The relationship between age and wisdom-related performance (1999)
Studies like this that try to pin or correlate a fundamentally changing, social concept like wisdom with precise quantitative fixtures are idiotic.<p>No matter the qualifications the authors might make to ensure their definition of wisdom is as empty and useless as that of a specific number, the grand claim of the study makes it sound as if they hadn’t even grasped that qualitative concepts are subject to change and depend upon the entire universe of conditions that impinge upon the concept’s users.<p>What we mean by wisdom today in 2018 and what, for example, the ancient Greeks or scholastics meant by wisdom is entirely different, such is the power, history, and blurry bounds of the concept—and the point of studying these concepts in such a quantitative fashion is refuted before it’s even made.