Common sense is what we mean when we want to talk about the knowledge we all share. That which we consider basic and evident, conclusions that we reach almost automatically when trying to analyze what we perceive.

However, at the moment of truth it is difficult to understand exactly what common sense is . We will talk about it in this article.

What is common sense?

There are several ways to philosophically define what is common sense. Let’s look at them.

Aristotle

For example, Aristotle attributed it to our ability to perceive almost identically the same sensory stimuli when they target our senses. When someone hears the snapping of a branch when it breaks, he is perceiving the same thing that would have been perceived by anyone else in his place .

In a sense, this indicates that we all share that way of feeling the impact that the environment has on us, but only if we are referring to the more specific and less abstract aspects of what we live in everyday life: the taste of coffee, the views from a balcony, etc.

However, as we will see, other thinkers used the concept of common sense to argue that beyond the senses, we all have a common psychological matrix that makes it possible to critically analyze various things and extract similar ideas from this. For example, that if a truck is speeding towards us, it is urgent to get out of the way.

René Descartes

For this famous French philosopher, common sense was that which acts as a bridge between the rational and immaterial being that according to him governed the body, and the physical world , composed of the human body and all that surrounds it in time and space.

Thus, while common sense allows the spiritual being to know that a physical reality exists, at the same time the imperfection of this physical world makes it not directly comprehensible and that rationality is needed to understand it. Common sense is, therefore, a basic notion that there are things that exist and things that happen , but it is a very vague knowledge from which we cannot extract great truths capable of giving meaning to what happens to us. The water wets, the sun shines… these are the kinds of ideas that would emanate from common sense.

Pragmatists

The pragmatist philosophy that emerged in the Anglo-Saxon world from the 19th century has generated a whole series of thinkers who tend to maintain that the common sense is simply a set of beliefs about practical and basic aspects of everyday life and that they are useful for dealing with them. Thus, common sense is not defined so much by its proximity to truth, but by the consequences of believing in certain ideas.

In theory, it is possible that an idea brings us closer to the truth and at the same time is of little use to us in living well and being happy and, in that case, it would be debatable whether it constituted common sense. In short, much of what is or is not common sense depends on the context , because this makes believing or not believing in certain things have different effects according to the place and time in which we live. Since most people live in places that share many characteristics and rules, we largely share those ideas.

The authority argument

Sometimes we forget that the use of language not only serves to communicate ideas, but also has an effect, causes phenomena. Appealing to common sense to support an idea can be used, simply, to leave out of discussion a belief or opinion that is considered unquestionable .

This is, in practice, the only certainty we have about the nature of common sense: a rhetorical tool that serves to make it difficult for anyone to question widespread ideas that many people consider naturally self-evident. In short, it is a way of impoverishing any debate, since the popularity of a belief does not imply that it is good, true or useful.

Conclusion

Common sense is a concept we use every day to refer to pieces of knowledge that seem obvious, that in theory everyone should have clear. However, the very fact that we relate this idea to many day-to-day experiences is what makes the concept’s ability to explain the human way of thinking not very powerful.

In other words, if the concept of common sense is problematic it is because we take it for granted by thinking that by living similar experiences, we all draw similar conclusions from them. When it comes down to it, there is no guarantee that this is the case.

Bibliographic references:

  • Bernstein, Richard (1983), Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis.
  • Maroney, Terry A. (2009). “Emotional Common Sense as Constitutional Law.” Vanderbilt Law Review. 62: 851.
  • Sachs, Joe (2001), Aristotle’s On the Soul and On Memory and Recollection, Green Lion Press.