PHronesis

Phronesis is a value that was formalised by Athenean philosophers, notably by Aristotle in Nicomachean Ethics.

Its meaning is roughly ‘Practical Wisdom’, a concept that is a little like ‘street smarts’ or ‘Wisdom’ in a very Dungeons & Dragons sense. Wisdom can be seen in actions and decisions, where they form an intersection of criteria:

• Judgement: Using the available time to consider different alternatives.

• Context: Being situationally aware of the effects of one’s actions.

• Alignment: Performing actions that lead to the attainment of one’s highest values.

• Sustainable: Performing actions that avoid needless suffering or misery.

In a problem situation, the exercise of Phronesis is seeing what matters, finding optimal balance between competing values and avoiding the extremes brought about by ‘maximising’ singular values, and acting appropriately and thoughtfully to the situation, rather than mechanically or by following doctrinal principles.

Epistemic Differentiations

In the Aristotelian framework, knowledge can be divided into different domains according to aspects it does not share with other domains:

• Epistēmē refers to scientific knowledge, or ‘truth’ in the sense of empirically-derived belief. This form of knowledge simply tells what exists in the world, not what ‘could’ exist.
  

• Technē is regarded as a knowledge of craft or how to make something. It describes the ‘truth of process’ or the relationship between states of reality. In this sense it describes not only what does exist, but also what could exist.
  

• Phronesis is seen as the third category of knowledge, concerning how to live and act well. In this sense it describes not what does exist or what could exist, but what should exist from the perspective of the knower. It places knowledge within the context of a human actor or knower.

One of the most famous dictates from Socratic wisdom is to ‘know thyself’, and in this we can see the root of phronesis as a form of knowledge; it is really self-knowledge, being able to know what one really wants, to navigate how to change what one wants, and how to ‘be’ in the world while being at peace with oneself.

Procedural & Declarative Memory

Another way to consider Techne and Epistēmē is by an analogy to modern computational terms that describe forms of memory usage.

Declarative Memory holds statements that are considered as true or false. They are primarily descriptive, and have a lot in common with epistēmē. When we are making epistemic conjectures, we are really making statements as to what we consider true or false. Colloquially we refer to these as ‘data’, the plural of ‘datum’, which means ‘given’. When something is taken as given or granted, it is conjected as a fact.

Procedural Memory is different in that it holds chains of commands, which are not in and of themselves true or false, but merely describe what can be done to variables. Computationally we can think of procedures as programs, executables, or applications, which operate on data to produce an effect. They are roughly what is meant by ‘Technē’, and the difference between technē and epistēmē is perhaps clearest through this lens; epistēmē are statements that can be true or false, technē are commands that are neither true nor false.