Whitcomb on Wisdom

For my summer job I'm writing a report on wisdom (yes, really). As most of the few philosophers who write on wisdom today remark, there are few philosophers who write on wisdom today. But there are some, and today's post was spurred by an article by one of them, Dennis Whitcomb. In his piece on wisdom for the Routledge Companion to Epistemology, Whitcomb surveys the available theories, criticizes a few of them, and advocates his preferred alternative. According to one kind of theory, wisdom consists in knowing how to live well. Whitcomb criticizes this theory on the basis that two people may well have the same amount of such practical knowledge and nevertheless differ in their degree of wisdom. What he has in mind is a difference in non-practical knowledge (e.g., metaphysical, scientific, historical). Surely, Whitcomb says, we would think that a person with more non-practical knowledge is wiser, all else equal.

My worry here is that there may be some kind of holism: in many cases it seems as though your non-practical knowledge will inform your practical knowledge. Perhaps greater non-practical knowledge will lead you to better appreciate the complexities and difficulties of life. Thus Whitcomb's example may be harder to imagine accurately than one would initially think. I suppose he could retort that surely it's metaphysically possible for two agents to have exactly the same degree of practical knowledge yet differ in their degree of non-practical knowledge. But I wonder whether we should require that the concept of wisdom is applicable across all possible worlds.

That said, I don't think trying to define wisdom in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions is a very fruitful project. Much of the psychological work on wisdom is done under the aegis of prototype theory, which strikes me as a more promising approach.