How to Teach a Wise Man
Should a wise man keep so much to his own counsel?
From How to Teach a Wise Man, by Michael Root:
In An Inquiry Concerning the Human Understanding, David Hume advanced four principles for a wise man to live by.
1. A wise man proportions his beliefs to the evidence.
2. Testimony is good evidence for a wise man only if he has good evidence that the witness is credible.
3. A wise man has good evidence that a witness is credible only if he observes a constant conjunction between his reports and the truth.
4. A witness A's testimony that p to a wise man B is good evidence for B only if B believes that A is more credible than p is unlikely.
Though each principle is plausible, together they are not, for a man who is defined by (1)–(4) is unwise. In particular, he learns little from the testimony of others and seldom believes the word of a teacher or the teachings of a text. . . .
As I see it, the point here is that the follower of 1–4 is unwise largely because he will spend all of his time verifying truths or falsehoods thrown at him. Once you acknowledge that this is true, it is only a few steps more to see that you and most other people get along swimmingly with very little of the reasoning contained in those four principles.
So why do we breathlessly exhort students to practice things we know no one could possibly do on a regular basis? Do we believe we actually could follow the principles regularly if we were better people and we are just hoping for the best for our students? Or, even worse, do we believe we follow the principles regularly in the first place and assume students can do the same? I suspect that both of those questions can be answered in the affirmative. And this lack of awareness must have disturbing consequences for student learning.
Should a wise man keep so much to his own counsel? Would he be more wise were he more accepting and believe what others—teachers or texts—tell him simply because they tell him? There is a growing consensus that he would be . . . He should believe what others would teach him, not because he has evidence that they are credible, but because he and they are part of the same community. Epistemology, according to this view, should become more socialized and be less a matter of what each individual can learn on his own and more a matter of what we can know or learn together.
