Wisdom Finds Truth

The biblical Book of Kings tells of two women who came before Solomon, each claiming that a living infant was hers and that the other woman's child was dead. There were no witnesses and no tests to apply. Solomon called for a sword and ordered the living child to be cut in two so that each woman could have half. One woman accepted the verdict. The other cried out that the child should be given to her rival, and by that cry Solomon knew who the mother was. The story is told in many cultures, including in Indian folklore about Akbar and Birbal, and it illustrates the claim of the topic that wisdom finds truth.

The topic compares wisdom with knowledge, which is more common and less effective at this task. Knowledge is the possession of facts, and a person can have a great many of them and still be foolish. Wisdom is knowing which facts matter, how they fit together and what to do about them. Heraclitus said in the fifth century BCE that much learning does not teach understanding. The wise person sees through to the point of a problem, and in Solomon's case the point was that a real mother would sooner lose her claim than lose her child.

The classic case is Socrates. According to Plato, a friend asked the oracle at Delphi whether any man was wiser than Socrates, and the oracle replied that none was. Socrates was puzzled, since he knew that he knew nothing of importance, and he went about questioning the politicians, poets and craftsmen of Athens to find a wiser man. He found that each claimed knowledge he lacked. Socrates concluded that he was wiser in one small respect, that he did not think he knew what he did not know. His wisdom began in the recognition of his own ignorance, and it led him toward the truth more than the confidence of the others.

Humility is thus one of the sources of wisdom's power. The person who is certain stops looking, and the person who knows the limits of his understanding goes on testing. Philip Tetlock spent two decades studying the predictions of experts and found in 2005 that the average specialist was barely better than chance at forecasting political events. Those who did best were not the most famous or confident but those who held their views lightly and updated them in response to evidence, whom he called foxes in contrast with hedgehogs who knew one big thing. Later work on superforecasters confirmed that open mindedness is the mark of accurate judgement.

Humility is thus one of the sources of wisdom's power.

A second source is knowledge of people. Truth in human affairs is hidden behind motive, self interest and concealment, and facts alone cannot penetrate it. A judge who has seen many witnesses learns the difference between a rehearsed account and a remembered one. The Indian tradition has the figure of Birbal, the courtier of Akbar who resolved disputes by cunning tests of character. The Arthashastra of Kautilya, composed more than two thousand years ago, devotes a section to detecting dishonest officials by observing their conduct and not their words. Wisdom reads behaviour as well as speech.

A third source is the ability to ask the right question. Much of the search for truth fails because it begins with a wrong question. The physician who asks not just what a patient's symptoms are but how he sleeps, works and lives often finds the cause that the tests missed. The scientist who asks why the planets do not fall, and not merely how they move, makes a discovery of a different order. Wisdom lies in reframing the problem so that the truth becomes visible. Solomon did not ask who had the better evidence but what a mother would do.

Wisdom is also practical. Aristotle distinguished between sophia, theoretical wisdom concerned with the unchanging truths of nature, and phronesis, practical wisdom concerned with what is good to do in particular circumstances. The truth that practical wisdom finds is not always a proposition, but a right course of action. A teacher who knows that a particular student is fearful and not lazy has found a truth that no examination reveals. Truth, in this sense, is the fit between a judgement and the real situation.

A wise judge or physician also knows when to wait. Many truths reveal themselves only with time, and the hasty investigator who seizes the first explanation often arrests the wrong man. Patience is one of wisdom's instruments.

Yet the topic needs some qualification. Wisdom does not find all truths. The structure of the atom, the origin of the universe and the genetic code were not discovered by sages but by systematic instruments, calculations and experiments, often against common sense. The wisdom of earlier ages believed that heavier objects fall faster and that the earth is still. Wisdom works well on the scale of human affairs, with the evidence of experience, and less well on matters remote from daily life. It needs the help of method.

There is also the danger of false wisdom. Many people who are called wise speak confidently on subjects that they know nothing about, and the reputation can hide error. The sage who is never contradicted learns nothing, and societies that rely on a single wise leader pay dearly when his judgement fails. Real wisdom invites correction. The courts, the scientific journals and the free press are institutions built to check the claims of wise people against the facts.

The most honest account is perhaps that wisdom does not so much find truth as prepare a person to receive it. It is a condition of patience, honesty and attention in which truths that others miss become evident. Whether the truth was waiting to be discovered or is made by the way the wise person looks is a question that Solomon, who needed only to see a woman's face when the sword was raised, did not have to answer, and that philosophers have not answered since.