What Is Wisdom?
What is wisdom? The answer I find most useful here is not “knowing more.” It is learning to notice what matters, revise how we are framing a situation, and act with care toward a good life.
At U of T’s iSchool, I learned the familiar DIKW hierarchy: data, information, knowledge, and wisdom. In its simplified gloss, data are recorded observations; information is data organized and interpreted; knowledge is what we understand or know how to do. DIKW places wisdom above them, as if the earlier levels could build toward it. But does that describe how anyone becomes wise?
Wikipedia’s overview summarizes psychological accounts of wisdom as joining judgment and virtue with tacit, experiential knowledge, while balancing different interests and working through life’s complex questions toward a common good. It also stresses that there is no single settled definition: wisdom may describe a person’s trait, or something they manage to do wisely in a particular situation (Wikipedia, “Wisdom”).
Caption: Nicolas Régnier ·
The pyramid leaves its highest rung vague. Jennifer Rowley reviewed how information-systems and knowledge-management textbooks describe DIKW. Only three of the books she examined tried to define wisdom, and she found no settled account of how one level turns into the next. Martin Frické challenges the idea that data, information, and knowledge form a dependable ladder at all. His alternative sketch of wisdom is broad practical knowledge, used when needed, alongside an understanding that what we know can be wrong. DIKW can prompt a useful question, but it is not a recipe that turns information into wisdom (Rowley, 2007;
Frické, 2009).
Régnier gives wisdom a face, scales, books, and a skull: judgment among what we know, what matters, and the limits of a life. That is a visual allegory, not a definition. It does, though, make the point the DIKW ladder leaves out: wisdom is about how knowledge is weighed and used.
Caption: Albrecht Dürer ·
Saint Jerome in His Study (1514) · Engraving · National Gallery of Art · CC0 via
Dürer gives us an image of attention as something embodied and practiced: Jerome reads and writes in a room shaped for study, while the sleeping animals and quiet light set another pace. The image does not prove that concentration equals wisdom. Critical thinking still has to ask what our focus leaves outside the frame.
The paper I have in mind is and Leonardo Ferraro’s 2013 chapter, “Relevance, Meaning and the Cognitive Science of Wisdom”. They call wisdom “rationally self-transcending rationality.” The phrase is dense; their point is that wisdom involves learning to examine and improve how we think, attend, and learn, rather than only collecting correct answers.
Their account starts from the fact that a situation offers more details, possible explanations, and possible actions than we can consider at once. Cognition has to select what is relevant and ignore much else. Vervaeke and Ferraro call this relevance realization. Wisdom includes noticing when our usual way of selecting and framing has trapped us in a bad interpretation, then learning to reframe it. They connect this work to three forms of knowing: propositional knowledge (knowing that), procedural knowledge (knowing how), and perspectival knowledge (understanding how facts and events matter from within a situation). Wisdom coordinates them in the service of self-change and a good life.
This is where attention and critical thinking meet. Vervaeke and Ferraro describe active open-mindedness as looking for ways bias may distort our reasoning. They describe mindfulness as noticing how we attend to a situation and learning to shift that attention when needed. An insight can happen when a new frame makes a hidden possibility visible. But an “aha” moment is not wisdom by itself. The frame and the action that follow still need examination.
I’ll use discernment here for the situated judgment that coordinates these moves: what matters, what evidence supports our view, whose perspective we have missed, and what response fits. My working definition, then, is this: wisdom is a cultivated, self-correcting ability to notice and revise what we take to be relevant, bring knowledge and know-how to bear, and act in ways that support a good life for ourselves and others. That is one theoretical account, not a universal definition. Vervaeke and Ferraro tie the good life to satisfaction, moral character, and meaningful connection; they also stress that wisdom can create conditions for flourishing, but cannot guarantee it.
This gives spirituality a practical connection without making it a synonym for wisdom. Vervaeke and Ferraro discuss meditation and contemplation as practices for training mindfulness. A spiritual experience alone does not show that someone has become wiser; the question is whether practice helps them attend more flexibly, see their own assumptions, and respond with greater care.
Take a missed deadline. More data might tell a manager when the work stalled. Critical thinking checks whether the first explanation is supported. Discernment asks whether the issue was unclear priorities, workload, or a broken process, and whose account is missing. Insight may reveal that the deadline was never realistic. A wise response addresses that cause, treats the employee fairly, and stays open to evidence that the new plan also needs adjustment.
DIKW names a hoped-for progression from recorded observations to understanding. Vervaeke and Ferraro ask a different question: how do we keep improving the way we make sense of a situation, especially when our framing may be part of the problem? Here, wisdom is not the last storey of a pyramid. It is the ongoing work of seeing, revising, and acting well.