What is common sense? 3 theories that explain it

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

However, when push comes to shove it's hard to understand exactly what common sense is. We will talk about it in this article.

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What is common sense?

There are several ways to philosophically define what common sense is. Let's see them.

Aristotle

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

In a sense, this indicates that we all share this 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 experience on a daily basis: the taste of coffee, the views from a balcony, etc

However, as we will see, other thinkers used the concept of common sense to maintain that beyond the senses, We all have a common psychological matrix that allows us to critically analyze various things and extract similar ideas from them. this. For example, that if a truck is heading at full speed towards us, it is urgent to get out of the way.

Rene Descartes

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

Thus, while common sense allows the spiritual being to know that there is a physical reality, it also imperfection of this physical world means that it is not directly understandable and that rationality is needed to understand it. Common sense is like this 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 is wet, the sun shines... those kinds of ideas are those that would emanate from common sense.

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pragmatists

The pragmatist philosophy that emerged in the Anglo-Saxon world from the 19th century onwards 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 that are useful for dealing with life. they. Thus, common sense is not defined so much by its proximity to the truth, as by the consequences of believing in certain ideas.

In theory, it is possible that an idea brings us closer to the truth and that at the same time it is of little use to us to live well and be happy and, in that case, it would be debatable whether it constitutes common sense. Definitely, 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 depending on the place and time in which we live. Since most of us live in places that share many characteristics and rules, most of us share those ideas.

The argument from authority

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 question 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 widely held ideas that many people naturally consider obvious. In short, a way to impoverish any debate, since the popularity of a belief does not imply that it is good, true or useful.

Conclusion

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

In other words, if the concept of common sense is problematic, it is because we take it for granted thinking that by living similar experiences, we all draw similar conclusions from them. At the moment of truth, there is nothing to guarantee that this is the case.