Oushinar Nath's presentation "A Puzzle about Wisdom: Stability, Bias, and Reflection"

On February 28, a session of the research seminar "From the Logical Point of View" took place, where Oushinar Nath (University College London) delivered the presentation "A Puzzle about Wisdom: Stability, Bias, and Reflection".

Abstract
Wisdom, in virtue of it being a character trait, is taken as a stable disposition to form beliefs and perform actions conducive to or constitutive of living well. I demonstrate that a puzzle emerges when we discuss wisdom’s relationship to certainty and bias, such that a wise agent isn’t in a position to perform wise actions stably over a large range of situations. I argue that this puzzle could be avoided if we take wise agents to be those who are skilled at reflecting – a wise agent forms her attitudes on the basis of skilfully reflecting on the relevant situation such that, despite the kind of uncertainty that threatens to make wisdom unstable, the involvement of this skill stably generates the relevant attitude.