Published in Wisdom and Creativity in Education (2007).

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It would be very unwise to try and legislate for an agreed canonical meaning of such an ambiguous and contested term as 'wisdom', so I shall not try. All I can do in this short paper is to 

• offer some guidelines for its exploration that I think might be productive; 

• attempt to illustrate one legitimate - and I think core - sense of 'wisdom' through three short narratives;

• extract from those some preliminary ideas about how wise action might be conceptualised in cognitive neuroscientific terms; and 

• offer some speculations about how, on this analysis, the propensity for wise action might possible be cultivated through education. 

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The main point to emerge will be the suggestion that 'wisdom' inheres not so much in a quality of thinking or cognition, but in the nature of the underlying 'motivational vector' that drives cognition.

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