Can you measure wisdom?

 What is wisdom? Can it be taught? Is it something within a person that can be improved? Can I make myself wiser? 

When it comes to measuring wisdom, I’m a skeptic. But I find the attempts fascinating.

Emily Laber-Warren’s article at the University of Chicago’s Center for Practical Wisdom is the best survey I’ve seen.

I overindulged. I followed all the links. I marveled that psychologists and sociologists are devising experiments to tackle questions that interested the ancient Greek thinkers who were called philosophers, lovers of wisdom.

I was both thrilled and alarmed that some of the new research is on sites for the medical profession. (My sense of what counts as wellbeing has been challenged.)

The attempts to define and measure wisdom interest me. But it seems to me that the consensus among the ancient philosophers was that the evidence of wisdom is not so much provable as obvious: it’s in a person’s life.

Fortune does wildly different things to people. As the Greek philosophers put it, some people were born kings. Some were born slaves. Some would suffer horrible hardship and die young. Some would live long in luxury. Fortune’s gifts are neither equal nor fair.

The question is whether, given the whims of fortune, you can carve out a good life. A wise person can. 

Wisdom was a kind of definition — it’s what you called a person who lived a certain kind of life. If a life had a certain character, or approached it, you called the person who lived it wise.

Wisdom, as the old philosophers saw it, was a conceptual problem, rather than a scientific one. It also was an individual problem. What would count as a wise solution in my case might not in yours.

I’m not sure what Socrates would say about all this research. But I think he’d be interested.

• Source: Emily Laber-Warren, “What is wisdom, and can it be taught?”; Knowable Magazine, March 11, 2026. It’s here:
https://wisdomcenter.uchicago.edu/news/wisdom-news/what-wisdom-and-can-it-be-taught