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Be wise, because the world needs more wisdom. And if you can not be wise, pretend to be someone who is wise and then just behave like they would.
I first thought that this would be impossible, because accurately simulated wisdom would just be wisdom. Yet perhaps genuinely being wise requires not only right action but also understanding, and so one might do what a wise person would do but without the wise person's understanding of entirely why. So the advice is possible.
Whether it is good advice depends on whether it is any easier to simulate wisdom than to actually be wise. Imagine predicting what a wise person will do, holding fixed the assumption that they are wise. In some vexed cases or thought experiments, the prediction might require actually being wise yourself. But you might be able to predict fairly well for quotidian decisions without actually having wisdom. In such cases, Gaiman's advice seems sound.
There is a further question of moral philosophy whether following this advice would be right and proper. If goodness and wisdom are related, do they require the right interior understanding or just the right action? I don't know, but I am inclined to think that right action with wrong thinking is prima facie better than wrong action with wrong thinking.
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As I argue in several papers about realism, philosophers should give up their obsession with monolithic questions of realism and antirealism. So I try to emphasize other things when I teach philosophy of science. Some of these other things are causation, explanation, laws of nature, and attitude toward unification.
Positions on these issues arrange themselves into roughly three categories. Interestingly, although each has a different metaphysical picture, they are neutral on questions of realism or antirealism about unobservable entities. For example, adopting the Humean outlook of the epistemic package is compatible with affirming or denying that facts about electrons are on the list of Hume facts about the world.
The EPISTEMIC package
Exemplary adherents include Hempel, Lewis, et al.
Metaphysics: Only actual objects and events are real.
(Alternately: Only concreta exist.)
Causes are regularities.
Laws are the fundamental regularities that appear in the best system.
Probabilities are subjective credence.
Explanation is a matter of nomic expectability. The DN account (or some relative of it) using elements of the best unified system.
Unification of science is constitutive.
The MODAL package
Exemplary adherent: Armstrong
Metaphysics: Actual objects and events are real, but so are modal facts.
(Alternately: Concreta exist, but so do universals.)
Causes are relations between properties.
Laws are the fundamental necessities, relations between universals.
Probabilities could be subjective or objective (but I think that there's some pull toward subjective accounts).
Explanation is a matter of nomic expectability. The DN account (or some relative of it) using genuinely necessary laws.
Unification of science is contingent.
The ONTIC package
Exemplary adherent: Cartwright
Metaphysics: Actual objects and events are real, but so are causal capacities.
Causes are exercises of capacities, the powers of things.
Laws are a patchwork, summaries of what capacities can do in particular arrangements.
Probabilities are objective, determined by the capacities of things.
Explanation is a matter of identifying causes.
Unification of science is doomed.
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My last day of teaching for the Spring semester was yesterday. As usual, I asked some debriefing questions.
Although I always take student questions in my Introduction to Logic, there are more than a hundred students. So the reality is that there are just ten or so students who raise their hands with any frequency. This semester, I tried to get more involvement by using clickers. Each student buys their own remote, and I ask multiple choice questions during lecture. They get credit both for participation and for getting right answers.
The only question I asked yesterday was how they felt about clickers, whether I should use them next time I teach the course.
good- use them again 79%
meh - who cares? 13%
bad - don't use again 9%
From my point of view, the clickers were an improvement over the take-home quizzes that they replaced. So I guess I'll use them again next time.
In my Existentialism class, I asked some variant of my usual debriefing questions. For the texts we had read, I asked whether students considered them essential or dispensable; that is, should I definitely include them next time I teach existentialism, definitely leave them out, or otherwise. I didn't take a separate show of hands for the 'otherwise' response, and students were allowed as many yays and boos as they wanted.
yay boo
No Exit (Sartre) 17 0
ex'ism as humanism (Sartre) 15 4
Being & Time (Heidegger) 14 3
Being & Nothingness (Sartre) 27 0
Ego and its Rel'n to Others(Marcel) 3 5
Ethics of Ambiguity (de Beauvoir) 20 1
Is Bad Faith Bad? (Hazlett&Feldman) 0 13
The Hazlett&Feldman was only added at the end because we had a couple of days free. So I am not surprised that nobody considered it essential. I was a bit surprised that so many students were enthusiastic for jettisoning it.
I was also surprised by the enthusiasm for Heidegger. Perhaps it is because I sternly warned them at every opportunity, from day one until we finished with Being&Time, that Heidegger is a terribly poor writer and that the book is wickedly hard to read. So it became a kind of challenge, and if they teased any meaning out of it then it was a victory.
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I have completed the index for my forthcoming book, which is to appear in September.
The item referenced the most is "Boyd, Richard".
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A recent interview with 3:AM magazine introduces Kit Fine as "a groovy metaphysician".
Reading it makes me reprise my musing on the nature of metaphysics.
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