Common sense

Common sense is sound practical judgment concerning everyday matters, or a basic ability to perceive, understand, and judge that is shared by ('common to') nearly all people. The first type of common sense, good sense, can be described as 'the knack for seeing things as they are, and doing things as they ought to be done.' The second type is sometimes described as folk wisdom, 'signifying unreflective knowledge not reliant on specialized training or deliberative thought.' The two types are intertwined, as the person who has common sense is in touch with common-sense ideas, which emerge from the lived experiences of those commonsensical enough to perceive them.Quintilian says it is better to send a boy to school than to have a private tutor for him at home; for if he is kept away from the herd (congressus) how will he ever learn that sensus which we call communis? (I, ii, 20). On the lowest level it means tact. In Horace the man who talks to you when you obviously don't want to talk lacks communis sensus.René Descartes is generally credited with making obsolete the notion that there was an actual faculty within the human brain that functioned as a sensus communis. The French philosopher did not fully reject the idea of the inner senses, which he appropriated from the Scholastics. But he distanced himself from the Aristotelian conception of a common sense faculty, abandoning it entirely by the time of his Passions of the Soul (1649).According to Hobbes man is no different from the other animals. Hobbes' philosophy constituted a more profound rupture with Peripatetic thought. He accepted mental representations but 'All sense is fancy', as Hobbes famously put it, with the only exception of extension and motion.Cartesian theory offered a justification for innovative social change achieved through the courts and administration, an ability to adapt the law to changing social conditions by making the basis for legislation 'rational' rather than 'traditional'.But would these prejudiced reasoners reflect a moment, there are many obvious instances and arguments, sufficient to undeceive them, and make them enlarge their maxims and principles. Do they not see the vast variety of inclinations and pursuits among our species; where each man seems fully satisfied with his own course of life, and would esteem it the greatest unhappiness to be confined to that of his neighbour? Do they not feel in themselves, that what pleases at one time, displeases at another, by the change of inclination; and that it is not in their power, by their utmost efforts, to recall that taste or appetite, which formerly bestowed charms on what now appears indifferent or disagreeable? Do you come to a philosopher as to a cunning man, to learn something by magic or witchcraft, beyond what can be known by common prudence and discretion?A publick Spirit can come only from a social Feeling or Sense of Partnership with Human Kind. Now there are none so far from being Partners in this Sense, or sharers in this common Affection, as they who scarcely know an Equall, nor consider themselves as subject to any law of Fellowship or Community. And thus Morality and good Government go together.Another man comes and alters the phrase: leaving out moral, and putting in common, in the room of it. He then tells you, that his common sense teaches him what is right and wrong, as surely as the other's moral sense did: meaning by common sense, a sense of some kind or other, which he says, is possessed by all mankind: the sense of those, whose sense is not the same as the author's, being struck out of the account as not worth taking.If there are certain principles, as I think there are, which the constitution of our nature leads us to believe, and which we are under a necessity to take for granted in the common concerns of life, without being able to give a reason for them — these are what we call the principles of common sense; and what is manifestly contrary to them, is what we call absurd.The common Understanding of men , which, as the mere sound (not yet cultivated) Understanding, we regard as the least to be expected from any one claiming the name of man, has therefore the doubtful honour of being given the name of common sense (sensus communis); and in such a way that by the name common (not merely in our language, where the word actually has a double signification, but in many others) we understand vulgar, that which is everywhere met with, the possession of which indicates absolutely no merit or superiority.Once we begin to question whether there is a common faculty of taste (a sensus communis), we are easily led down the path to relativism. And this is what did happen after Kant—so much so that today it is extraordinarily difficult to retrieve any idea of taste or aesthetic judgment that is more than the expression of personal preferences. Ironically (given Kant's intentions), the same tendency has worked itself out with a vengeance with regards to all judgments of value, including moral judgments.Endeavours of this sort always end in defeat. In order to confer a technical philosophical value upon the common sense of orators and moralists it is necessary either to accept Reid's common sense as a sort of unjustified and unjustifiable instinct, which will destroy Thomism, or to reduce it to the Thomist intellect and reason, which will result in its being suppressed as a specifically distinct faculty of knowledge. In short, there can be no middle ground between Reid and St. Thomas.Good Sense is, of all things among men, the most equally distributed; for every one thinks himself so abundantly provided with it, that those even who are the most difficult to satisfy in everything else, do not usually desire a larger measure of this quality than they already possess. And in this it is not likely that all are mistaken: the conviction is rather to be held as testifying that the power of judging aright and of distinguishing Truth from Error, which is properly what is called Good Sense or Reason, is by nature equal in all men; and that the diversity of our opinions, consequently, does not arise from some being endowed with a larger share of Reason than others, but solely from this, that we conduct our thoughts along different ways, and do not fix our attention on the same objects. For to be possessed of a vigorous mind is not enough; the prime requisite is rightly to apply it. The greatest minds, as they are capable of the highest excellencies, are open likewise to the greatest aberrations; and those who travel very slowly may yet make far greater progress, provided they keep always to the straight road, than those who, while they run, forsake it.Some say the Senses receive the Species of things, and deliver them to the Common-sense; and the Common Sense delivers them over to the Fancy, and the Fancy to the Memory, and the Memory to the Judgement, like handing of things from one to another, with many words making nothing understood. (Hobbes, Thomas, 'II.: of imagination', The English Works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury; Now First Collected and Edited by Sir William Molesworth, Bart., 11 vols., 3 (Leviathan), London: Bohn). Common sense is sound practical judgment concerning everyday matters, or a basic ability to perceive, understand, and judge that is shared by ('common to') nearly all people. The first type of common sense, good sense, can be described as 'the knack for seeing things as they are, and doing things as they ought to be done.' The second type is sometimes described as folk wisdom, 'signifying unreflective knowledge not reliant on specialized training or deliberative thought.' The two types are intertwined, as the person who has common sense is in touch with common-sense ideas, which emerge from the lived experiences of those commonsensical enough to perceive them. In a psychology context, Smedslund defines common sense as 'the system of implications shared by the competent users of a language' and notes, 'A proposition in a given context belongs to common sense if and only if all competent users of the language involved agree that the proposition in the given context is true and that its negation is false.' The everyday understanding of common sense derives from historical philosophical discussion involving several European languages. Related terms in other languages include Latin sensus communis, Greek αἴσθησις κοινὴ (aísthēsis koinḕ), and French bon sens, but these are not straightforward translations in all contexts. Similarly in English, there are different shades of meaning, implying more or less education and wisdom: 'good sense' is sometimes seen as equivalent to 'common sense', and sometimes not. 'Common sense' also has at least two specifically philosophical meanings. One is a capability of the animal soul (ψῡχή, psūkhḗ) proposed by Aristotle, which enables different individual senses to collectively perceive the characteristics of physical things such as movement and size, which all physical things have in different combinations, allowing people and other animals to distinguish and identify physical things. This common sense is distinct from basic sensory perception and from human rational thinking, but cooperates with both. The second special use of the term is Roman-influenced and is used for the natural human sensitivity for other humans and the community. Just like the everyday meaning, both of these refer to a type of basic awareness and ability to judge that most people are expected to share naturally, even if they cannot explain why. All these meanings of 'common sense', including the everyday ones, are interconnected in a complex history and have evolved during important political and philosophical debates in modern Western civilisation, notably concerning science, politics and economics. The interplay between the meanings has come to be particularly notable in English, as opposed to other western European languages, and the English term has become international. Since the Age of Enlightenment the term 'common sense' has frequently been used for rhetorical effect, sometimes pejorative, and sometimes appealed to positively, as an authority. It can be negatively equated to vulgar prejudice and superstition, it is often positively contrasted to them as a standard for good taste and as the source of the most basic axioms needed for science and logic. It was at the beginning of the eighteenth century that this old philosophical term first acquired its modern English meaning: 'Those plain, self-evident truths or conventional wisdom that one needed no sophistication to grasp and no proof to accept precisely because they accorded so well with the basic (common sense) intellectual capacities and experiences of the whole social body' This began with Descartes' criticism of it, and what came to be known as the dispute between 'rationalism' and 'empiricism'. In the opening line of one of his most famous books, Discourse on Method, Descartes established the most common modern meaning, and its controversies, when he stated that everyone has a similar and sufficient amount of common sense (bon sens), but it is rarely used well. Therefore, a skeptical logical method described by Descartes needs to be followed and common sense should not be overly relied upon. In the ensuing 18th century Enlightenment, common sense came to be seen more positively as the basis for modern thinking. It was contrasted to metaphysics, which was, like Cartesianism, associated with the Ancien Régime. Thomas Paine's polemical pamphlet Common Sense (1776) has been described as the most influential political pamphlet of the 18th century, affecting both the American and French revolutions. Today, the concept of common sense, and how it should best be used, remains linked to many of the most perennial topics in epistemology and ethics, with special focus often directed at the philosophy of the modern social sciences. The origin of the term is in the works of Aristotle. The best-known case is De Anima Book III, chapter 1, especially at line 425a27. The passage is about how the animal mind converts raw sense perceptions from the five specialized sense perceptions, into perceptions of real things moving and changing, which can be thought about. According to Aristotle's understanding of perception, each of the five senses perceives one type of 'perceptible' or 'sensible' which is specific (ἴδια, idia) to it. For example, sight can see colour. But Aristotle was explaining how the animal mind, not just the human mind, links and categorizes different tastes, colours, feelings, smells and sounds in order to perceive real things in terms of the 'common sensibles' (or 'common perceptibles'). In this discussion, 'common' (κοινή, koiné) is a term opposed to specific or particular (idia). The Greek for these common sensibles is tá koiná (τά κοινᾰ́, lit. 'that which is common to many'), which means shared or common things, and examples include the oneness of each thing, with its specific shape and size and so on, and the change or movement of each thing. Distinct combinations of these properties are common to all perceived things. In this passage, Aristotle explained that concerning these koiná (such as movement) we already have a sense, a 'common sense' or sense of the common things (aísthēsis koinḕ), which does not work by accident (κᾰτᾰ́ σῠμβεβηκός, katá sumbebēkós). And there is no specific (idéā) sense perception for movement and other koiná, because then we would not perceive the koiná at all, except by accident. As examples of perceiving by accident Aristotle mentions using the specific sense perception vision on its own to see that something is sweet, or to recognize a friend by their distinctive color. Lee (2011, p. 31) explains that 'when I see Socrates, it is not insofar as he is Socrates that he is visible to my eye, but rather because he is coloured'. So the normal five individual senses do sense the common perceptibles according to Aristotle (and Plato), but it is not something they necessarily interpret correctly on their own. Aristotle proposes that the reason for having several senses is in fact that it increases the chances that we can distinguish and recognize things correctly, and not just occasionally or by accident. Each sense is used to identify distinctions, such as sight identifying the difference between black and white, but, says Aristotle, all animals with perception must have 'some one thing' that can distinguish black from sweet. The common sense is where this comparison happens, and this must occur by comparing impressions (or symbols or markers; σημεῖον, sēmeîon, lit. 'sign, mark') of what the specialist senses have perceived. The common sense is therefore also where a type of consciousness originates, 'for it makes us aware of having sensations at all'. And it receives physical picture imprints from the imaginative faculty, which are then memories that can be recollected.