Is wisdom a characteristic of a person or is it a skill that anyone could acquire? The idea of the wise person like Socrates or King Solomon has figured prominently in many cultures and suggests wisdom may be viewed as an individual trait. Even when wisdom is viewed as learnable, people often think that wisdom takes a lifetime to acquire. Both of these views of wisdom suggest that it cannot really be taught. In this respect wisdom might be understood as similar to the way many people think about intelligence—you either have it or you don’t. Just as psychologists talk about “g” (Spearman, 1904) as a general measure of intelligence (although see Sternberg, 2002), there could be some property “w” that reflects the general wisdom of a person.
However, if we move beyond the folk psychology of intelligence, research has suggested that intelligence is context-specific and even mutable (Sternberg, 1987). The suggestion that wisdom may be specific to particular contexts and knowledge (e.g., Sternberg, 1998) and may represent a kind of expertise (Baltes & Staudinger, 1993), also suggests that perhaps wisdom can be learned—and thus taught (Sternberg, 2001), even without wading through decades of experience. But if wisdom can be learned, how would we teach it (see Reznitskaya & Sternberg, 2004)? For that matter, how can we know wisdom when it is manifest in an individual? In order to teach wisdom, we need some metric by which to measure learning.
If wisdom depends on knowledge, the classroom might serve as a kind of learning paradigm. Indeed, we often talk about imparting wisdom to others and the importance of words of wisdom and Socratic dialogue could be viewed in just this way. People seek wisdom through sage advice, and stories and fables are written to convey wisdom. Clearly language could play an important role in teaching wisdom and language is also important in measuring wisdom scientifically. The Berlin Wisdom Paradigm (Kunzmann & Baltes, 2005) depends entirely on the use of language. People read stories about real-life situations and must give appropriate advice. For example, you might read a story about a teenage girl’s pregnancy andbe asked about the advice to give her. Your analysis of the situation is scored for mentioning a variety of factors that should be taken into account for wise advice.
Although this might suggest some close connection between language and wisdom, for most people, language is simply a communication channel. Language plays an important role in any kind of social interaction and therefore its only function with respect to wisdom may be the medium of communication. Thinking about language as a communication channel, we think about words and sentences as a vehicle for transporting mental states and attitudes from one mind to another. The general scientific study of language accords with this view. Words are viewed as symbols that stand for concepts and sentences combine these words into logical propositions through syntax. Indeed, scientists generally think there are two channels of communication in spoken language. One is the propositional structure that symbolically conveys ideas and descriptions and is used to ask questions and issue imperatives; the second is the prosodic structure that analogically conveys attitudes and emotions and intentions. If someone says, “Hilary Clinton is our new Secretary of State,” with rising intonation, she may be conveying incredulity.
Can wisdom be conveyed by just these two channels of language? Wisdom involves the interaction of cognitive processes with emotional processes and social values. It seems difficult to imagine that this combination of meaning and feeling can be transmitted effectively if language is limited in this way. But perhaps language can do more than just send symbolic forms with an attiudinal value attached. Haidt’s (2003) research on moral dumbfounding suggests that we can use language to convey situations that directly reach into our deep affective reactions and for which we cannot respond adequately using language. Listening to some speeches such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s speech at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963 or Barbara Jordan’s 1976 keynote address to the Democratic National Convention or Mario Cuomo’s 1984 keynote address at the Democratic National Convention (see these at http://www.americanrhetoric.com/newtop100speeches.htm), there is an impact that goes beyond understanding the speaker’s intended meaning and attitude. While it may be that we can learn lessons from the propositional structure of language, perhaps imparting wisdom also depends on language impact or an effect beyond meaning.
It is interesting that this very issue has been debated during the recent Presidential Primary. Clinton argued that words can be understood and evaluated but in the end, they are just words. Obama argued that speech has the power to impel action that goes beyond simply agreeing with an argument (see video clips below). While these are not scientific arguments, they outline an interesting question about the nature of language and its potential connection to wisdom. Some models of nonverbal communication (e.g., Owren & Bachorowski, 2003) suggest that there might be a more direct route for language to affect the listener. Shintel (Shintel et al., 2006, Shintel & Nusbaum, 2007, 2008) has shown that speakers vary properties of their speech to analogically gesture acoustically descriptions of events and objects and listeners can understand these acoustic gestures. Analogical acoustic gestures in speech represent a different channel of communication from symbolic-propositional and analogic-attiudinal and suggest that we may need a different model of language to understand communication.
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Teaching wisdom may require more than conveying ideas that can be understood. The difference between a speech that is understood and a speech with impact seems clear in subjective experience, although understanding this difference scientifically will pose a challenge. Is a clear and understandable message sufficient to teach wisdom or must such instruction rise to a different level of impact on the listener? Understanding how to communicate wisdom is a fundamental scientific problem and addressing this problem may reveal shortcomings in our current conceptualizations of language.
Howard Nusbaum, Co-Director
Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience
Department of Psychology
The University of Chicago
References
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