What Does It Take To Be a Wise Person? Towards a Social Account of Theoretical Wisdom

Abstract This paper proposes a function-first approach to understanding theoretical wisdom. Instead of analyzing an abstract concept, it focuses on specific epistemic agents—wise people—and examine their roles within society. While experts provide knowledge and understanding in specific domains, wise persons provide guidance, that is help novices be better epistemic agents and offer a broader picture of reality in the face of science atomization and epistemic flooding. Building on these insights, the paper explores how to combine the notion of theoretical wisdom so reconstructed with intuitions from epistemology of expertise and virtue epistemology. This approach leads to a unitarian, socially relevant concept of theoretical wisdom.