored intuition systematically misleads us in moral judgment, see Singer (2005).

  20. This conclusion is further bolstered by research in psychology that shows that the situation often affects our behavior and cognition to a much greater degree than personality traits or character. Some philosophers have suggested that this research shows that virtue ethics relies upon an implausible account of character traits and their influence on conduct (Doris 2002; Harman 1999). Other philosophers (see e.g. Merritt (2000)) have argued that virtue ethics can accommodate this research by acknowledging virtue’s dependence on social and situational influence. I am suggesting that wisdom gives a person the understanding required to intelligently channel this situational influence. I thank Valerie Tiberius for pointing out the connection to this research.

  21. This disagreement can be found, for example, in debates over moral particularism. For an overview of the issues in this literature, see Dancy (2001).

  22. The research Stichter relies on is the empirical model of expertise developed by Stuart and Herbert Dreyfus (H. L. Dreyfus 1997; S. E. Dreyfus 2004; H. L. Dreyfus and Dreyfus 1991). The problem is that Dreyfus and Dreyfus’ work, while historically important in the field of empirical research on expertise, is based upon phenomenological investigation of skills like driving (H. L. Dreyfus 1997, 19) rather than naturalistic decision-making research on domains of complex choice and challenging performance.

  23. See Wong (2002) for a helpful examination of analogical reasoning that does not proceed using principles to deduce conclusions.

  24. Thus, Margaret Little: [the knowledge a virtuous, i.e. practically wise, person has] is a skill in judging which situations fall under various rich moral classifications such as kind, cruel, obligatory, evil; and what it takes to count as having such a skill, it is claimed, cannot be understood independently of one’s having a practical orientation to be identified, if you like, with its judgments. (1997, 74–75)

  25. I thank Valerie Tiberius for helpful discussion of this objection.

  26. A similar thing can thus be said about wisdom: through deliberate practice (including, for instance, feedback from the wise and appropriate reflection on her experiences), a person can shape her commitments to justice, compassion, and the like into a reliable understanding of how to conduct herself, all-things-considered. This helps us answer two puzzles about wisdom that occupied Aristotle: what is the relationship between virtue of character and wisdom, and what distinguishes mere cleverness from wisdom? In answer to the first puzzle, Aristotle states that “virtue [of character] makes the goal correct, and prudence [practical wisdom] makes the things promoting the goal [correct]” (NE 1144a9-10). The expert skill model yields a similar conclusion because it stresses that developing wisdom, just like developing expert firefighting skill, requires having the right general commitments that are then shaped through practice, experience, and reflection into a reliable understanding of how to conduct oneself. In the case of wisdom, a person brought up to care about honesty, justice, self-respect (and the like) has a concern for the right general goals, but she needs then to develop the reliable intuitive, deliberative, meta-cognitive, self-regulative, and self-cultivation abilities that channel this concern appropriately. This helps to answer the second puzzle about the distinction between wisdom and mere cleverness. According to Aristotle, although a wise person and a clever person share a similar skill at deliberation, wisdom and mere cleverness are distinct, since a person who is merely clever is able to figure out what promotes the goals she happens to have, while a wise person has an ability to figure out what promotes the right goals (NE 1144a25-36). The expert skill model yields a similar conclusion. A person who is committed to self-promotion and self-gratification, for instance, and who only practices pursuing these ends may develop decision-making abilities (i.e. intuitive, deliberative, meta-cognitive, self-regulative, and self-cultivation abilities) that help her achieve them. But such a person is merely clever and not wise, since her decisions aim at the wrong ends and thus don’t track what really matters. On the other hand, a person who has the right general goals and learns (through appropriate experience and reflection) how to specify what these goals require in particular situations and to identify the effective means to achieving those goals is truly wise, though her abilities bear some general resemblance to the merely clever person’s.

  27. Daniel Jacobson (2005) identifies another pressing objection for the expert skill model. Since the expert skill model shows that wisdom can be developed only if a person gets sufficient feedback on the quality of her decisions, developing wisdom is possible only if a person can get sufficient feedback on the quality of her all-things-considered decisions about what to do. But, Jacobson argues, no such feedback is available. While it is clear how we can get feedback on how our chess moves contribute to winning, it is much less clear how any of the (often objectionably parochial) sources of feedback we get on the wisdom of our decisions could help us develop a highly reliable understanding of what to do. If Jacobson is right, then wisdom is not “a plausible human skill” after all (2005, 400). I think the expert skill model can avoid this objection, but there isn’t space to show why here.

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Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the University of Minnesota and the Department of Philosophy at the University of Minnesota, respectively, for support in the form of a Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship and a Swenson-Kierkegaard Fellowship. I would also like to thank the journal’s two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments and suggestions. I am also grateful to a number of people for helpful discussions of the paper and the ideas it concerns: Nathan Gutt, Peter Hanks, Mark Herr, Steve Nelson, Ian Stoner, Valerie Tiberius, and audiences at the 2011 Minnesota Philosophical Association and the University of Minnesota Undergraduate Philosophy Club. I would especially like to thank Nathan, Steve and Ian for their support and routinely incisive comments on various drafts of the paper and Prof. Tiberius for her generous encouragement, support, and consistently exceptional philosophical guidance.

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    Jason D. Swartwood

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Swartwood, J.D. Wisdom as an Expert Skill. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 16, 511–528 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-012-9367-2

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