Topics Knowledge

Question What is the difference between "knowledge" and "wisdom" from both a current and a historical context.

Accepted:
August 22, 2013

Comments

What? You want a quickie bloggy-type answer for a question that would merit (at least) a whole book?

OK, but be warned: what you are looking for is much, much more complicated and richer than the following answer (or, perhaps any bloggy-type answer) could indicate.

Knowledge is usually conceived as simply being in the best--or at any rate, a sufficiently good--kind of position in one's cognitive relation to the thing in question. Knowledge is generally regarded as requiring something like a truth condition (if what you think is false, you don't know), a belief condition (if you don't believe something, you can't know it), and some other condition (usually called "justification" or "warrant") that shows why the true belief in question actually fulfills whatever other standards apply to distinguish between knowledge and other forms of true belief--after all, one can have true beliefs about something and still not know it. For example, if I believe something that's true, but for the wrong reasons, or based on faulty evidence, or if there is something wrong with the way I came to have that belief or with what makes me continue to believe it now.

It follows that one can know things, even if the things themselves are quite trivial, useless, or uninteresting. (Thanks to Ernest Sosa here for the example) Consider being in a dentist's office and there is nothing else to read, so you pick up a phone book and memorize some of it. If the phone book is accurate (and maybe you will need to check this in various ways), it seems like you might come to know that such-and-such is the number for ABC Bakery...and so on. But so what?

Wisdom seems to require something different. To be wise, it seems that maybe someone might needs to know some things, but perhaps they need to know really important things, rather than totally trivial things. Or, maybe wisdom consists in not knowing things, but being aware of that fact and behaving appropriately for one who is in that condition.

Historically, different philosophers have had some different things to say about the difference(s) between knowledge and wisdom, but let me recommend a couple of philosophical classics to consult (among many, and some others may be named by others who choose to answer your question and make other suggestions--my two are just two of my personal favorites):

Plato, Apology. Pay special attention to where Socrates distinguishes between what he calls his "human wisdom" with his opinion that "the god is truly wise."

Immanuel Kant, "What Is Enlightenment?" Kan't official "target" is "enlightenment," but I think it is not unreasonable to think that he thinks of this as at least a kind of wisdom.

Hope this helps...

Question What is the difference between "knowledge" and "wisdom" from both a current and a historical context. Accepted:August 22, 2013

Question What is the difference between "knowledge" and "wisdom" from both a current and a historical context.

Accepted:
August 22, 2013