2015-10-24
What kind of inquiry can best help us create a good world?
Reply to Derek Allan
 I thought I had already answered that objection.  My argument is that wisdom-inquiry is more rigorous and objective than knowledge-inquiry for a number of reasons.  Aim-oriented empiricism, central to wisdom-inquiry, does far better justice to the pursuit of factual truth in science than does standard empiricism (a basic component of knowledge-inquiry).  Wisdom-inquiry is more objective than knowledge-inquiry when it comes to values and politics because:-

1. Knowledge-inquiry has values and politics built into it, as a result of the priorities of reseach, and to whom, and by what means, the results of research are made available to those outside academia, but value and political commitments are officially denied, and so not scrutinized - and there is no adequate methodology for such scrutiny.  Wisdom-inquiry, by contrast, is absolutely explicit about value and political assumptions.

2.  Wisdom-inquiry puts aim-oriented rationality into practice - a generalization of aim-oriented empiricism - a methodology designed to facilitate improvement of problematic aims, and problematic value and political assumptions inherent in such aims, by representing them in the form of a hierarchy.  Knowledge-inquiry has nothing like this at all.  It is the implementation of aim-oriented rationality which utterly transforms the situation, and renders value and political assumptions rational and objective.

Wisdom-inquiry is needed in order to transform present implicit, irrational, unacknowledged value and political commitments of academia into explicit, acknowledged, rational, objective ones.