37.2746, Confs: Panel at the IPC20: The Pragmatics of Wisdom (Finland)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-37-2746. Wed Aug 26 2026. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 37.2746, Confs: Panel at the IPC20: The Pragmatics of Wisdom (Finland)

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Date: 24-Aug-2026
From: Carsten Levisen [calev at ruc.dk]
Subject: Panel at the IPC20: The Pragmatics of Wisdom


Panel at the IPC20: The Pragmatics of Wisdom
Short Title: IPC20

Date: 27-Jun-2027 - 02-Jul-2027
Location: Helsinki, Finland
Contact: Carsten Levisen
Contact Email: calev at ruc.dk
Meeting URL: https://pragmatics.international/page/IPC20Helsinki

Linguistic Field(s): Anthropological Linguistics; Discourse Analysis;
Pragmatics; Semantics; Sociolinguistics

Submission Deadline: 15-Oct-2026

This panel explores how ‘wisdom’ is conceptualized, articulated, and
spoken about across diverse linguistic and cultural settings.
A particularly rich point of departure is the contemporary resurgence
of ‘wisdom talk’ in the context of planetary crises: ecological
degradation, technological acceleration, democratic decline, and
anxieties surrounding the future of humanity. In such conditions,
appeals to wisdom often index both anxiety and aspiration. They may
foreground indigenous knowledges, endangered knowledges, and
pluricentric forms of knowledge production, while also raising
methodological and epistemological questions for pragmatics and
discourse studies.
Across cultural contexts, speakers have oriented themselves to sayings
and words that carry the aura of wisdom: proverbs, aphorisms,
ancestral sayings, and the speech of sages and wizards. At the same
time, these discourses are shadowed by their opposites: accusations of
shallowness, silliness, short-sightedness, or stupidity.
The panel is interested in this tension, and in how wisdom and its
opposites are interactionally negotiated, pragmatically framed, and
discursively contested across contexts.
While most existing studies of wisdom have emerged from cultural
psychology, religious studies, classics, and philosophy, the
pragmatics of wisdom seeks to broaden and decentre these conversations
by approaching wisdom through multiple languages, diverse discourses,
and everyday meaning-making. In other words, this panel will seek to
retell the story of wisdom through the parameters of variation
afforded by linguistic pragmatics. Is, for example, talk about
‘wisdoms’ justified, by analogy to ‘knowledges’ (the two being related
but not the same)? If so, are ‘wisdoms’ social and cultural constructs
or can ‘wisdom’ be only discovered or received from above?
The panel brings together perspectives from (i) cultural pragmatics
and linguistic anthropology, (ii) ecopragmatics and environmental
humanities, (iii) sociohistorical and postcolonial pragmatics, and
(iv) interactional pragmatics in its broadest sense, including online
and offline interactions, ritual communication, and the discursive
construction of advice-giving, decision-making, and public
deliberation.
We invite pragmatic contributions that engage with, but are not
limited to, the following lines of inquiry:
 - Conceptualisations of wisdom and “wisdom-like” notions across eras
and linguacultures
 - Proverbs, sayings, and other paremiological forms as sites of
condensed social knowledge
 - Studies of wisdom discourse in ecological, posthuman, and
polycrisis contexts
 - The metapragmatics of “wise methods”: how claims to sustainability,
decoloniality, or ethical attunement are linguistically crafted,
authorised, and contested
 - Pragmatic studies of indigenous knowledges, pluricentric knowledge
and epistemic diversity
 - Discourses of judgement and decision, and the interactional
positioning of speakers and other actors as “wise” or “unwise”.
 - Platitudes, clichés, and pseudo-wisdom: the pragmatics of formulaic
“wise talk,” including parody, inflation, and critique
 - The invocation of past wisdom in present discourse, including
mythopoeia, metaphor and imagined continuity in public discourse



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