Inferential: propositional knowing → enhanced and protected from undue influence from S1 processing by active open-mindedness.
Insight competence: construal (procedural) - mindfulness foregrounds it
How are these coordinated together?
One possibility: opponent processing, self-organizing, potentially viable
V argued that inferential giving priority to propositional knowledge, insight to do with procedural - cultivating skills of attention
Active open mindedness and propositional knowing give knowledge of facts
Processes give you knowledge of events
Fact: cross contextual patterns
Events or processes are things that are unfolding idiosyncratically in time and space
Inferential - grasping of principles
Insight - grasping of processes
Inferential - sophia, insight - phronesis (may not be that clean a mapping)
Perspectival: internalization - how do you learn to adopt and take other people’s perspectives and internalize them within own processing so they became metacognitively effective
Helps to put principles into process and have processes govern by principles
A perspective puts theories and skills together.
But more that:
propositional knowledge is grounded in but affected by procedural knowledge (your skills, knowing how to interact)
your ability to cultivate skills and apply them to propositional knowledge is grounded in perspectival knowing → gives situational awareness that you need to cultivate the skills and apply knowledge of principles
This is ultimately grounded in your participatory knowing the agent arena attunement that affords your being in the world and ability to go through modal transformation existential change
Without an account of participatory knowing it can’t incorporate into it’s account of becoming wise - need to connect participatory knowing to this overarching schema or the connection between wisdom, transformative experience, altered states of consciousness will be missing from the theory
This needs important development
They argued perspectival is set within a cognitive style that will give higher-order way of regulating active open-mindedness and mindfulness
Took directly from the philosophical tradition of internalizing the sage
Infernential overcoming fallactious reasoning
Insight overcoming misframing/misconstrual, perceptual helps overcome egocentrism in powerful way
What does internalizing the sage do?
Sophrosyne: translated as temperence, moderation but doesn’t capture it
Everything in moderation - not quite right. Connected to something like the golden mean, virtual engine that generates enough options so don’t suffer vices of deficit but also generates enough governance there’s enough selective constraints so that also thwarts vices of excess - optimization
They argue better way to understand this in enkratia - kratia = exercising power ovre oneself - enkratia = self-restraint, self-control
Can practice a virtue in an enkratic manner
Ex: Tom trying to become honest, sees the potential to lie and the benefit that wil encrue, exercises self-control and doesn’t lie. Susan sees the opportunity to lie, sees the advantage to lie, but that’s it - but not a viable option to her, can’t get into the existential mode so that draws on her. It is unthiinkable to her. She’s not tempted to lie. Many would say Susan is more honest than Tom, because honesty second nature to her
Ex: Paul and agape, now show you the most excellent way, when I was a child thought like a child, when became a man put childish things behind me. Toys don’t tempt me. Sage has a salience landscape where they are not tempted to self deception in the way we often are.
Sage’s salience landscape less oriented to our prevalent and pervasive self deception
If wise naturally self-organize towards seeing through illusion zeroing in on what’s relevant.
Argue deep connection that needs to be explored between wsdom and Sophrosyne
Sophrosyne: optimization of perspectival knowing, so it’s always in service of my agent/arena relationship and how it is being developed so I can go through the transformations needed to become a wise person
Sophrosyne directed to:
Morality: knowing the rules and capacity being virtuous
Realizing the meaning in life - self determination theory, needs to be revised
Mastery: terrific capacity for coping and caring with reality, sets of skills, psychotechnologies, roles can take. Propositional knowing gives rules, procedural knowing gives routines, perspectival knowing gives roles, being able to use routines and roles with mastery, always guided by Sophrosyne
Relationship between different kinds of knowing not well developed
All of this about enhanving relevance realization, optimize cognition
RR is central in the explicit psychological theories we’ve examined
Wisdom has to do with gaining knowledge in the best way.
Wise person knows how to believe well.
Overcoming egocentrism
Pauline recommendation best form of Sophrosyne is Agape
What’s missing is theory of understanding
Theory of understanding
V working on this, not complete
Distinguish understanding from knowledge, beyond possessing an explanation
Kekes: grasping the significance - construal and RR
Grasping the significance of the knowledge - many converging on this idea
Construal: understood in terms of problem formulation
V argues that what talking about is really good construal
Notion of “optimal grip”
Structural functional organization
Sized up the situation well
Know the feature/gestalt get the tight degree of transparency opacity
What it does is afford me to grasp what’s relevant in the situation, \
affords good problem formulation
Connection to good problem finding
Standard of effectiveness:
Can’t say understanding = grasping the truth, because most things believe are false so would have to say no one’s ever understood something
Tie understanding to rationality - use the best methods for getting out the truth
We use things that aren’t true to understand things: ex: drawing of atom is false
Helps zero in on the relevant information in the right way. Most scientific diagrams not aimed at truth but at relevant implications and connections
Understand means can apply knowledge, open up new domains, areas of research
Capacity for problem finding - good understanding can motivate need for good cognition
Contextually sensitive, context relative
Argue that one more thing needed: convergence so construct trustworthy
If basic understanding is to grasp the significance, profound understanding when basic understanding generates plausibility (?)
Profound understanding also aligns and optimizes relationship propositional knowing, procedural, perspectival, participatory
Knowing through transformation, transformative experience - can be sudden, so has important features of insight.
Agnes Callard: Aspiration: argued also instances where people go through transformative knowing that are more incremental
Join music appreciation class
Goal to come to value music for its own sake
If good student would appreciate music for own sake but then wouldn’t need the class
Process of trying to acquire: aspiration
Sudden insight - inspiration
Proleptic rationality: trying to encourage people to cultivate certain values
Person who is trying to become someone other than they are, to go through transformational experience, wouldn’t say it’s irrational. Don’t say it’s irrational to aspire to rationality
Loving of wisdom cannot itself be irrational, must be rational
V argues also should include inspiration in rationality
Process of identity change, transformative experience, participatory knowing - but doesn’t give much to a psychology of aspiration
Need to get a value that will get me currently engaged, but will be able to give up that value when achieve goal
I may go to the music class because I have the value of making myself do things I find difficult, do that with the understanding that is temporary, try to get me to a liminal place, start to play with what it’s like to value music for its own sake
Gnosis bound up with aspiration
She doesn’t talk about wonder
Wonder gets you to question your worldview, sense of self, motivates you to go through aspirational change
Account of wisdom: wisdom is an ecology of psychotechnologies, styles, that dynamically and reciprocally constrain and optimize each other such that there is an overall optimization enhancement of relevance realization, within inference, within insight and into intuition, internalization, understanding, gnosis, transformation and aspiration
Wisdom is an ecology of psycho technologies and cognitive styles that dynamically enhance RR in inference insight and intuition, internatilization,understanding and gnosis transformation and aspiration and that sense what’s happening is something overlapping with machinery of enlightenment. Dynamical system. Counteractive to the machinery of self-deception and that helps to afford the self-organized transformation into the life of flourishing, a life that is deeply meaningful
