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Dear Richard,
Thanks for your email and queries. Forgive me for not getting back to you before now.
You ask: How does wisdom-inquiry differ from the pragmatism of Dewey, James and Peirce? Once, after one of my talks in the USA, I was resoundingly attacked for just repeating Dewey’s ideas without due acknowledgement.
I was thoroughly taken aback, and hardly knew how to respond, but I did ask my assailer afterwards what I should read of Dewey’s to get his version of wisdom-inquiry. He said I should look at Dewey’s
The Logic of Inquiry. I did, and found that Dewey and I used some of the same phrases, but throughout Dewey takes (a version of) knowledge-inquiry for granted. All the Pragmatists, as far as I am aware, took versions of knowledge-inquiry for granted.
I would certainly not want to defend the pragmatic theory of truth. We should, of course, accept the correspondence theory: p is true if what p asserts corresponds to the facts. Or, more succinctly, “p” is true if
and only if p. P may well be very useful, and yet false (all theories of physics, for example). And again, p may well be true, but entirely useless (the number of grains of sand in a particular bucket of sand, perhaps).
I am not sure the pragmatists (apart, perhaps, from Peirce) do proper justice to the value of inquiry pursued for its own sake. I do not find anywhere, in any of the works of the Pragmatists anything like the central
argument of my From Knowledge to Wisdom: aim-oriented empiricism leading to aim-oriented rationalism leading to wisdom-inquiry. As I have frequently remarked, this modifies, and I think improves on, the basic Enlightenment idea of learning from scientific
progress how to achieve social progress towards an enlightened world. It also modifies, and improves on Popper’s argument from falsificationism to critical rationalism to the open society. What I argue for can be regarded as having its intellectual roots
in the French Enlightenment and Karl Popper (although that is not quite the way it came to me), rather than the Pragmatists.
I do not think any Pragmatist spelled out, or would agree with, my argument that we need to see physics as having established already that the universe is physically comprehensible – insofar as physics ever establishes
anything theoretical. That is the basic point behind aim-oriented empiricism.
So there is an overlap with pragmatism, but also major differences.
Finally, I would like to recommend a marvellous book about the Pragmatists, and the background to the movement:
The Metaphysical Club by Louis Menand.
Best wishes,
Nick
Dear Nick,
Thanks so much for all of this. You go some way to settling my queries and concerns.
I totally agree with you about the fact that universities on the whole are actually pretty unconcerned with developing that 'holy curiosity' to pursue understanding. And indeed,
you are also right that 'disinterested knowledge' is a myth -- though a myth that seems to be propagated nonetheless by the marketing and advertising teams in universities. In some ways I respect Susan Haack as an example of someone I feel is genuinely pursuing
research that is meaningful to her. Whether it is meaningful on a wider, wisdom-based concern, I am unable and unqualified to say. But as an example, I think she is a potentially good role model.
Would you be able to expand your point about how wisdom inquiry differs in some ways from the pragmatism of Dewey, James, and Peirce? Your point about aim-oriented empiricism
leaves me a bit clueless -- straying into realms I am somewhat ignorant of. One of the things I do take from Dewey, however, is his insistence that true pursuit of knowledge (as he referred to it) comes from some sort of tension or individual preoccupation.
Only this kind of pursuit will lead to understanding that becomes part of our 'working equipment', because we truly want to know about it, and process it in our minds. So in that sense, perhaps he could also be said to advocate an aim-oriented sense of inquiry?
With regard to the democracy aspect, I mentioned it as potential leverage on universities, and also, actually, on research councils who receive the government funds. Perhaps
research councils need reminding that they are receiving funds from a democratic government, which implicates this money in the furtherance of this position.
Thank you once again for responding to my queries.
BW,
Richard.
Sent: Tuesday, August 26, 2014 at 11:44 AM
From: "Maxwell, Nicholas" <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Amartya Sen and Wisdom-Inquiry
Dear Richard,
Thank you for your comments. Let me first take up what you say about the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake,
before I respond to your very important points about democracy.
In almost all of my publications in which I spell out the case for wisdom-inquiry, I struggle to make clear that
wisdom-inquiry does better justice to both aspects of inquiry, inquiry pursued for its own sake, and inquiry pursued for the sake of other ends. My first book “What’s Wrong With Science?” (1976) had as its subtitle “Towards a People’s Rational Science
of Delight and Compassion”. “Delight” was intended to include curiosity, a passion to know, to understand. It is a basic theme of that book that “Person-Centred Science” (as I there called what I now call “wisdom-inquiry”) does better justice to both aims
of science (pure and applied as they are often called). Both need to be conceived of in personal and social terms. Science and scholarship, construed in wisdom-inquiry terms, are there to help enhance our capacity to realize what is of value in life – and
“realize” means both “apprehend”, “experience”, “know”, “see”, or “understand” on the one hand, and “make real” or “create” on the other. What ultimately matters is the capacity of people to realize what is of value; it is that that the work of scientists
and scholars (within the framework of wisdom-inquiry) is intended to promote, whether “pure” or “applied”.
Below is an extract from one of my papers (available
here) were I, very briefly, indicate some of the ways in which wisdom-inquiry does better justice to inquiry pursued for its own sake as well as inquiry pursued for the sake of other ends.
Now what you say about democracy. I wholeheartedly agree with you when you say, in effect, that a basic rationale
for wisdom-inquiry is to promote democracy. In my view, wisdom-inquiry is required for democracy to function properly. Democracy can only function properly to the extent that there is an enlightened electorate – one that has a good understanding of what
the problems of the country and the world are, and what needs to be done about them. That is what we lack at present. It is astonishing that Banks bring the world’s economy to its knees, six years ago, and still what needs to be done to ensure this does
not happen again has not been done. We know growing inequality in wealthy countries is bad for all of us in all sorts of ways (see “The Spirit Level”), and is even bad for the economy itself, but no political party in the UK is prepared to do anything about
the matter – apart from the Green party. That ought to suffice to ensure the Greens get elected. They may not even get a single MP. Wisdom-inquiry is urgently needed if for no other reason than to help electorates discover how they can elect governments
that will act in their best interests – taking the interests of others (especially the poor of poor countries) into account as well.
Incidentally, even if wisdom-inquiry has elements of pragmatism built into it, there are also elements which clash
with pragmatism – at least the pragmatism of Dewey, James and Peirce. The argument for wisdom-inquiry begins with an argument for aim-oriented empiricism, a key element of wisdom-inquiry thoroughly at odds with pragmatism.
Thank you for your comments.
Best wishes,
Nick
Extract from “From Knowledge to Wisdom”, 2007,
London Review of Education, 5, 97-115.
Wisdom-inquiry does not just do better justice to the social or practical dimension of inquiry than knowledge-inquiry; it does better justice to the “intellectual” or “cultural”
aspects as well.
From the standpoint of the intellectual or cultural aspect of inquiry, what really matters is the desire that people have to see, to know, to understand, the passionate
curiosity that individuals have about aspects of the world, and the knowledge and understanding that people acquire and share as a result of actively following up their
curiosity. An important task for academic thought in universities is to encourage non-professional thought to flourish outside universities. As Einstein once remarked "Knowledge
exists in two forms – lifeless, stored in books, and alive in the consciousness of men. The second form of existence is after all the essential one; the first, indispensable as it may be, occupies only an inferior position." (Einstein, 1973, p. 80).
Wisdom-inquiry is designed to promote all this in a number of ways. It does so as a result of holding thought, at its most fundamental, to be the personal thinking we engage
in as we live. It does so by recognizing that acquiring knowledge and understanding involves articulating and solving personal problems that one encounters in seeking to know and understand. It does so by recognizing that passion, emotion and desire, have
a rational role to play in inquiry, disinterested research being a myth. Again, as Einstein has put it "The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever
does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed." (Einstein, 1973, p. 11).
Knowledge-inquiry, by contrast, all too often fails to nourish "the holy curiosity of inquiry" (Einstein, 1949, p. 17), and may even crush it out altogether. Knowledge-inquiry
gives no rational role to emotion and desire; passionate curiosity, a sense of mystery, of wonder, have no place, officially, within the rational pursuit of knowledge. The intellectual domain becomes impersonal and split off from personal feelings and desires;
it is difficult for "holy curiosity" to flourish in such circumstances. Knowledge-inquiry hardly encourages the view that inquiry at its most fundamental is the thinking that goes on as a part of life; on the contrary, it upholds the idea that fundamental
research is highly esoteric, conducted by physicists in contexts remote from ordinary life. Even though the aim of inquiry may, officially, be
human knowledge, the personal and social dimension of this is all too easily lost sight of, and progress in knowledge is conceived of in impersonal terms, stored lifelessly in books and journals. Rare is it for popular books on science to take seriously
the task of exploring the fundamental problems of a science in as accessible, non-technical and intellectually responsible a way as possible.
[1] Such work is not highly regarded by knowledge-inquiry, as it does not contribute to "expert knowledge". The failure of knowledge-inquiry to take seriously the highly problematic nature of the
aims of inquiry leads to insensitivity as to what aims are being pursued, to a kind of institutional hypocrisy. Officially, knowledge is being sought "for its own sake", but actually the goal may be immortality, fame, the flourishing of one's career or research
group, as the existence of bitter priority disputes in science indicates. Education suffers. Science students are taught a mass of established scientific knowledge, but may not be informed of the
problems which gave rise to this knowledge, the problems which scientists grappled with in creating the knowledge. Even more rarely are students encouraged themselves to grapple with such problems. And rare, too, is it for students to be encouraged
to articulate their own problems of understanding that must, inevitably arise in absorbing all this information, or to articulate their instinctive criticisms of the received body of knowledge. All this tends to reduce education to a kind of intellectual
indoctrination, and serves to kill "holy curiosity".[2] Officially, courses in universities divide up into those that are vocational, like engineering, medicine
and law, and those that are purely educational, like physics, philosophy or history. What is not noticed, again through insensitivity to problematic aims, is that the supposedly purely educational are actually vocational as well: the student is being trained
to be an academic physicist, philosopher or historian, even though only a minute percentage of the students will go on to become academics. Real education, which must be open-ended, and without any pre-determined goal, rarely exists in universities, and yet
few notice. (These considerations are developed further in Maxwell, 1976, 1984 and 2004.)
In order to enhance our understanding of persons as beings of value, potentially and actually, we need to understand them empathetically, by putting ourselves imaginatively
into their shoes, and experiencing, in imagination, what they feel, think, desire, fear, plan, see, love and hate. For wisdom-inquiry, this kind of empathic understanding is rational and intellectually fundamental. Articulating problems of living, and proposing
and assessing possible solutions is, we have seen, the fundamental intellectual activity of wisdom-inquiry. But it is just this that we need to do to acquire empathic understanding. Social inquiry, in tackling problems of living, is also promoting empathic
understanding of people. Empathic understanding is essential to wisdom. Elsewhere I have argued, indeed, that empathic understanding plays an essential role in the evolution of consciousness. It is required for cooperative action, and even for science.
(For a fuller exposition of such an account of empathic understanding see Maxwell, 1984, pp. 171-189 and chapter 10; and 2001, chapters 5-7 and 9).
Granted knowledge-inquiry, on the other hand, empathic understanding hardly satisfies basic requirements for being an intellectually legitimate kind of explanation and understanding
(Maxwell, 1984, pp. 183-185). It has the status merely of “folk psychology”, on a par with “folk physics”.
Website:
www.ucl.ac.uk/from-knowledge-to-wisdom
Publications online:
http://philpapers.org/profile/17092
http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/view/people/ANMAX22.date.html
From: Group concerned that academia
should seek and promote wisdom [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
On Behalf Of Richard Whitney
Sent: 25 August 2014 23:38
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Amartya Sen and Wisdom-Inquiry
Dear Nick,
Denis's email is indeed sober and dry in its conclusions. Your response is balanced and consistent, which is good.
Still my major perplexity with encouraging universities to pursue wisdom inquiry in a wholesale way is the obvious
pragmatism of it -- which is open to accusations of being harnessed for less than worthy causes.
I have nothing against pragmatism myself; I am somewhat a pragmatist myself. But surely one of the historic priveleges
of higher education has been the impartial pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, without regard to what external agencies have to say about it.
I am simply playing devil's advocate here, because I am very much in favour of your calls for change.
But if, as you say, change begins in the universities educating the electorate in the right way -- to promote investigations
into wisdom, then selling this ideal to the universities seems the main challenge. And how will they swallow this when, like the old art for art's sake movement in the nineteenth century, what we have now tends to be a knowledge for knowledge's sake paradigm?
The only way I can see you swinging this is if you make the democratic aspect far more visible than you have (to
my mind) thus far. If you stress the fact that at the moment Britain has a democratic government, and that this government gives funds to the universities to carry out their work, then you have some leverage, by arguing that wisdom inquiry is the cornerstone
of preserving a democratic society in which decisions and courses of action are constantly weighed in the balance.
But I feel universities as a whole have lost this sense that they are centres of education in a democracy, and that
this democracy cannot be taken for granted (as witnessed by the defection to ISIS of some of the disillusioned of Britain -- those educated in our institutions).
So I am not sure how much attention you give to explicitly grounding your wisdom inquiry revolution within a democratic
foundation that needs to be continually at the forefront of any argument for universities taking up this burden. But it's something to think about, anyway.
If universities recognise they receive funding from the government, then part of the responsibility that comes from
receiving this money is to promote the cause of democratic evolution, and within this wider socio-political goal, wisdom inquiry can be placed at the heart of it, I think.
Best wishes,
Richard.
Sent: Monday, August 25, 2014 at
10:28 PM
From: "Leland R. Beaumont" <[log in to unmask]" target="_parent">[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]" target="_parent">[log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Amartya Sen and Wisdom-Inquiry
Nick,
I am somewhat encouraged by Denis Robinson’s frank response to your proposal; it begins to outline the type of operational tests and evidence that will
be required to validate your theoretical claims.
Evidence trumps ideology—and all we have so far is ideology.
Perhaps FoW has stalled because we are waiting for others to design and conduct the experiments, collect the data, and empirically test the various hypotheses
that FoW has been proposing.
So far what has been offered is only a reiteration of the reasoning leading up to the theory, but little or no “clinical trials” have been conducted.
With so many ideologies and so little time, perhaps the burden of proof lies with us.
Lee Beaumont
From: Group concerned that academia
should seek and promote wisdom [[log in to unmask]" target="_parent">mailto:[log in to unmask]]
On Behalf Of Maxwell, Nicholas
Sent: Monday, August 25, 2014 8:41 AM
To: [log in to unmask]" target="_parent">[log in to unmask]
Subject: Amartya Sen and Wisdom-Inquiry
Dear Friends of Wisdom,
Recently, Amartya Sen published an article entitled ‘Stop Obsessing About Global Warming’
(see
here ). Near the beginning of his article, Sen refers to “the general problem of not having anything like an overall normative framework, involving ethics as well as science, that could serve as the basis of debates and discussions on policy recommendations”.
Well, wisdom-inquiry is, at the very least, just such an overall framework (it is of course much more than that). So, I sent off an email to Sen, letting him know about wisdom-inquiry, and I informed the philosophy emailing list (that told me of Sen’s article)
of my email to Sen. I am always looking for opportunities to let potentially simpatico people know about wisdom-inquiry, and the profound importance of putting it into academic practice.
Back came an interesting, almost despairing email from Denis Robinson, a philosopher evidently
from New Zealand. It occurred to me that his email might be of interest to some Friends of Wisdom. Here it is, together with my reply.
Best wishes,
Nick
Dear Nicholas,
Do you have any account of global power-structures, economic systems, political processes, and the role of media, vested interests,
lobbyists, Big Capital, and the blind forces of politico-economic "ecology" (for want of a better word), giving any sort of clear account of why they perpetuate (blindly in some ways, deliberately in others), the multiple dysfunctions (poor understanding and
dissemination of, indeed antagonism to, scientific expertise not least amongst them) which we see turning the 21st. century into a global nightmare?
Do you have any analysis of those forces which explains how they could be grasped, managed, manipulated, thwarted, redirected, and
outwitted, to improve the prospects of more rational and humane collective social action to deal with global poverty, resource mismanagement, climate change, arms profiteering, medical profiteering, antagonism to expertise, silencing of the underprivileged,
human trafficking, and all the many other manifest ills which plague the contemporary world?
Unless you can explain how the mechanisms work, what the levers are which could reconfigure those mechanisms, and how people can be
persuaded to take hold of them (without being crushed under predictable political, military, and economic backlashes), what have you given us?
We need more than an overall normative framework. We need a way to redirect global-scale socio-economic processes that are out of
control and running riot. If you can tell me that you have anything useful to say about that, perhaps I will read your book with interest. If you do not, surely you are in the game of rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
I do not mean to write in a specially unfriendly manner, but I am sick of seeing people discussing proposals for the ethics of elephant-herding
while a horde of wild elephants tramples the room, the walls, the countryside, human life and culture, and the planet.
Unless people genuinely identify the dynamics of global socio-economico-military-cum-political processes, and particularly, the evolved
feedback loops which sustain those processes by disempowering their victims and their critics, there is no hope at all of diverting them from the uncontrolled destructive path they are on.
If this is a pessimistic outlook, so be it. The naive optimism of people who propose new sets of ideals, new codes of ethics, new
ways of thinking, or the needs for new mindsets, without detailed practical and realistic proposals for achieving uptake of those ideals, and successful, widespread and large-scale action based on them, are in my opinion simply self-deluded. Academics have
so little power to bring about change that it makes little difference to the world's main problems, at the moment, what we say. Ask yourself how the Koch brothers, ISIS, the Chinese leadership, or even Fox News, or anyone making economic or foreign policy
in the world's most militarily and economically nations or nation-blocs, would deal with a wave of new opinions in academia about the purposes of science. Then ask yourself how much real change in the planetary multi-crisis would result!
I'd sooner be a reality-based pessimist than a deluded idealist peddling words which the mindless, largely irrational, and as a whole
impersonal, processes governing our futures will never listen to. They are not rational processes (nor are many people who are their social products), so reason is wasted on them.
Where is the engine room? How do the mechanisms work? How can we turn them off? How can we throw them into reverse? Those are the
questions we need realistic answers to! Shouting at the engines to behave themselves is a waste of breath.
Thanks for reading. Please pass these words on if you care to.
Denis Robinson
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dear Denis,
Thank you for your email – and your questions! I thoroughly sympathize with your feelings of near despair at
the way the world is going. I do indeed have views about the potent social forces you refer to: global power structures, economic systems, and the rest. But what I set out to do in my book “From Knowledge to Wisdom” is point out that the kind of academic
inquiry we have inherited from the past, and which is still dominant in universities today – “knowledge-inquiry” as I call it these days – is an intellectual disaster when judged from the standpoint of helping to promote human welfare, helping humanity make
progress towards a better, wiser world. It is grossly and damagingly irrational in a wholesale, structural way, and that goes a long way towards accounting for our failure to learn how to deal with all the malign social forces you refer to. Correct the rationality
defects of knowledge-inquiry and a quite different kind of academic enterprise would emerge, wisdom-inquiry, really capable of enabling us to discover how to deal with all these malign forces, and learn how to resolve conflicts and problems of living in increasingly
cooperatively rational ways.
You argue that academia is powerless before the Koch brothers, ISIS, the Chinese leadership, Fox news, and so on.
Academia as constituted today is powerless. But matters would be very different if we put wisdom-inquiry into practice. Then, public education and problems of living would be fundamental – intellectually fundamental, and of fundamental concern. It is unlikely
that governments of democracies will be much more enlightened than the electorate. In order to get more enlightened governments, we need more enlightened electorates. Academia today is hardly concerned about public education – education about what our problems
of living are, and what we need to do about them. That would be the primary concern of wisdom-inquiry academia. Would having a politically enlightened public make a difference? It would certainly have an impact on the Koch brothers and Fox news – and even
on ISIS. And it would be hard for the Chinese leadership to impose effective barriers against Western universities implementing wisdom-inquiry.
In order to deal with the malign social forces you indicate, and make progress towards a better world, we need
to learn how to do it – and by “we” I mean a considerable percentage of the electorate – ultimately of the world’s population. This in turn requires that our institutions of learning are rationally designed and devoted to the task. At present they are not.
That, in my view, is the great disaster of our times – the gross, wholesale, structural irrationality of our institutions of learning, when judged from this standpoint. As I have pointed out, this is even the cause of most of our current global problems in
one legitimate sense of “cause”: the astonishing intellectual success of science and technology pursued within the framework of knowledge-inquiry. Science and technology have made possible modern industry and agriculture, modern armaments, modern medicine
and hygiene, which in turn have led to population growth, vast inequalities in wealth and power around the globe, the lethal character of modern war, destruction of natural habitats and extinction of species, pollution of earth, sea and air, and probably most
serious of all, despite Sen, the impending disasters of climate change. It is not that people have become greedier or more wicked; nor is it that we have got capitalism: what has happened is that some of us have acquired unprecedented powers to act, as a
result of science and technology, without also acquiring the capacity to act wisely. Sometimes these unprecedented powers are used for the good; sometimes, whether intentionally or unintentionally, for the bad. Almost inevitable, granted that our institutions
of learning are restricted to procuring knowledge, and not devoted primarily to helping us to discover how to solve our problems of living in increasingly cooperatively rational ways.
Below is a short extract from my most recent book “How Universities Can Help Create a Wiser World: The Urgent
Need for an Academic Revolution” (Imprint Academic, 2014, £9-95) which makes the point that modern science is the cause of our global problems – in one sense of “cause”. For a short piece, two sides of one sheet of A4, which lists some of the changes involved
in moving from knowledge-inquiry to wisdom-inquiry, see
here . For a summary of my “from knowledge to wisdom” argument see my 2008)
From Knowledge to Wisdom: The Need for an Academic Revolution. In:
Barnett, R and Maxwell, N, (eds.)
Wisdom in the University. (1 - 19). Routledge: London, UK. For the detailed argument see “From Knowledge to Wisdom”, preferably the 2nd edition (Pentire Press, 2007).
All good wishes,
Nick
Website:
www.ucl.ac.uk/from-knowledge-to-wisdom
Publications online:
http://philpapers.org/profile/17092
http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/view/people/ANMAX22.date.html
“Extract from “How Universities Can Help.....”
But it is not just that modern science has made all our global crises possible. It is worse than that. The unprecedented success of modern scientific and technological research
is actually the cause of our global problems.
At once it will be objected that it is not
science that is the cause, but rather the things that we do, made possible by science and technology. This is obviously correct. But it is also correct to say that scientific and technological progress
is the cause. The meaning of “cause” is ambiguous. By “the cause” of event E we may mean something like “the most obvious observable events preceding E that figure in the common sense explanation for the occurrence of E”. In this sense, human actions
(made possible by science) are the cause of such things as people being killed by modern weapons in war, destruction of tropical rain forests. On
the other hand, by the “cause” of E we may mean “that prior change in the environment of E which led to the occurrence of E, and without which E would not have occurred”. If we put our times into the context
of human history, then it is entirely correct to say that, in this sense, scientific-and-technological progress is the cause of our distinctive current global disasters: what has changed, what is new, is scientific knowledge, not human nature. Give a group
of chimpanzees rifles and teach them how to use them and in one sense, of course, the cause of the subsequent demise of the group would be the actions of the chimpanzees. But in another obvious sense, the cause would be the sudden availability and use of rifles—the
new, lethal tech-nology. Yet again, from the standpoint of theoretical physics, “the cause” of E might be interpreted to mean something like “the physical state of affairs prior to E, throughout a sufficiently large spatial region surrounding the place where
E occurs”. In this third sense, the sun continuing to shine is as much a part of the cause of war and pollution as human action or modern science and technology.