[II] Good Judgment is the Second Pillar of Wisdom
Stepping stones, Tollymore, cc Ardfern_2010
1.01.2017 rev in progress 2019, 2022
I imagine the reader skipping this essential chapter with that old feeling of «I know, I know!" that of course, to have a good judgement you have a good logic and a discipline of keeping with fact.
Well, not so! Whoever reduces good judgement to empirical orientation and good logic did not understand a thing from what I am trying to do. The purpose of formal reasoning- with its abstract skeleton of logics and mathematics - should be to serve and scaffold our living judgement, not to replace it. As for keeping with fact, it helps to check but not to reduce our thought to mere tangibles.
To be "good", our judgement must attend to whatever is significant to us humans. It must not exclude that which cannot be measured and reduced to today's positive science and theories. Good judgement is not dedicated to obtaining abstract truth nor to technological exploit; it serves the life of people and the values of such good life. Achieving a happier, quality life, involves the competences of living and succeeding among people, avoiding the many errors we are prone to do by learning from the past and present of humanity at least as much as we learn from Nature. To understand what is best for us humans to chose wisely, to increase our freedom, we need to use all our means and modalities of knowing, many of them yet unaccounted for by the impersonal formal reasoning of the "scientific method".
To be good, our judgement - and our thinking at large - is not obsessed to be perfectly consistent and reflecting some laws of material reality or some theories but instead it must be practical and adequate to human life and the actions in the human world. The science and technology we developed must be servants of people, adequate and conducing to good life instead of being domains served by humanity as if they where ultimate goals. I would take the freedom to observe that everyday humans seem more preoccupied to find meaning and means to pursue their happiness rather than seeking truth and consistency for their own sake. Practical judgement should be adequate in establishing what things, actions, decisions mean to us rather than crucifying itself to make certain it fits ultimate truth or some other ultimate theory.
No doubt, good logic - solid premises made of notions well defined, coherent sentences that follow, conclusions born by proper, understandable rules - are the social back-bone of Rationality, our man-made tool of manufacturing and maintenance of justified beliefs which our scientists call knowledge; By conforming with the rules of logic, known, shared and agreed, we assert, communicate and cooperate safely; which is the main thing our production driven society is seeking nowadays.
Unfortunately, compliance with the grand theory called "the scientific view of the World" grew - as an unintended side effect - into yet another reductionist and limitative dogma. This dogma indicates which subjects are serious enough to consider to such an extent that the rest becomes invisible to science and is deemed not to be real in the world. It happens that many of those "mere words and voices", those constructs not observable or replicable in serious research, are about the core of being human: freedom, consciousness, agency, identity as a unique person, self, moral values, "flourishing" … and of course wisdom.
The frontier around Scienceland is not clearly drawn, certainly not formally and publicly stated with respect to whatever is not (yet) science but still exists, causes effects and is important for the human. Because of this poorly drawn frontier, narrower spirits project a big monist lie, the pretence that science and its technology own and cover everything, and the rest - the improperly defined, the not reducible to observable matter, energy, information, numbers - do simply not exist. Such confusion works against humanism, against the human being, against remaining humane. I would say that this is yet another slope to dehumanisation...in the name of truth and knowledge.
Formal, science-like reasoning recommended to be used everyday, is - as I see it - reduced, reductive and inadequate for thinking well in practice, among people. Inadequate because - in spite of its excellence and correctness - its scope is limited by its requirement of impersonal (i.e. other than human) precision and impaired by omission of whatever does not fit a formal approach, measurements and some reductionist beliefs of our day. Narrowed to exclusive use of empirically verified data, quantities and algorithms, you will ignore a large part of the humans' life-worlds; you will produce dried-out and therefore incredibly silly, often impractical judgement and procedure.
Worse than eliminating most of the humane subjects, logic - which is itself a metaphor, an ideal model, an "as if" generated by successive distilling of commonsense judging - is forced upon us, educated into us, as the necessary and only one correct way of functioning for our mind and brain. Such a "socialisation" tends to eliminate valuing and even considering the modalities of cognition and reasoning which do not fit a logical-mathematical model. Today we end up as adults believing that the metaphor of the computer, of the disincarnate rules and algorithms, must be the quintessence of human judgement. Isn't this some kind of madness? This can hardly be "good judgement".
Rationality is the dominant proven creed of the modern world. It is used to check mental sanity we all accept this; no need of particular wisdom to practice it, it is sufficient to be normal and follow the rules (and avoid starting something new or spontaneous). Nevertheless, beyond the prise of rationality which goes without saying, what I understand by "good judgement" must be and is, much wider.
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Common sense or any other name for our mental flow as it actually takes place...
Living good judgement cannot be disincarnate. It takes place in the mind and bodies of living, unique persons, with names, personal histories, identities, parents and children, places to call "home", things to call "mine", values, certainties, points of view, goals, and in non standard actual situations. All these situated aspects must be considered when relevant, lest the judgement is no good within the actual human world.
The everyday instrument of reasoning employed by human judgement - be it good or poor - includes abundant, informal knowing processes which are inbred to human nature and mentality. Our natural thinking and its omnipresent - often informally received commonsense intuitions and common place references, are ways of functioning shared by all humans, by our entire species. Part of it - the evolutionary heritage of perception and orientation by representation - we share with other animals while another uniquely human part is embodied in specific language, actions, tools, symbols inherited by cultures, nations, professions and the like...
I would have liked to use simple words to name this intricate fasces-like stripe of converging mental functioning. The most attractive - but endlessly debated - are "common sense" or intuitive thinking. Unfortunately these words are corrupted by contradictory theories and disparaged by philosophers who discard the common, "unexamined" only part-conscious way in which people function as mere "folk psychology", guessing, prejudice, preconception and the like. Even as ultimately, as persons, their own last recourse of understanding and judging is the same common sense mentality and reference to metaphors.
One could call our everyday judgement flow natural thinking, well, (as natural or unnatural as us today), meant here as the intuitive, phenomenal (that is lived, introspectively experienced, embodied and situated) flow of knowing and reasoning. I cannot accept that this is reducible to some linear advance of propositions as proposed by a model of classical logic.
The several operations of common human reasoning can be enumerated in spite of being neglected by the account of "reasoning" or "thinking":
To begin, before any formal-like processing, one's judgement consists in perception grasping, identifying and establishing the content, the "input" of our reasoning. If this primary content is poor or misunderstood, all the rest of our judgement is garbage-in, garbage out: no proper logic or intelligence will help one to judge well. The quality of observation is the first step of good judgement.
We observe, highlight and preliminarily select some objects to our attention from many present. Our looking is set from start with an angle and an aim. To judge well we need to observe (and hopefully be aware that we - the observer - count), being also aware of other persons who count as they are stakeholders or targets of the deliberation and potential action.
We differentiate, discern, identify what we observed. We are already interpreting and defining the perceived, referring with practical certainty to widely shared basic beliefs and reliable common knowledge. Choosing the wrong or biased word to name things deforms the entire judgement following. Our looking and handling is determined by words like asking or missing the relevant questions.
We investigate actively, visually, by listening, touching, feeling or handling. Investigating with the hands and the taste is the first cognition of a child, probably partial model and metaphor for all later knowing.
While we establish the state of facts, many factors are already present and influent in our mind; our own understanding experience and memories of what appears to us, credible witnessing and various information sources we had, considering with intention what all this could mean to us and other people, what we could learn and what happens, maybe responding to possible urgency.
Reasoning or thought mainly spontaneous, which follows in our mind to treat what we just learned is in its turn multi-modal, achieved by several and combined mental ways (for example flow of visual representations, kinetic, tactile, auditive, and other more abstract, verbal, etc.) all "flagged" by pre-existing representations and names. This flow is supported in ways still unknown, within the functioning of our nervous system.
Our thinking is not limited to a line of chain of propositions made of words. We often think by doing things and experimenting with how the doing advances; some think, as I saw, with their hands, by manipulating objects to know and fix them.
We all think by moving and doing things, by making and transforming them; we "reason" in our mind in terms of moving, by our usual and meaningful, expressive acts, behaviours, by our conduct situated in the space we live and related to the human body. These basic forms appear to establish the metaphors, the familiar building blocks, which allow all the rest of the World, new and unknown, to become understandable to us. We seem to always think in our mind by means of such building-block metaphors. Without them, all is just words - empty sounds.
When together with other people we reason by conversation exchanging and agreeing the meaning of words, acting and working together. Such thought is often something collective, which we do together.
We also think socially by performing ritualised actions, by rituals giving shape and meaning to what we do; we think by means of dancing, of singing, we we commune by rhythm and emotional resonance; we think by creating our art, our symbols, our metaphors which in turn become patterns for our thought in all domains; inside our body, we reason by imagining, by branching out of scenarios, visualised outcomes and the like... Reasoning proper - informally or even formally, by procedures learned, is an ulterior stage.
When we think verbally, the language often thinks for us. Languages seem to contain in their definitions and reference, in their terms, grammar, syntax and shared metaphors, a major component of the way we reason and judge.
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Our way of judging as humans is phenomenal, a living bundle or fascicle of diverse but parallel mental activities, of colourful, feeling reasoning in human terms and ways (some of them inherited from our phylogeny in representations, emotions, rythmes and non conscious nervous processes, some in the words patterns and rules of language, in the world as we experience the world, as we perceive it, know it, feel it, value it, understand it and while we act in it.
In this process, the conscious and unique observer cannot be evacuated from human judgement and replaced as positivist dreams would like to do for the sake of "objectivity - this is a necessarily subjective activity of unique persons, a core factor of good judgement. All humans think ultimately (or fundamentally) at the first person, not impersonally, by means of modalities and procedures of understanding, representations and meaning, some intimate and some shared, on guided by our shared basic beliefs and knowledge.
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To be explicit and prudent; our real-life, practice of reasoning and shared knowing is not good or bad, it is simply our given heritage unavoidable for all of us. This is how we judge on our feet. This is how both the common people and the sages judge.
Intelligent, well educated and informed people make good use of this cornucopia of reasoning and what they obtain is good sense, possibly wisdom, validated by their critical sense. Silly, ignorant, uncritical people only parrot in the dark and obtain received ideas, prejudice and uncritical shallowness ending up in poor judgement.
It is easy to prove and decry that common sense is volatile, folkish, less secure, less verifiable than the more formal procedures of knowing developed by centuries rationalism and science; but in exchange, the many million years old human cognition processes are quick, local, prompt with their ready-made metaphoric building blocks and - most important - rich enough, nuanced, situational, timely and purposeful, so that it fits well daily life and people matters. Certainly, it needs intelligent control, critical sense and prompt correction to avoid going astray.
On the other hand, basic common sense reasoning, being universally shared, is irreplaceable because it is readily communicable ant it makes sense to everybody. Other people can empathise and understand our mind and feeling and reasons because they function in similar ways with familiar turns of mind, shared beliefs and references.
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Judging well – with feet on ground, in real time, in the best interest of living individuals and groups of people - is then a particular way of mainly inductive informal thinking which takes place in the frame of peoples’ real life-space, in terms of their subjectivity.
The practical manner of thought "in our heads" which we all use, which I label here common sense (or shared sense if you prefer), instead of solely deploying some folkish brand of more or less correct logical thinking - seems to include in fact only some short-cuts of learned logic embedded in an abundant flow of intuitive mental progress.
Our mental flow of inferences forms a multi-modal bundle – driven (or at least given form) by our body, physiology, by the structures of grammar and syntax of the native language. Even at this level, it cannot be conceived merely in terms of a valid processing of perceptions and statements, true or erroneous. Our reasoning - to be useful, to succeed - starts with "premises" being accepted definitions, assumptions, beliefs, trusted witnessing, commands, questions, norms, values, intuitions, desires and intentions. Quite ambiguous, imperfect stuff! We are not passive responding mirrors of the given.
The part of our practical judgement which takes place in words includes and applies to reasoning all the turns of grammar, all the punctuation marks and more - question marks, attention marks, commas, accents, points, quotes, brackets, tones of voice, a whole world of qualifications... it mainly narrates what the words of a given language can express; it builds and tweaks stories as they advance. It includes things unexpressed but felt. The skeleton of language determines meaning and orders thought certainly, but even this is only part of the flow; Mind works with representations, it imagines, feels, represents action, is aware, bets, associates, jumps ahead far beyond (or below) words…
Our reasoning is made – amazingly, I would say - of slippery stepping-stones, mobilis in mobili land-marks, symbols, exploratory representations in movement, turns of mind, rules of thumb, mental experiments visiting alternative scenarios based on ceaselessly evolving criteria. This is at least what I find in my head when I introspect how I reason. For some of us, the train of thought may be visually consistent from the start, led by the Gestalts, the forms and trajectories we perceive at once.
Quite different from sound deduction of which logicians are satisfied to be ideally content-free, blind and silent concerning whatever is not factual and provable, this mental world of ours values everything, applies family resemblances and handy informal routines. The progress of mind may be based on metaphors, of memes functioning as paradigms, and also on gestures or blueprints of action not represented in words. In the same way in which we use expressive gestures to convey meaning, I imagine that some attitudes adopted (and other significant postures and acts) are internalised and shaping our common sense flow of thought. Our intuitions – certainly mine - do not simply generalise from some experience but branch out and ahead ceaselessly rebuilt, guided and corrected "live" by the corrections of perception and the interpretations in progress. Common sense judging takes place in synchronicity and interaction with being and action in the world or even by means of the action itself... Some of us, as I observed, reason best not before speaking but during and by dialectic dialogue, or while they act to change things.
Add to this that the part of “reasoning” of which we become aware and introspect (there must be much more happening in the brain and body which is “us”) takes place within and only within first person conscious positioning in our own history and within the occasion of here and now. We do not reason disembodied, impersonally, in general, from the nowhere, timeless point of view. Who thinks, when and where, with whom, counts, the person with a history, an identity and role it is even decisive. Generic “objectivity” imported as a dogma from philosophy and science into daily life and human affairs works the opposite way, to take us out of the picture instead of judging well. Generic objectivity is stupid in social practice and individual life. Stupid because it neglects the human components and interest.
I think that to face the complexity of actual living on Earth as humans and in the human society we need to reason – if we are to be judicious - aware that we and those we may want to teach, convince or help will start mostly from some degree of error, from uncertain knowledge, shallow, prejudiced understanding and weak probabilities. The priority of common sense reasoning is not truth, truth is only one of its instruments of control. The priority is to solve problems often new, to use or create opportunities, to achieve and succeed short and long term, to nourish human states like security, peace, hope, beauty, justice, fairness, to survive and live better, a good flourishing life. Truth-value alone is a poor guide for practical human judgement.
To do achieve all these things which count instead of hesitating paralysed by technical expertise and some dogma, we have to start from where we are, take as “fact” and provisional truth things doubtful and work our way ahead, towards truer knowledge or success or happiness, by using - to correct the course - all our mental means, formal or informal.
The strength of the living mind – compared with formal rigidity - is to continuously correct our representation and alter our approach to keep the reasoning open until our approximations become accurate enough to be efficient and our action reaches satisfactory results. This is guerrilla art against error, rather than advance of regular troops of formal thought. Such adventurous strategy has little to do with seeking, selecting and treating only measurable data put in provable propositions, advanced in a linear way by means of logical operations. In successful practical thinking, shifting attention and awareness, responsive to subjective interest and external evolutions seem more “present” than logical construction work.
To reason with purpose about the world and people, to negotiate the turns of complexity, subjectivity and disorder, our psyche employs all its formal and informal modalities, born or imitated, explicit and implicit, inherited from our biology and culture. Common sense identifies with them and understands them because the common sense thinker reasons with the same human means. Some of our mental means of today we inherited from the animal past, some from what proved successful in history. Taking place in human terms, exerted from the human point of view, commonsense judgement is involving the entirety of our common mental functioning. It seems to me that we humans (not to speak about animal intelligence) coped like this for hundreds of thousands of years – prehistoric and historic - before the culture of classical logic vas invented. We adapted and survived. Informally. This treasury should not be disparaged and eliminated in favour of modern logical correctness, but rather augmented and enriched with the science born common knowledge and rules of thumb.
Common sense reasoning not only makes use of shared mental means but also includes and makes use of common human knowledge. We consult spontaneously (or let intervene) a huge passive memory content of references and beliefs, of common places and platitudes, of analogies and typical scenarios, the one shared informally by most people under the name of “common knowledge”.
As it appears, some fragments of educated formal procedures learned as we mature are present to check and justify the flow in our epoch. We use them from time to time. We earn from science-shaped education new reference content and corrections which influence and enrich usefully our common sense “concepts”. But the main operations must be very old, coming from biology and humanization. We gain to improve our "natural" "folkish" flow but not to repress it or to replace it with formal, machine-like algorithms.
This comprehensive content and process of reasoning - described here very shortly - is what I call "faute de mieux" common sense judgement. When it works, it is labelled "good sense".
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I see educated good judgement as necessarily considering and integrating in its common-sense reasoning the inevitable "fact of life" presence and weight of received ideas, being aware that – most of the time - we trust long chains of witnessing and mediated informing. Judging well among people takes as relevant factors and includes in our deliberations the values, feelings, beliefs unquestioned, ignorances, diverging interests and interpersonal or group transactions; this does not prevent critical judgement and awareness of how relative and artificial or false such components are.
To achieve adaptive success or to change things, to create something new, practical judgement engages the whole of the human psyche, feeling, will, action and the whole content of our memory. Practical judgement juggles with risky approximations, pre-judged recipes and received notions. Amazing, hasty short-cuts in need of permanent correction. To judge well we must learn to reason from fact but also from error from lies and misunderstanding. Among people I observe reasoning from appearances, very often from faith, from belief, from trust, from witnessing... from beauty or moral principle and - quite successfully - from vision and dreams. This can not be neglected if you want to understand people, to be understood an helpful.
Dry and impersonal, without experiencing and interpreted experiencing, without a sense of the particular local difference, without culture and psychology given due value and notice, good logic and scientific accuracy offer no good judgement in the real life of people and nations.
Good logic, this device of pure reason which I can only admire and try to emulate, is –I believe - mandatory at the core of good thought and decision, as a watchdog of realism and consistency; but it cannot maim or replace imagination and intuition, the connection, the immersion of the thinker in the informality of actual human reality.
Clean propositional logic - even amplified by terra bites of computing - cannot supplant the richness and finesse of judging within human dimensions, with good sense living the phenomenon. The deployed flow of formal logic misses the deadlines of personal and social effectiveness.
Good judgement functions aware of the genesis and history of a present condition and is concerned to imagine many potential developments ahead, multiple developments not existent but possible. Some of them could be entirely our own creation or initiative.
The internal core of (somewhat informal) proper logic we are supposed to practice and the dry critical analysis so useful to educate, is – in practice - surrounded, wrapped, assimilated, into a live connection with the human side of our life-world. To “think well”, we must be able to understand human reality as people live it and as they conceive to live it.
I imagine that good judgement takes place in a composite internal language - part verbal part figurative - and by a progress of shared representations, notions and short-hand reasoning procedures; such habits were previously acquired and validated through socialisation. In my experience, when shared with other people, good judgement takes the convincing form of communication people can understand, centred on them, with content they can use. The opposite of this is generic, impersonal truth, carefully separated from the “impurity” of human interest, proud to abstract, prone to consider people objects of study and manipulation instead of active, autonomous agents.
Good judgement cannot be reduced to processing precise data, empirical knowledge and arbitration by truth; it becomes "good" by considering the practical and artificial references, landmarks and informal procedures people use to position themselves, adjust, think and take everyday decisions, then to follow them in practice. This complicated process takes place directly, in real time, on one's feet, almost always on incomplete information, but it works quite well, better for the time being than the clean logic driven response of the best artificial intelligence. The engineers understood this faster than the psychologists; at this time, artificial intelligence works to imitate our "sloppy" efficiency in the poorly defined fields which are –as it appears – our reality.
The priority for the one judging well is to connect relevant fact and action needed with that which counts and makes sense for people.
There is a willed bias in good judgement to advise and help the specific interest of specific people, like you, with preferred values at work. For the one “judging well” people are his clients, friends, students... or sometimes foes.
Good judgement is not meant to serve precision, perfection or truth above the human interest of living safe and better. Life as end-value is worth more than the instrumental values of truth, perfection, newness or technological achievement. The values taking precedence for the wise are first of all not to harm (primum non nocere), survival life, and peace. Next is goodness: usefulness, success, flourishing, social harmony, beauty and the like.
What good judgement is definitely not is "pre-judgement", thought readily received or set in advance – that is prejudice - to be forced upon local or new goals, circumstances and events. Reducing surprise and discontinuity to rigid past solutions, cutting down newness to the technically handy size and notions of dogma is contrary to good judgement.
Forcing unruly, fuzzy plural reality-in-movement onto a Procrustean bed of hard and slow thinking rules set in advance can only be foolish, not wise. Generality imposed on the particular, dogma, utopias, are contrary to good judgement; even when they were thought-out by geniuses. Misapplied, such generalities are usually absurd or stupid.
Good judgement is people-minded reasoning that functions in the actual Umwelt, the life-space, born and socially constructed. This is the life-space of knowing and acting which is accessible to the human being. Judgement is good when it foresees what can and probably will happen in this existential bubble; usefully, without horses blinkers, with multiple choices of scenarios of that which may and will actually happen; it is good if it protects with prudence and it succeeds to help.
Good judgement is proven when it is tested in critical events and in time to be a successful navigator of the everyday and also of the unexpected, of the exceptional, of the yet unknown.
Good judgement is expected to provide – when needed - means to create something new, at times “something from nothing”; new ways around obstacles, radically new interpretation and new names voluntarily invented, propitious to master things and events, instead of being dominated by them. If we are to build or create new reality it is by such good judgement, certainly not by emaciated un-human utopia. Provided we keep good judgement fool-proof.
Good judgement is watchful with the garbage-in garbage-out vulnerability of the formal procedures and processes of judgement. It does not help at all to be precise and correct in processing and deciding, but based on reality incompletely and poorly perceived, understood and named; even less on dogmatic decisions ignoring the human factor.
Good judgement is interpreting and judging its own perception, mindful of the relevant at work, not reduced to the politically correct or the scientifically correct pretence.
The miraculous, creative entry point of good judgement is to observe and understand, with the adequate "granularity" with an open mind, to sense what counts and to name it or rename it in felicitous ways in the relevant context.
The "wise one" will understand better than other people what things mean here and now and also how the meaning could change in the long term and a much wider view. This frame is higher or deeper, N+-1, thus freer that standard, precise, stable but frozen definitions and propositions. I would say that often good judgement starts well indeed with that intuitive moment when the thinker exclaims "Aha!" when he suddenly sees falling into one meaningful picture the components of a Gestalt, a configuration through which a useful itinerary makes sense. To see only what we can measure, censored by definitions and available instruments, keeps us blind to many choices, in a state of disconnected stupidity. Sometimes, such limitation is purposeful and presents choices made to diminish choice.
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The everyday is too complicated for the theorists
Actual life-spaces, these bubbles of environment, may appear as a mere simplifying metaphor of banality but when you examine them with precision they are immensely more complicated than the domains of clean, abstract, theories... Accordingly, to force deep thought into being practical, wisdom needs minds capable to be involved with the imperfect things and with ever surprising, different people. Such minds empathise, intervene and change the given even as they work to know it. To be realistic, the wise must be personally connected; even when they keep at prudent distance.
Good judgement, as an applied form of wisdom, is action-thinking; therefore it must be able to advance on the slippery stepping stones of the human every day. We think well-enough to be considered wise when we fit the practice, not the theory.
Practical wisdom is not at all the same thing with the detached thinking of an excellent scientist; it judges and often guesses on its feet, immersed in a complex, implicit and vague context of multiple, fluid meaning, with "information" forever incomplete. Culture, spiritual life, words, count as much as "fact"; tradition, occasions, acting participants, events are active causes; perspective and meaning are relative while objects keep moving...
Wisdom turned practical must be able to use as a raw material the actual factors that shape the human being’s actual life which is far from being informed exclusively with verified truth; on the contrary, it is easy to observe – if we have eyes to see and ears to hear - that most of our active knowledge comes from the authority of long chains of testimony by other people be they our parents, contemporaries, teachers, preachers, scientists, journalists, politicians and even worse… all accepted on trust, credibility and authority. Only a minute part of an individual’s knowledge is acquired by sensory experience and own verification. Wise judgement must accordingly do with inevitable and massive received common place, unquestioned convictions and beliefs, hearsay, prejudice, stereotype, shared denial, laws, customs, tradition and so on… Add to this the unsteadiness of memory, the desires, blind-spots and wishful thinking, all here to stay.
Today's theory-driven “human” sciences - are not willing, as it seems, nor capable to embrace such an imprecise domain of individuals. The mainstreams appear to me defensive, even hostile to whatever they cannot order and reduce to the prescribed mould. Instead of humbly accepting the not yet included in Science, we are urged to exclude the untidy but influent multitude, by formal reasoning and mechanistic reduction. It is like a dream to reduce the human to the machine.
When it comes to considering how humans judge, the specialist procedures of thinking designed by the logicians and scientists are proposed as exclusive models and norms, to eliminate and to replace rather than to improve the ways in which human mind works "naturally", as it did for millennia, before Aristotle... In fact, we are invited - for reasons of doctrine, precision and ease to replicate in machines - not to trust (while learning to be aware of their weaknesses and limits) our spontaneous understanding and judgement.
Alas, the reduction of judgement to well defined, isolated subjects and monotonous progress by formal rules of reason is inadequate for us to think in the living human interest and in the rhythm of life among people. The limited scope and the abstracting attitude of scientific method are not nimble enough to fit this wriggling human world. In truth, we ignore it observably in our daily life. Our actual world is lived by persons, in their poorly structured life-space of reality, as relating and meaningful to them, with human goals, involving other persons, their biography and circumstances, not in controlled, aseptic isolation.
The generic wisdom a judicious person may know, is awakened and becomes practical, live, less by learning and practising logic or scientific creed (which should not hurt) but rather by means of this other critical "pillar of wisdom" which I would call - with a personal interpretation - good judgement.
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A working definition: "good judgement" is intelligent common sense thought
I understand by good judgement, the intelligent use of all our mental resources and means - formal and informal, explicit and implicit, verified successively and in various degrees - to judge adequately, in common sense terms, responding to a common ground of actual comprehension, needs and intentions of living people.
Certainly, wise thinkers live with their real times, among incontestable facts and real progress of formal thinking. They must build on reliable knowledge and on the logic of our best language-based reasoning, but it seems to me that they also engage with their intuition and common knowledge a full array of protean common sense means of judgement available to any normal “reasonable person”: familiarity with the environment, narrative, mental representations in movement, shared knowledge and awareness, shared intention, common place evaluations, scenarios, turns of the literal and figurative language, prefabricated building-blocs and short-cuts of reasoning. They practice empathy, dialogue, continuous questioning, projecting oneself into other people’s situation, they consider variably credible testimony, choices of coexisting meanings and points of view. Their progress and correction of thought is in part by action and while acting, not to forget the use of norms, beliefs and creative imagination... The uncomfortable list of complexity is far from being finished.
All normal people practice in some measure this multitude of implicit ancestral means; the difference is that those who judge well master those means, while poor thinkers lacking intelligence and critical sense fall prey to rigid usage and to the potential prejudice and biases of fast, conventional thinking. It should be clear that common sense is an instrument, not good or bad but requiring skill, with outcome as bright or inept as the ones who use it.
The mental work of one judging well with common sense cannot spare being adequately coherent and sound to be rational and of this world; nonetheless at the same time, it must be adequately rich, flexible, error-tolerant and risk-taking – I would say personal - to be practical, flexible to fit local situation, autonomous and free enough to add some value, to start something new, some desired change.
To take one example - the narrative mode of reasoning - its course must follow with coherence; it must come to explain by tracing how things happened to get from the past to the present; it must make sense of how they are now; it must project ahead and lead without implausible gaps from the present state to some alternative of desired future state while not ignoring or denying the undesired. These stories have their necessary logic of reasonableness, one able to include more than selected, isolated “terms” and "fact"; components like the implicit, the not stated, ignorance, relevant belief, not understanding, feelings, intentions and the like...
I came to think that the main way of thinking by which what I call good judgement takes place and communicates is the intuitive, obvious-feeling flow of common sense reasoning [1]
I keep discovering the depth behind this seemingly common place expression "common sense"; I must spend much more time studying it; maybe other people will do it better. For now, when I use these words I have in mind the movement of the content of mind - representations of multiple sensory nature, meanings attached to words, concepts, compelling narrative descriptions, interpretations, valuations, metaphors, symbols, and turns of mind - a culturally shared collection of widely shared and accepted building blocks, guiding us intuitively trough daily life and personal decision. It is using common sense well which allows us to judge well and apply whatever wise knowledge we own. Accordingly, to understand wisdom at work we must study common sense and define it with more respect than today.
Common sense is – as I think today - our mental sense of reality and our Archilochian way of the fox who knows many tricks, unlike the hedgehog of rational method who knows just one [2]. Common sense is a polymorphous movement of mind, a "language", an Esperanto in which actual human judgement is flowing and is communicated.
For me it is an amazing discovery that “common sense” is not as I used to believe a mere disorderly, naïve, pre-reflective functioning of the mind but a vital, structured and inevitable mode of existence of actual human judgement – everybody’s judgement, with no rational aristocracy making exception.
Caveat sophus - common sense is as good as those who practice it
This intuitive mode of functioning which comes naturally to us and its sources do not guarantee at all that our judgement is good, it can be all wrong and prejudiced; call it good judgement only when it proves self-correcting, adequate, reliable and successful in time and in important occasions. The use of the tool depends on intelligence, character and education. Alternatively, the same “common sense” jargon and complacency is the potential carrier of simple-mindedness and received prejudice eluding critical thinking, an unsuspecting door of obviousness wide open to conformity, brain-washing and outright mass stupidity.
Good judgement as I experience it, reasons with a variable geometry of components; it keeps a keen, familiar eye on surrounding reality in progress (but also with a constant sense of longer term and wider view) while it moves its representation – artfully and with a purpose - from readily accepted landmarks of reality perceived as "obvious common place", through creative processes as complex as we are able to command, but always landing back to next "compelling, self-evident common place" that follows. This starting with and coming back to common place landmarks is the condition of fitting the human dimension and intuitive understanding.
Because it is bold and approximate, good judgement is perpetually busy to correct course, learn, alter or retract when surprised with new aspects or with signs of error. Continuous correction of errors, critical for a quick application of intuitions and pre-existent building blocks of judgement is a condition without which common sense would be indeed inferior to better organised formal reasoning.
Common sense is a probably inborn or early-learned manner, a functioning of the normal human mind which advances along practical reality, guided by a socially shared "folk-world-view" and "folk-psychology" map composed of common knowledge, common places, interpretations, valuations and generally accepted turns of mind, socially prefabricated "building-blocks" that proved to be useful, readily available to the socialized human.
All people use the folk world-view and its turns of mind, some with more luck than others, according to their intelligence, talent and critical sense. I believe that "wise" people have a gift of juggling well or that they learned to use consciously, with critical sense, the intricacy of the generic, shared, human mode of thought. I also guess that their art is to keep aware of the fallibility of the common-sense moves and to swiftly correct their weakness while using their advantage of reasoning fast and being readily understandable.
I visualise good judgement as a bundle of streams flowing intertwined, branching out and converging back, a cluster of all cognitive functioning means at hand . We actually use this diversity of means - at our risk - to discern the relevant, find meaning, give meaning, define, re-define, represent, guess, make connections... I imagine that we deploy this heteroclite content as moving situational trees and flows of representations, reference marks and scenarios of possible change. While we advance, we consider evolving feelings, interests, ends and means, in order to deliberate, decide and continuously correct human - not purified rational - reception, action and inaction.
Thus, good judgement, while mindful and in part educated to be unemotionally factual, purposeful, economic and principled, is also reasonable, personal and warm; it considers in its flow much more fact and belief than formally described notions and data; it also respects a richness of implicit, intangible or not yet measurable, often irrational but nonetheless determinant human factors at work like emotion, value, local or personal ability to understand and to accept, inherent imprecision and errors of appreciation at work, different and differing interests, representations, belief, convictions, faith, choices made, arbitrary norms adopted... the structural subjectivity of people.
To forecast and decide among humans, to help, good judgement needs to consider and steer in real-time a flow of actual and possible scenarios, perpetually branching out and changing.
Good judgement keeps moving - and its components keep transforming - altering and correcting definitions, content and means, homing successively towards desirable objectives and reality fit.
Instead of only one process – linear and logical - the good judgement of wisdom uses all means at hand, precise or imprecise, certain or risky. Good judgement grows and learns while thinking.
Imagine the dread of the logicians and social science methodologists – at least the ones I met or knew about - to even consider such slippery mess which happens to be (in my hardly provable mental experience) the life of mind. Whatever it is, for the "properly educated" academic thinker good judgement must not be faith or folklore or God forbid! common sense - that mish-mash jumping ahead to quick default conclusions that appears as "clear and distinct ideas" to a multitude of "common" people or that “Good sense* [which according to Descartes’ somewhat ironic claim] is the most evenly distributed thing in the world.”[3] The spontaneous way common people (that is all of us) think, is still shunned by honourable academy as "folklore", as vulgar, biased, received, superficial ideas in need to be corrected or, even better, eliminated and replaced with exact specialist knowledge.
Only artificial intelligence researchers (let me jest) prove sympathetic at this time with common sense reasoning; because the engineers have no choice but to observe its reality [4]; because their machines must face the practical tasks of the human world, function and succeed in it. In fact theirs is –as it seems to me – the notable recent contribution to the psychology and the philosophy of common sense.
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Compare this complexity juggling device with the linear logical judgement which is "good" only if purified of unverified, erroneous, imprecise "common sense", advancing from operational hypothesis and precise, necessary definitions to finding by explicit rules that lead from verified premises to true conclusions.
It is easy to see why such a representation of multi-modal reasoning, verbal and non verbal, "sufficient", rational and intuitive at the same time, including prefabricated blocks of received judgement is controversial and repulsive for the orderly researcher. I may describe my introspection of the process it in another chapter. All I state here is that actual life complexity in progress, experienced by persons, in particular relationships, circumstances and events, culturally formatted and represented, cannot be accounted for today, nor directed, by dry rationalisation; to be relevant, it needs flowing concreteness and subjectivity respected as relevant. My straw logician must be horrified by such a view.
All approaches – logical or "wise" - need of course to be consistent internally and externally, but their differences in grasping and in handling complexity and fuzziness are huge. I am certainly aware of the trade-offs and the risk. But I remember the old fable in which the excellent dog proved incapable to catch a small skinny rabbit: unlike the laboratory scientists who run for a theory and for truth, common people run for their life; they prefer to trust, nay, cannot do anything but trust, something which appears robust and compelling to their intuition and proves to work in their practice.
I see good judgement as certainly including the best of logic available and applicable in the case at hand, wrapped into the best which our personal and informal means of mental progress may offer. I also believe that good judgement can be educated to use more logic provided it does not pretend to deny, eliminate and replace common sense.
If rational thinking is controlled and valued for its unambiguity, precision, consistency, good form, objective truth fit to the verifiable reality of its object, good judgement would be evaluated and verified by its ability to bring about comprehensible outcomes that work and prove favourable to "subjective" persons, "now" and over time. Good judgement achieves that people make sense of the past, perceive increased choices, feel secure, avoid harm, suffer less, live better and succeed more in the short, medium and long term, from the point of view and for the sake of their own life.
Good judgement will inevitably reflect and fit the material but also the spiritual representation of us and of the world within which we live. It will also be at times radically creative towards the given of fact, language and ideas, by proposing and acting towards new reality - new ways of understanding, believing, defining, wording, acting, building, producing, responding, "navigating" and finally living our reality.
A world with its matter and laws is given to us in part directly, or in much larger part witnessed to us by authority we trust (be it scientific or other); thus many things are given. But some we invent, do and make. New things translated into common sense representations become as real to our mind as everything given to us by Nature and mediated by Society. Good judgement knows not only that we live on dreams, but also that dreams may come true by our action; accordingly, it keeps close to what we can understand and accept.
Good practical judgement is agency, beyond a mechanic snapshot of reality given. Quite often good judgement consists in redefining and re-framing radically the given instead of submitting to it's received interpretation. With such requirements, for a while, the purified and reduced representation programmed into computers will be slow to become wise. I would say the ultimate computer is still our brain.
Useful judgement is not only sound, intuitive and readily understandable but also personal, flexible and sensitive enough to context, point of view, ownership and actual complexity, roomy enough to hold the many things important, relevant, meaningful and practical, far more concrete and luxuriant than the plain propositions mastered to this day by formal logical rationality and scientific method.
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The life-smart effectiveness and striking banality of basic, shared common sense judgement is - I advance hopefully - completed in some of the value-adding wise people, with its opposite - uncommon sense often paradoxical - the unusual contribution of bold minds able to break the conformity of obviousness and received beliefs, to create new perspective and initiative, to start something new. But afterwards they still need to put feet back on earth and translate the uncommon into common.
As I see it, striking newness will need, in order to become wise and to help good judgement, to get past surprise, the built in hostility of common sense to paradox and unfamiliarity. This is done by translation into the compelling images, metaphors, paradigms and examples made simple and absorbed as obvious by our Esperanto of common sense.
Without landing back from higher levels of "something else" (scientific, philosophical or other) to that which is relevant to the common understanding and human interest of persons, uncommon sense can hardly appear as wise.
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Wise knowledge and good judgement – these two intellectual pillars of wisdom - will most probably offer valuable understanding and advice to us and to other people. People who own this much wisdom, deserve to be considered sages. But is this a complete enough answer to the question "What is wisdom?" Are the knowing of much wisdom and judging well in the world sufficient for a flourishing life, better for you and me? Certainly not!
Wisdom known, understood and the ability to reason well in practical complexity still need to materialize in action and fact, in the actual government of our life.
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*"Socrates
...And all these things the philosopher does not even know that he does not know; for he does not keep aloof from them for the sake of gaining reputation, but really it is only his body that has its place and home in the city; his mind, considering all these things petty and of no account, disdains them and is borne in all directions, as Pindar1 says, “both below the earth,” and measuring the surface of the earth, and “above the sky,” studying the stars, and investigating the universal nature of every thing that is, each in its entirety, never lowering itself to anything close at hand.
Theodorus
What do you mean by this, Socrates?
Socrates
Why, take the case of Thales, Theodorus. While he was studying the stars and looking upwards, he fell into a pit, and a neat, witty Thracian servant girl jeered at him, they say, because he was so eager to know the things in the sky that he could not see what was there before him at his very feet. The same jest applies to all who pass their lives in philosophy.”
Plato. Plato in Twelve Volumes, Vol. 12 translated by Harold N. Fowler. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1921.Theaet. [173e] and [174a]
[1] Radu J. Bogdan, a fine philosopher I had the privilege to meet many years ago, in our youth, published attempts at defining a field of common sense he called "folk or commonsense psychology" or "folklore of the mind" referring to the way we make sense of other people’s mental functioning; his analysis helped me greatly to clarify my thoughts about my riskier, extrapolating approach to a wider domain of "good judgment seen as common sense reasoning at large". Certainly he is innocent for my possible exaggerations with which he would probably disagree for mindful reasons. His two introductions which I read with profit are "The folklore of the mind" and "Common Sense Naturalized - The Practical Stance", both in his volume "Mind and Common Sense" Radu J. Bogdan (ed), Cambridge U.P. Cambridge.. first published in 1991
This completes the useful consultation of Stephen Boulter's, The Rediscovery of Common Sense Philosophy, Palgrave Macmillan, Houndmills, 2007, Elio, Renee's (ed.) publication of the Vancouver Symposium on common sense, reasoning and rationality in 1998: Common Sense, Reasoning, and Rationality - New Directions in Cognitive Science, Oxford, New York, 2002 and a host of similar sources to which I will come back in a separate article on "commonsense".
[2] I adapt this interpretation of Archilochus fragment after Isaiah Berlin’s THE HEDGEHOG AND THE FOX An essay on Tolstoy's view of history, WEIDENFELD & NICOLSON, London, 1953.
[3] [Descartes, René, A Discourse on the Method of Correctly Conducting One’s Reason and
Seeking Truth in the Sciences, Trans. Ian Maclean, Oxford U.P., 2006, part I, p. 5]
[4] Elio, Renee (Ed), Common Sense, Reasoning, and Rationality, Univ of Alberta, 2002 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: February 2006
and
Mueller, Eric, T., Commonsense Reasoning, An Event Calculus Based Approach (2nd ed), Morgan Kaufmann, Amsterdam.., 2015,
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I imagine the reader skipping this essential chapter with that old feeling of «I know, I know!" that of course, to have a good judgement you have a good logic and a discipline of keeping with fact.
Well, not so! Whoever reduces good judgement to empirical orientation and good logic did not understand a thing from what I am trying to do. The purpose of formal reasoning- with its abstract skeleton of logics and mathematics - should be to serve and scaffold our living judgement, not to replace it. As for keeping with fact, it helps to check but not to reduce our thought to mere tangibles.
To be "good", our judgement must attend to whatever is significant to us humans. It must not exclude that which cannot be measured and reduced to today's positive science and theories. Good judgement is not dedicated to obtaining abstract truth nor to technological exploit; it serves the life of people and the values of such good life. Achieving a happier, quality life, involves the competences of living and succeeding among people, avoiding the many errors we are prone to do by learning from the past and present of humanity at least as much as we learn from Nature. To understand what is best for us humans to chose wisely, to increase our freedom, we need to use all our means and modalities of knowing, many of them yet unaccounted for by the impersonal formal reasoning of the "scientific method".
To be good, our judgement - and our thinking at large - is not obsessed to be perfectly consistent and reflecting some laws of material reality or some theories but instead it must be practical and adequate to human life and the actions in the human world. The science and technology we developed must be servants of people, adequate and conducing to good life instead of being domains served by humanity as if they where ultimate goals. I would take the freedom to observe that everyday humans seem more preoccupied to find meaning and means to pursue their happiness rather than seeking truth and consistency for their own sake. Practical judgement should be adequate in establishing what things, actions, decisions mean to us rather than crucifying itself to make certain it fits ultimate truth or some other ultimate theory.
No doubt, good logic - solid premises made of notions well defined, coherent sentences that follow, conclusions born by proper, understandable rules - are the social back-bone of Rationality, our man-made tool of manufacturing and maintenance of justified beliefs which our scientists call knowledge; By conforming with the rules of logic, known, shared and agreed, we assert, communicate and cooperate safely; which is the main thing our production driven society is seeking nowadays.
Unfortunately, compliance with the grand theory called "the scientific view of the World" grew - as an unintended side effect - into yet another reductionist and limitative dogma. This dogma indicates which subjects are serious enough to consider to such an extent that the rest becomes invisible to science and is deemed not to be real in the world. It happens that many of those "mere words and voices", those constructs not observable or replicable in serious research, are about the core of being human: freedom, consciousness, agency, identity as a unique person, self, moral values, "flourishing" … and of course wisdom.
The frontier around Scienceland is not clearly drawn, certainly not formally and publicly stated with respect to whatever is not (yet) science but still exists, causes effects and is important for the human. Because of this poorly drawn frontier, narrower spirits project a big monist lie, the pretence that science and its technology own and cover everything, and the rest - the improperly defined, the not reducible to observable matter, energy, information, numbers - do simply not exist. Such confusion works against humanism, against the human being, against remaining humane. I would say that this is yet another slope to dehumanisation...in the name of truth and knowledge.
Formal, science-like reasoning recommended to be used everyday, is - as I see it - reduced, reductive and inadequate for thinking well in practice, among people. Inadequate because - in spite of its excellence and correctness - its scope is limited by its requirement of impersonal (i.e. other than human) precision and impaired by omission of whatever does not fit a formal approach, measurements and some reductionist beliefs of our day. Narrowed to exclusive use of empirically verified data, quantities and algorithms, you will ignore a large part of the humans' life-worlds; you will produce dried-out and therefore incredibly silly, often impractical judgement and procedure.
Worse than eliminating most of the humane subjects, logic - which is itself a metaphor, an ideal model, an "as if" generated by successive distilling of commonsense judging - is forced upon us, educated into us, as the necessary and only one correct way of functioning for our mind and brain. Such a "socialisation" tends to eliminate valuing and even considering the modalities of cognition and reasoning which do not fit a logical-mathematical model. Today we end up as adults believing that the metaphor of the computer, of the disincarnate rules and algorithms, must be the quintessence of human judgement. Isn't this some kind of madness? This can hardly be "good judgement".
Rationality is the dominant proven creed of the modern world. It is used to check mental sanity we all accept this; no need of particular wisdom to practice it, it is sufficient to be normal and follow the rules (and avoid starting something new or spontaneous). Nevertheless, beyond the prise of rationality which goes without saying, what I understand by "good judgement" must be and is, much wider.
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Common sense or any other name for our mental flow as it actually takes place...
Living good judgement cannot be disincarnate. It takes place in the mind and bodies of living, unique persons, with names, personal histories, identities, parents and children, places to call "home", things to call "mine", values, certainties, points of view, goals, and in non standard actual situations. All these situated aspects must be considered when relevant, lest the judgement is no good within the actual human world.
The everyday instrument of reasoning employed by human judgement - be it good or poor - includes abundant, informal knowing processes which are inbred to human nature and mentality. Our natural thinking and its omnipresent - often informally received commonsense intuitions and common place references, are ways of functioning shared by all humans, by our entire species. Part of it - the evolutionary heritage of perception and orientation by representation - we share with other animals while another uniquely human part is embodied in specific language, actions, tools, symbols inherited by cultures, nations, professions and the like...
I would have liked to use simple words to name this intricate fasces-like stripe of converging mental functioning. The most attractive - but endlessly debated - are "common sense" or intuitive thinking. Unfortunately these words are corrupted by contradictory theories and disparaged by philosophers who discard the common, "unexamined" only part-conscious way in which people function as mere "folk psychology", guessing, prejudice, preconception and the like. Even as ultimately, as persons, their own last recourse of understanding and judging is the same common sense mentality and reference to metaphors.
One could call our everyday judgement flow natural thinking, well, (as natural or unnatural as us today), meant here as the intuitive, phenomenal (that is lived, introspectively experienced, embodied and situated) flow of knowing and reasoning. I cannot accept that this is reducible to some linear advance of propositions as proposed by a model of classical logic.
The several operations of common human reasoning can be enumerated in spite of being neglected by the account of "reasoning" or "thinking":
To begin, before any formal-like processing, one's judgement consists in perception grasping, identifying and establishing the content, the "input" of our reasoning. If this primary content is poor or misunderstood, all the rest of our judgement is garbage-in, garbage out: no proper logic or intelligence will help one to judge well. The quality of observation is the first step of good judgement.
We observe, highlight and preliminarily select some objects to our attention from many present. Our looking is set from start with an angle and an aim. To judge well we need to observe (and hopefully be aware that we - the observer - count), being also aware of other persons who count as they are stakeholders or targets of the deliberation and potential action.
We differentiate, discern, identify what we observed. We are already interpreting and defining the perceived, referring with practical certainty to widely shared basic beliefs and reliable common knowledge. Choosing the wrong or biased word to name things deforms the entire judgement following. Our looking and handling is determined by words like asking or missing the relevant questions.
We investigate actively, visually, by listening, touching, feeling or handling. Investigating with the hands and the taste is the first cognition of a child, probably partial model and metaphor for all later knowing.
While we establish the state of facts, many factors are already present and influent in our mind; our own understanding experience and memories of what appears to us, credible witnessing and various information sources we had, considering with intention what all this could mean to us and other people, what we could learn and what happens, maybe responding to possible urgency.
Reasoning or thought mainly spontaneous, which follows in our mind to treat what we just learned is in its turn multi-modal, achieved by several and combined mental ways (for example flow of visual representations, kinetic, tactile, auditive, and other more abstract, verbal, etc.) all "flagged" by pre-existing representations and names. This flow is supported in ways still unknown, within the functioning of our nervous system.
Our thinking is not limited to a line of chain of propositions made of words. We often think by doing things and experimenting with how the doing advances; some think, as I saw, with their hands, by manipulating objects to know and fix them.
We all think by moving and doing things, by making and transforming them; we "reason" in our mind in terms of moving, by our usual and meaningful, expressive acts, behaviours, by our conduct situated in the space we live and related to the human body. These basic forms appear to establish the metaphors, the familiar building blocks, which allow all the rest of the World, new and unknown, to become understandable to us. We seem to always think in our mind by means of such building-block metaphors. Without them, all is just words - empty sounds.
When together with other people we reason by conversation exchanging and agreeing the meaning of words, acting and working together. Such thought is often something collective, which we do together.
We also think socially by performing ritualised actions, by rituals giving shape and meaning to what we do; we think by means of dancing, of singing, we we commune by rhythm and emotional resonance; we think by creating our art, our symbols, our metaphors which in turn become patterns for our thought in all domains; inside our body, we reason by imagining, by branching out of scenarios, visualised outcomes and the like... Reasoning proper - informally or even formally, by procedures learned, is an ulterior stage.
When we think verbally, the language often thinks for us. Languages seem to contain in their definitions and reference, in their terms, grammar, syntax and shared metaphors, a major component of the way we reason and judge.
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Our way of judging as humans is phenomenal, a living bundle or fascicle of diverse but parallel mental activities, of colourful, feeling reasoning in human terms and ways (some of them inherited from our phylogeny in representations, emotions, rythmes and non conscious nervous processes, some in the words patterns and rules of language, in the world as we experience the world, as we perceive it, know it, feel it, value it, understand it and while we act in it.
In this process, the conscious and unique observer cannot be evacuated from human judgement and replaced as positivist dreams would like to do for the sake of "objectivity - this is a necessarily subjective activity of unique persons, a core factor of good judgement. All humans think ultimately (or fundamentally) at the first person, not impersonally, by means of modalities and procedures of understanding, representations and meaning, some intimate and some shared, on guided by our shared basic beliefs and knowledge.
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To be explicit and prudent; our real-life, practice of reasoning and shared knowing is not good or bad, it is simply our given heritage unavoidable for all of us. This is how we judge on our feet. This is how both the common people and the sages judge.
Intelligent, well educated and informed people make good use of this cornucopia of reasoning and what they obtain is good sense, possibly wisdom, validated by their critical sense. Silly, ignorant, uncritical people only parrot in the dark and obtain received ideas, prejudice and uncritical shallowness ending up in poor judgement.
It is easy to prove and decry that common sense is volatile, folkish, less secure, less verifiable than the more formal procedures of knowing developed by centuries rationalism and science; but in exchange, the many million years old human cognition processes are quick, local, prompt with their ready-made metaphoric building blocks and - most important - rich enough, nuanced, situational, timely and purposeful, so that it fits well daily life and people matters. Certainly, it needs intelligent control, critical sense and prompt correction to avoid going astray.
On the other hand, basic common sense reasoning, being universally shared, is irreplaceable because it is readily communicable ant it makes sense to everybody. Other people can empathise and understand our mind and feeling and reasons because they function in similar ways with familiar turns of mind, shared beliefs and references.
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Judging well – with feet on ground, in real time, in the best interest of living individuals and groups of people - is then a particular way of mainly inductive informal thinking which takes place in the frame of peoples’ real life-space, in terms of their subjectivity.
The practical manner of thought "in our heads" which we all use, which I label here common sense (or shared sense if you prefer), instead of solely deploying some folkish brand of more or less correct logical thinking - seems to include in fact only some short-cuts of learned logic embedded in an abundant flow of intuitive mental progress.
Our mental flow of inferences forms a multi-modal bundle – driven (or at least given form) by our body, physiology, by the structures of grammar and syntax of the native language. Even at this level, it cannot be conceived merely in terms of a valid processing of perceptions and statements, true or erroneous. Our reasoning - to be useful, to succeed - starts with "premises" being accepted definitions, assumptions, beliefs, trusted witnessing, commands, questions, norms, values, intuitions, desires and intentions. Quite ambiguous, imperfect stuff! We are not passive responding mirrors of the given.
The part of our practical judgement which takes place in words includes and applies to reasoning all the turns of grammar, all the punctuation marks and more - question marks, attention marks, commas, accents, points, quotes, brackets, tones of voice, a whole world of qualifications... it mainly narrates what the words of a given language can express; it builds and tweaks stories as they advance. It includes things unexpressed but felt. The skeleton of language determines meaning and orders thought certainly, but even this is only part of the flow; Mind works with representations, it imagines, feels, represents action, is aware, bets, associates, jumps ahead far beyond (or below) words…
Our reasoning is made – amazingly, I would say - of slippery stepping-stones, mobilis in mobili land-marks, symbols, exploratory representations in movement, turns of mind, rules of thumb, mental experiments visiting alternative scenarios based on ceaselessly evolving criteria. This is at least what I find in my head when I introspect how I reason. For some of us, the train of thought may be visually consistent from the start, led by the Gestalts, the forms and trajectories we perceive at once.
Quite different from sound deduction of which logicians are satisfied to be ideally content-free, blind and silent concerning whatever is not factual and provable, this mental world of ours values everything, applies family resemblances and handy informal routines. The progress of mind may be based on metaphors, of memes functioning as paradigms, and also on gestures or blueprints of action not represented in words. In the same way in which we use expressive gestures to convey meaning, I imagine that some attitudes adopted (and other significant postures and acts) are internalised and shaping our common sense flow of thought. Our intuitions – certainly mine - do not simply generalise from some experience but branch out and ahead ceaselessly rebuilt, guided and corrected "live" by the corrections of perception and the interpretations in progress. Common sense judging takes place in synchronicity and interaction with being and action in the world or even by means of the action itself... Some of us, as I observed, reason best not before speaking but during and by dialectic dialogue, or while they act to change things.
Add to this that the part of “reasoning” of which we become aware and introspect (there must be much more happening in the brain and body which is “us”) takes place within and only within first person conscious positioning in our own history and within the occasion of here and now. We do not reason disembodied, impersonally, in general, from the nowhere, timeless point of view. Who thinks, when and where, with whom, counts, the person with a history, an identity and role it is even decisive. Generic “objectivity” imported as a dogma from philosophy and science into daily life and human affairs works the opposite way, to take us out of the picture instead of judging well. Generic objectivity is stupid in social practice and individual life. Stupid because it neglects the human components and interest.
I think that to face the complexity of actual living on Earth as humans and in the human society we need to reason – if we are to be judicious - aware that we and those we may want to teach, convince or help will start mostly from some degree of error, from uncertain knowledge, shallow, prejudiced understanding and weak probabilities. The priority of common sense reasoning is not truth, truth is only one of its instruments of control. The priority is to solve problems often new, to use or create opportunities, to achieve and succeed short and long term, to nourish human states like security, peace, hope, beauty, justice, fairness, to survive and live better, a good flourishing life. Truth-value alone is a poor guide for practical human judgement.
To do achieve all these things which count instead of hesitating paralysed by technical expertise and some dogma, we have to start from where we are, take as “fact” and provisional truth things doubtful and work our way ahead, towards truer knowledge or success or happiness, by using - to correct the course - all our mental means, formal or informal.
The strength of the living mind – compared with formal rigidity - is to continuously correct our representation and alter our approach to keep the reasoning open until our approximations become accurate enough to be efficient and our action reaches satisfactory results. This is guerrilla art against error, rather than advance of regular troops of formal thought. Such adventurous strategy has little to do with seeking, selecting and treating only measurable data put in provable propositions, advanced in a linear way by means of logical operations. In successful practical thinking, shifting attention and awareness, responsive to subjective interest and external evolutions seem more “present” than logical construction work.
To reason with purpose about the world and people, to negotiate the turns of complexity, subjectivity and disorder, our psyche employs all its formal and informal modalities, born or imitated, explicit and implicit, inherited from our biology and culture. Common sense identifies with them and understands them because the common sense thinker reasons with the same human means. Some of our mental means of today we inherited from the animal past, some from what proved successful in history. Taking place in human terms, exerted from the human point of view, commonsense judgement is involving the entirety of our common mental functioning. It seems to me that we humans (not to speak about animal intelligence) coped like this for hundreds of thousands of years – prehistoric and historic - before the culture of classical logic vas invented. We adapted and survived. Informally. This treasury should not be disparaged and eliminated in favour of modern logical correctness, but rather augmented and enriched with the science born common knowledge and rules of thumb.
Common sense reasoning not only makes use of shared mental means but also includes and makes use of common human knowledge. We consult spontaneously (or let intervene) a huge passive memory content of references and beliefs, of common places and platitudes, of analogies and typical scenarios, the one shared informally by most people under the name of “common knowledge”.
As it appears, some fragments of educated formal procedures learned as we mature are present to check and justify the flow in our epoch. We use them from time to time. We earn from science-shaped education new reference content and corrections which influence and enrich usefully our common sense “concepts”. But the main operations must be very old, coming from biology and humanization. We gain to improve our "natural" "folkish" flow but not to repress it or to replace it with formal, machine-like algorithms.
This comprehensive content and process of reasoning - described here very shortly - is what I call "faute de mieux" common sense judgement. When it works, it is labelled "good sense".
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I see educated good judgement as necessarily considering and integrating in its common-sense reasoning the inevitable "fact of life" presence and weight of received ideas, being aware that – most of the time - we trust long chains of witnessing and mediated informing. Judging well among people takes as relevant factors and includes in our deliberations the values, feelings, beliefs unquestioned, ignorances, diverging interests and interpersonal or group transactions; this does not prevent critical judgement and awareness of how relative and artificial or false such components are.
To achieve adaptive success or to change things, to create something new, practical judgement engages the whole of the human psyche, feeling, will, action and the whole content of our memory. Practical judgement juggles with risky approximations, pre-judged recipes and received notions. Amazing, hasty short-cuts in need of permanent correction. To judge well we must learn to reason from fact but also from error from lies and misunderstanding. Among people I observe reasoning from appearances, very often from faith, from belief, from trust, from witnessing... from beauty or moral principle and - quite successfully - from vision and dreams. This can not be neglected if you want to understand people, to be understood an helpful.
Dry and impersonal, without experiencing and interpreted experiencing, without a sense of the particular local difference, without culture and psychology given due value and notice, good logic and scientific accuracy offer no good judgement in the real life of people and nations.
Good logic, this device of pure reason which I can only admire and try to emulate, is –I believe - mandatory at the core of good thought and decision, as a watchdog of realism and consistency; but it cannot maim or replace imagination and intuition, the connection, the immersion of the thinker in the informality of actual human reality.
Clean propositional logic - even amplified by terra bites of computing - cannot supplant the richness and finesse of judging within human dimensions, with good sense living the phenomenon. The deployed flow of formal logic misses the deadlines of personal and social effectiveness.
Good judgement functions aware of the genesis and history of a present condition and is concerned to imagine many potential developments ahead, multiple developments not existent but possible. Some of them could be entirely our own creation or initiative.
The internal core of (somewhat informal) proper logic we are supposed to practice and the dry critical analysis so useful to educate, is – in practice - surrounded, wrapped, assimilated, into a live connection with the human side of our life-world. To “think well”, we must be able to understand human reality as people live it and as they conceive to live it.
I imagine that good judgement takes place in a composite internal language - part verbal part figurative - and by a progress of shared representations, notions and short-hand reasoning procedures; such habits were previously acquired and validated through socialisation. In my experience, when shared with other people, good judgement takes the convincing form of communication people can understand, centred on them, with content they can use. The opposite of this is generic, impersonal truth, carefully separated from the “impurity” of human interest, proud to abstract, prone to consider people objects of study and manipulation instead of active, autonomous agents.
Good judgement cannot be reduced to processing precise data, empirical knowledge and arbitration by truth; it becomes "good" by considering the practical and artificial references, landmarks and informal procedures people use to position themselves, adjust, think and take everyday decisions, then to follow them in practice. This complicated process takes place directly, in real time, on one's feet, almost always on incomplete information, but it works quite well, better for the time being than the clean logic driven response of the best artificial intelligence. The engineers understood this faster than the psychologists; at this time, artificial intelligence works to imitate our "sloppy" efficiency in the poorly defined fields which are –as it appears – our reality.
The priority for the one judging well is to connect relevant fact and action needed with that which counts and makes sense for people.
There is a willed bias in good judgement to advise and help the specific interest of specific people, like you, with preferred values at work. For the one “judging well” people are his clients, friends, students... or sometimes foes.
Good judgement is not meant to serve precision, perfection or truth above the human interest of living safe and better. Life as end-value is worth more than the instrumental values of truth, perfection, newness or technological achievement. The values taking precedence for the wise are first of all not to harm (primum non nocere), survival life, and peace. Next is goodness: usefulness, success, flourishing, social harmony, beauty and the like.
What good judgement is definitely not is "pre-judgement", thought readily received or set in advance – that is prejudice - to be forced upon local or new goals, circumstances and events. Reducing surprise and discontinuity to rigid past solutions, cutting down newness to the technically handy size and notions of dogma is contrary to good judgement.
Forcing unruly, fuzzy plural reality-in-movement onto a Procrustean bed of hard and slow thinking rules set in advance can only be foolish, not wise. Generality imposed on the particular, dogma, utopias, are contrary to good judgement; even when they were thought-out by geniuses. Misapplied, such generalities are usually absurd or stupid.
Good judgement is people-minded reasoning that functions in the actual Umwelt, the life-space, born and socially constructed. This is the life-space of knowing and acting which is accessible to the human being. Judgement is good when it foresees what can and probably will happen in this existential bubble; usefully, without horses blinkers, with multiple choices of scenarios of that which may and will actually happen; it is good if it protects with prudence and it succeeds to help.
Good judgement is proven when it is tested in critical events and in time to be a successful navigator of the everyday and also of the unexpected, of the exceptional, of the yet unknown.
Good judgement is expected to provide – when needed - means to create something new, at times “something from nothing”; new ways around obstacles, radically new interpretation and new names voluntarily invented, propitious to master things and events, instead of being dominated by them. If we are to build or create new reality it is by such good judgement, certainly not by emaciated un-human utopia. Provided we keep good judgement fool-proof.
Good judgement is watchful with the garbage-in garbage-out vulnerability of the formal procedures and processes of judgement. It does not help at all to be precise and correct in processing and deciding, but based on reality incompletely and poorly perceived, understood and named; even less on dogmatic decisions ignoring the human factor.
Good judgement is interpreting and judging its own perception, mindful of the relevant at work, not reduced to the politically correct or the scientifically correct pretence.
The miraculous, creative entry point of good judgement is to observe and understand, with the adequate "granularity" with an open mind, to sense what counts and to name it or rename it in felicitous ways in the relevant context.
The "wise one" will understand better than other people what things mean here and now and also how the meaning could change in the long term and a much wider view. This frame is higher or deeper, N+-1, thus freer that standard, precise, stable but frozen definitions and propositions. I would say that often good judgement starts well indeed with that intuitive moment when the thinker exclaims "Aha!" when he suddenly sees falling into one meaningful picture the components of a Gestalt, a configuration through which a useful itinerary makes sense. To see only what we can measure, censored by definitions and available instruments, keeps us blind to many choices, in a state of disconnected stupidity. Sometimes, such limitation is purposeful and presents choices made to diminish choice.
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The everyday is too complicated for the theorists
Actual life-spaces, these bubbles of environment, may appear as a mere simplifying metaphor of banality but when you examine them with precision they are immensely more complicated than the domains of clean, abstract, theories... Accordingly, to force deep thought into being practical, wisdom needs minds capable to be involved with the imperfect things and with ever surprising, different people. Such minds empathise, intervene and change the given even as they work to know it. To be realistic, the wise must be personally connected; even when they keep at prudent distance.
Good judgement, as an applied form of wisdom, is action-thinking; therefore it must be able to advance on the slippery stepping stones of the human every day. We think well-enough to be considered wise when we fit the practice, not the theory.
Practical wisdom is not at all the same thing with the detached thinking of an excellent scientist; it judges and often guesses on its feet, immersed in a complex, implicit and vague context of multiple, fluid meaning, with "information" forever incomplete. Culture, spiritual life, words, count as much as "fact"; tradition, occasions, acting participants, events are active causes; perspective and meaning are relative while objects keep moving...
Wisdom turned practical must be able to use as a raw material the actual factors that shape the human being’s actual life which is far from being informed exclusively with verified truth; on the contrary, it is easy to observe – if we have eyes to see and ears to hear - that most of our active knowledge comes from the authority of long chains of testimony by other people be they our parents, contemporaries, teachers, preachers, scientists, journalists, politicians and even worse… all accepted on trust, credibility and authority. Only a minute part of an individual’s knowledge is acquired by sensory experience and own verification. Wise judgement must accordingly do with inevitable and massive received common place, unquestioned convictions and beliefs, hearsay, prejudice, stereotype, shared denial, laws, customs, tradition and so on… Add to this the unsteadiness of memory, the desires, blind-spots and wishful thinking, all here to stay.
Today's theory-driven “human” sciences - are not willing, as it seems, nor capable to embrace such an imprecise domain of individuals. The mainstreams appear to me defensive, even hostile to whatever they cannot order and reduce to the prescribed mould. Instead of humbly accepting the not yet included in Science, we are urged to exclude the untidy but influent multitude, by formal reasoning and mechanistic reduction. It is like a dream to reduce the human to the machine.
When it comes to considering how humans judge, the specialist procedures of thinking designed by the logicians and scientists are proposed as exclusive models and norms, to eliminate and to replace rather than to improve the ways in which human mind works "naturally", as it did for millennia, before Aristotle... In fact, we are invited - for reasons of doctrine, precision and ease to replicate in machines - not to trust (while learning to be aware of their weaknesses and limits) our spontaneous understanding and judgement.
Alas, the reduction of judgement to well defined, isolated subjects and monotonous progress by formal rules of reason is inadequate for us to think in the living human interest and in the rhythm of life among people. The limited scope and the abstracting attitude of scientific method are not nimble enough to fit this wriggling human world. In truth, we ignore it observably in our daily life. Our actual world is lived by persons, in their poorly structured life-space of reality, as relating and meaningful to them, with human goals, involving other persons, their biography and circumstances, not in controlled, aseptic isolation.
The generic wisdom a judicious person may know, is awakened and becomes practical, live, less by learning and practising logic or scientific creed (which should not hurt) but rather by means of this other critical "pillar of wisdom" which I would call - with a personal interpretation - good judgement.
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A working definition: "good judgement" is intelligent common sense thought
I understand by good judgement, the intelligent use of all our mental resources and means - formal and informal, explicit and implicit, verified successively and in various degrees - to judge adequately, in common sense terms, responding to a common ground of actual comprehension, needs and intentions of living people.
Certainly, wise thinkers live with their real times, among incontestable facts and real progress of formal thinking. They must build on reliable knowledge and on the logic of our best language-based reasoning, but it seems to me that they also engage with their intuition and common knowledge a full array of protean common sense means of judgement available to any normal “reasonable person”: familiarity with the environment, narrative, mental representations in movement, shared knowledge and awareness, shared intention, common place evaluations, scenarios, turns of the literal and figurative language, prefabricated building-blocs and short-cuts of reasoning. They practice empathy, dialogue, continuous questioning, projecting oneself into other people’s situation, they consider variably credible testimony, choices of coexisting meanings and points of view. Their progress and correction of thought is in part by action and while acting, not to forget the use of norms, beliefs and creative imagination... The uncomfortable list of complexity is far from being finished.
All normal people practice in some measure this multitude of implicit ancestral means; the difference is that those who judge well master those means, while poor thinkers lacking intelligence and critical sense fall prey to rigid usage and to the potential prejudice and biases of fast, conventional thinking. It should be clear that common sense is an instrument, not good or bad but requiring skill, with outcome as bright or inept as the ones who use it.
The mental work of one judging well with common sense cannot spare being adequately coherent and sound to be rational and of this world; nonetheless at the same time, it must be adequately rich, flexible, error-tolerant and risk-taking – I would say personal - to be practical, flexible to fit local situation, autonomous and free enough to add some value, to start something new, some desired change.
To take one example - the narrative mode of reasoning - its course must follow with coherence; it must come to explain by tracing how things happened to get from the past to the present; it must make sense of how they are now; it must project ahead and lead without implausible gaps from the present state to some alternative of desired future state while not ignoring or denying the undesired. These stories have their necessary logic of reasonableness, one able to include more than selected, isolated “terms” and "fact"; components like the implicit, the not stated, ignorance, relevant belief, not understanding, feelings, intentions and the like...
I came to think that the main way of thinking by which what I call good judgement takes place and communicates is the intuitive, obvious-feeling flow of common sense reasoning [1]
I keep discovering the depth behind this seemingly common place expression "common sense"; I must spend much more time studying it; maybe other people will do it better. For now, when I use these words I have in mind the movement of the content of mind - representations of multiple sensory nature, meanings attached to words, concepts, compelling narrative descriptions, interpretations, valuations, metaphors, symbols, and turns of mind - a culturally shared collection of widely shared and accepted building blocks, guiding us intuitively trough daily life and personal decision. It is using common sense well which allows us to judge well and apply whatever wise knowledge we own. Accordingly, to understand wisdom at work we must study common sense and define it with more respect than today.
Common sense is – as I think today - our mental sense of reality and our Archilochian way of the fox who knows many tricks, unlike the hedgehog of rational method who knows just one [2]. Common sense is a polymorphous movement of mind, a "language", an Esperanto in which actual human judgement is flowing and is communicated.
For me it is an amazing discovery that “common sense” is not as I used to believe a mere disorderly, naïve, pre-reflective functioning of the mind but a vital, structured and inevitable mode of existence of actual human judgement – everybody’s judgement, with no rational aristocracy making exception.
Caveat sophus - common sense is as good as those who practice it
This intuitive mode of functioning which comes naturally to us and its sources do not guarantee at all that our judgement is good, it can be all wrong and prejudiced; call it good judgement only when it proves self-correcting, adequate, reliable and successful in time and in important occasions. The use of the tool depends on intelligence, character and education. Alternatively, the same “common sense” jargon and complacency is the potential carrier of simple-mindedness and received prejudice eluding critical thinking, an unsuspecting door of obviousness wide open to conformity, brain-washing and outright mass stupidity.
Good judgement as I experience it, reasons with a variable geometry of components; it keeps a keen, familiar eye on surrounding reality in progress (but also with a constant sense of longer term and wider view) while it moves its representation – artfully and with a purpose - from readily accepted landmarks of reality perceived as "obvious common place", through creative processes as complex as we are able to command, but always landing back to next "compelling, self-evident common place" that follows. This starting with and coming back to common place landmarks is the condition of fitting the human dimension and intuitive understanding.
Because it is bold and approximate, good judgement is perpetually busy to correct course, learn, alter or retract when surprised with new aspects or with signs of error. Continuous correction of errors, critical for a quick application of intuitions and pre-existent building blocks of judgement is a condition without which common sense would be indeed inferior to better organised formal reasoning.
Common sense is a probably inborn or early-learned manner, a functioning of the normal human mind which advances along practical reality, guided by a socially shared "folk-world-view" and "folk-psychology" map composed of common knowledge, common places, interpretations, valuations and generally accepted turns of mind, socially prefabricated "building-blocks" that proved to be useful, readily available to the socialized human.
All people use the folk world-view and its turns of mind, some with more luck than others, according to their intelligence, talent and critical sense. I believe that "wise" people have a gift of juggling well or that they learned to use consciously, with critical sense, the intricacy of the generic, shared, human mode of thought. I also guess that their art is to keep aware of the fallibility of the common-sense moves and to swiftly correct their weakness while using their advantage of reasoning fast and being readily understandable.
I visualise good judgement as a bundle of streams flowing intertwined, branching out and converging back, a cluster of all cognitive functioning means at hand . We actually use this diversity of means - at our risk - to discern the relevant, find meaning, give meaning, define, re-define, represent, guess, make connections... I imagine that we deploy this heteroclite content as moving situational trees and flows of representations, reference marks and scenarios of possible change. While we advance, we consider evolving feelings, interests, ends and means, in order to deliberate, decide and continuously correct human - not purified rational - reception, action and inaction.
Thus, good judgement, while mindful and in part educated to be unemotionally factual, purposeful, economic and principled, is also reasonable, personal and warm; it considers in its flow much more fact and belief than formally described notions and data; it also respects a richness of implicit, intangible or not yet measurable, often irrational but nonetheless determinant human factors at work like emotion, value, local or personal ability to understand and to accept, inherent imprecision and errors of appreciation at work, different and differing interests, representations, belief, convictions, faith, choices made, arbitrary norms adopted... the structural subjectivity of people.
To forecast and decide among humans, to help, good judgement needs to consider and steer in real-time a flow of actual and possible scenarios, perpetually branching out and changing.
Good judgement keeps moving - and its components keep transforming - altering and correcting definitions, content and means, homing successively towards desirable objectives and reality fit.
Instead of only one process – linear and logical - the good judgement of wisdom uses all means at hand, precise or imprecise, certain or risky. Good judgement grows and learns while thinking.
Imagine the dread of the logicians and social science methodologists – at least the ones I met or knew about - to even consider such slippery mess which happens to be (in my hardly provable mental experience) the life of mind. Whatever it is, for the "properly educated" academic thinker good judgement must not be faith or folklore or God forbid! common sense - that mish-mash jumping ahead to quick default conclusions that appears as "clear and distinct ideas" to a multitude of "common" people or that “Good sense* [which according to Descartes’ somewhat ironic claim] is the most evenly distributed thing in the world.”[3] The spontaneous way common people (that is all of us) think, is still shunned by honourable academy as "folklore", as vulgar, biased, received, superficial ideas in need to be corrected or, even better, eliminated and replaced with exact specialist knowledge.
Only artificial intelligence researchers (let me jest) prove sympathetic at this time with common sense reasoning; because the engineers have no choice but to observe its reality [4]; because their machines must face the practical tasks of the human world, function and succeed in it. In fact theirs is –as it seems to me – the notable recent contribution to the psychology and the philosophy of common sense.
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Compare this complexity juggling device with the linear logical judgement which is "good" only if purified of unverified, erroneous, imprecise "common sense", advancing from operational hypothesis and precise, necessary definitions to finding by explicit rules that lead from verified premises to true conclusions.
It is easy to see why such a representation of multi-modal reasoning, verbal and non verbal, "sufficient", rational and intuitive at the same time, including prefabricated blocks of received judgement is controversial and repulsive for the orderly researcher. I may describe my introspection of the process it in another chapter. All I state here is that actual life complexity in progress, experienced by persons, in particular relationships, circumstances and events, culturally formatted and represented, cannot be accounted for today, nor directed, by dry rationalisation; to be relevant, it needs flowing concreteness and subjectivity respected as relevant. My straw logician must be horrified by such a view.
All approaches – logical or "wise" - need of course to be consistent internally and externally, but their differences in grasping and in handling complexity and fuzziness are huge. I am certainly aware of the trade-offs and the risk. But I remember the old fable in which the excellent dog proved incapable to catch a small skinny rabbit: unlike the laboratory scientists who run for a theory and for truth, common people run for their life; they prefer to trust, nay, cannot do anything but trust, something which appears robust and compelling to their intuition and proves to work in their practice.
I see good judgement as certainly including the best of logic available and applicable in the case at hand, wrapped into the best which our personal and informal means of mental progress may offer. I also believe that good judgement can be educated to use more logic provided it does not pretend to deny, eliminate and replace common sense.
If rational thinking is controlled and valued for its unambiguity, precision, consistency, good form, objective truth fit to the verifiable reality of its object, good judgement would be evaluated and verified by its ability to bring about comprehensible outcomes that work and prove favourable to "subjective" persons, "now" and over time. Good judgement achieves that people make sense of the past, perceive increased choices, feel secure, avoid harm, suffer less, live better and succeed more in the short, medium and long term, from the point of view and for the sake of their own life.
Good judgement will inevitably reflect and fit the material but also the spiritual representation of us and of the world within which we live. It will also be at times radically creative towards the given of fact, language and ideas, by proposing and acting towards new reality - new ways of understanding, believing, defining, wording, acting, building, producing, responding, "navigating" and finally living our reality.
A world with its matter and laws is given to us in part directly, or in much larger part witnessed to us by authority we trust (be it scientific or other); thus many things are given. But some we invent, do and make. New things translated into common sense representations become as real to our mind as everything given to us by Nature and mediated by Society. Good judgement knows not only that we live on dreams, but also that dreams may come true by our action; accordingly, it keeps close to what we can understand and accept.
Good practical judgement is agency, beyond a mechanic snapshot of reality given. Quite often good judgement consists in redefining and re-framing radically the given instead of submitting to it's received interpretation. With such requirements, for a while, the purified and reduced representation programmed into computers will be slow to become wise. I would say the ultimate computer is still our brain.
Useful judgement is not only sound, intuitive and readily understandable but also personal, flexible and sensitive enough to context, point of view, ownership and actual complexity, roomy enough to hold the many things important, relevant, meaningful and practical, far more concrete and luxuriant than the plain propositions mastered to this day by formal logical rationality and scientific method.
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The life-smart effectiveness and striking banality of basic, shared common sense judgement is - I advance hopefully - completed in some of the value-adding wise people, with its opposite - uncommon sense often paradoxical - the unusual contribution of bold minds able to break the conformity of obviousness and received beliefs, to create new perspective and initiative, to start something new. But afterwards they still need to put feet back on earth and translate the uncommon into common.
As I see it, striking newness will need, in order to become wise and to help good judgement, to get past surprise, the built in hostility of common sense to paradox and unfamiliarity. This is done by translation into the compelling images, metaphors, paradigms and examples made simple and absorbed as obvious by our Esperanto of common sense.
Without landing back from higher levels of "something else" (scientific, philosophical or other) to that which is relevant to the common understanding and human interest of persons, uncommon sense can hardly appear as wise.
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Wise knowledge and good judgement – these two intellectual pillars of wisdom - will most probably offer valuable understanding and advice to us and to other people. People who own this much wisdom, deserve to be considered sages. But is this a complete enough answer to the question "What is wisdom?" Are the knowing of much wisdom and judging well in the world sufficient for a flourishing life, better for you and me? Certainly not!
Wisdom known, understood and the ability to reason well in practical complexity still need to materialize in action and fact, in the actual government of our life.
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*"Socrates
...And all these things the philosopher does not even know that he does not know; for he does not keep aloof from them for the sake of gaining reputation, but really it is only his body that has its place and home in the city; his mind, considering all these things petty and of no account, disdains them and is borne in all directions, as Pindar1 says, “both below the earth,” and measuring the surface of the earth, and “above the sky,” studying the stars, and investigating the universal nature of every thing that is, each in its entirety, never lowering itself to anything close at hand.
Theodorus
What do you mean by this, Socrates?
Socrates
Why, take the case of Thales, Theodorus. While he was studying the stars and looking upwards, he fell into a pit, and a neat, witty Thracian servant girl jeered at him, they say, because he was so eager to know the things in the sky that he could not see what was there before him at his very feet. The same jest applies to all who pass their lives in philosophy.”
Plato. Plato in Twelve Volumes, Vol. 12 translated by Harold N. Fowler. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1921.Theaet. [173e] and [174a]
[1] Radu J. Bogdan, a fine philosopher I had the privilege to meet many years ago, in our youth, published attempts at defining a field of common sense he called "folk or commonsense psychology" or "folklore of the mind" referring to the way we make sense of other people’s mental functioning; his analysis helped me greatly to clarify my thoughts about my riskier, extrapolating approach to a wider domain of "good judgment seen as common sense reasoning at large". Certainly he is innocent for my possible exaggerations with which he would probably disagree for mindful reasons. His two introductions which I read with profit are "The folklore of the mind" and "Common Sense Naturalized - The Practical Stance", both in his volume "Mind and Common Sense" Radu J. Bogdan (ed), Cambridge U.P. Cambridge.. first published in 1991
This completes the useful consultation of Stephen Boulter's, The Rediscovery of Common Sense Philosophy, Palgrave Macmillan, Houndmills, 2007, Elio, Renee's (ed.) publication of the Vancouver Symposium on common sense, reasoning and rationality in 1998: Common Sense, Reasoning, and Rationality - New Directions in Cognitive Science, Oxford, New York, 2002 and a host of similar sources to which I will come back in a separate article on "commonsense".
[2] I adapt this interpretation of Archilochus fragment after Isaiah Berlin’s THE HEDGEHOG AND THE FOX An essay on Tolstoy's view of history, WEIDENFELD & NICOLSON, London, 1953.
[3] [Descartes, René, A Discourse on the Method of Correctly Conducting One’s Reason and
Seeking Truth in the Sciences, Trans. Ian Maclean, Oxford U.P., 2006, part I, p. 5]
[4] Elio, Renee (Ed), Common Sense, Reasoning, and Rationality, Univ of Alberta, 2002 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: February 2006
and
Mueller, Eric, T., Commonsense Reasoning, An Event Calculus Based Approach (2nd ed), Morgan Kaufmann, Amsterdam.., 2015,
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