I encountered this question in Know Thyself by the University of Edinburgh, the course I’m currently taking as part of the PPP Project.
Indeed it is. Many very knowledgable people don't know how to put it to good use - wisdom must benefit oneself and society, but knowledge by itself never leads to wisdom. A great amount of experience, humility, and luck is needed for wisdom - but almost anyone can game knowledge.
If you were to invert the question: you can be wise while not having knowledge in any subject matter, a fellow student said. I disagree. Wisdom cannot be gained without knowledge. It might - often is - gained without formal education - but then formal education is notoriously bad at imparting wisdom (or even retaining knowledge). Education, as is famously said, is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school.
But wisdom without any knowledge? Impossible. Wisdom is the cherry on top of the cake of knowledge. Another student, while defending a similar view, said: “I can foresee the likely consequences of one’s actions within really understanding, in detail, what they are doing”. There are two rebuttals to this: either a) your foreseeing is neither wisdom nor knowledge, it’s guesswork, or more likely, b) you know quite a bit, even if you don’t know “in detail”.
Are wisdom and ethics related? That’s a tough question. A student said: software developers know how to hack into systems, but to do so wouldn’t be wise. From a legal and logistic perspective, this statement might be true, but the relation between ethics and wisdom is something debatable.
Knowing facts (propositional knowledge), or even knowing how to do something (ability knowledge), cannot inherently lead to wisdom. It is the intuition gained from years of using both types of knowledge, the lessons learned - lessons that cannot be learned in the classroom, but only in the real world by humble people - this is wisdom.
Might “common sense” qualify as wisdom? Nope. More often than not, common sense is not common, not shared, not universally known. And even if it was, this is knowledge - not wisdom.
Why do I say that? What does wisdom mean? My dictionary defines it as:
the quality of having experience, knowledge, and good judgment;
Ah! You see? Knowledge is a subset of wisdom - you need experience, as I mentioned, and good judgement - which is annoyingly vague. I’d argue that whatever it is, it is developed by a combination of experience and knowledge in the presence of humility.
Wait - that’s the same definition I gave for wisdom itself.
Yes - that means that I would define wisdom as the ability to make correct decisions.
This is genuinely one of the best blogs I've come across! Keep up the good work!! <3