The Philosophy and Common Sense Reader

Writings on Critical Thinking

Markar Melkonian

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350073760
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Epistemology in Philosophy

What might common sense be? Is it a mental capacity? Or does it consist of just truisms and precepts? If the latter is the case, is this knowledge innate or empirical? Or is it like "human nature"-a term that has played its role in rhetoric, but that does not appear to have a definite, agreed-upon meaning? Indeed we can learn a great deal about some of the most influential modern philosophers, from the Enlightenment to Ludwig Wittgenstein and W.V.O. Quine, by examining what they have to say about common sense, whilst the anthropologist Clifford Geertz observed that common sense "has become a central category, almost the central category, in a wide range of modern philosophical systems." This book investigates the nature of common sense through a selection of key writings on epistemology, the philosophy of science, the philosophy of religion, meta-ethics and the philosophy of economics and political philosophy. The authors included are representative of the Scottish School, such as David Hume, the Ordinary Language School, and members of the Analytic tradition, including Karl Popper, but they also incorporate thinkers like John Dewey from the American pragmatist tradition, the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, recent popular writers on economics, and even pamphleteers, from Thomas Paine to contemporary engaged journalists. This is the first reader to provide such a comprehensive overview of the central writings on common sense. It features review questions and further reading lists at the end of each section.

Part I

Common Sense and Skepticism

Introduction to Part I: Common Sense and Skepticism

According to one common understanding of common sense, it is a dependable, direct sense of what’s what, a sense that emerges from our experiences in the conduct of our day-to-day lives. Like the senses of sight and hearing, the direct, instinctive character of common sense and its basis in experience is what makes it dependable and what makes it a sense. What makes it common is that it is shared: it is the body of ideas and beliefs or the mental capacity that has been common to all adults who are competent enough to tend to their daily affairs. The French theologian François Fénelon (1651–1715) described a near synonym of common sense, namely, “good sense” (le bon sens), as the instinct that, when shocked, results in laughter.¹ Fénelon suggested that laughter, or a condescending smile, was the appropriate response to the extravagant claims of philosophers and skeptics of all stripes. Against the infallible and shared deliverances of common sense, skepticism cannot prevail. This, at least, was the conviction of the earliest modern champions of common sense.

The philosophy of common sense developed as a reaction against the skepticism of the Scottish enlightenment thinker, David Hume (1711–1776), and the subjective idealism of his contemporary, George Berkeley (1685–1753), the Anglo-Irish philosopher and Anglican Bishop of the city of Cloyne, in Ireland. Skepticism and subjective idealism both seemed to issue from the same source, namely an excessive stress on ideas, or what is present to the mind, at the expense of the inborn capacities of the mind. The skeptics’ overemphasis on ideas provided what seemed to the common-sense philosophers to be a false start, leading inescapably from the fundamental premise that “all knowledge begins with ideas,” to absurdities.

No one better personified the excesses of reason than Berkeley.² He argued for subjective idealism along the following lines: the only things that can be present to the mind are ideas—sensations, passions, memories, imaginations, and other “operations of the mind.” Since, as Berkeley claimed, “ideas can only resemble ideas,” every thing that we confusedly take to be an object is really ideas “blended or combined together.” You believe that an apple is something more than the sensations of a round red shape, a smooth spherical surface, a certain heft and aroma, and other ideas and perceptions; and yet, when you attend to these ideas and perceptions, you find that this “something more,” this supposed material reality swinging entirely free of your mind, is impossible to imagine. Accordingly, Berkeley concluded that to be means nothing more than to perceive or to be perceived. Reality consists not of physical form and matter, but of ideas and the minds that “have” them. Since any reality independent of minds and ideas is incomprehensible—since we cannot even make sense of the term material objects—it is against common sense to accept any notion of mind-independent reality.

But if this were so, then it would seem that apples and all other objects would disappear the moment we stop perceiving them: the world would disappear “behind our backs.” If that were the case, though, what would account for the regularity and consistency of our perceptions? What would account for the fact that, as I seem to turn the apple around in my hand, my perceptions of it change in very predictable ways? In response to this sort of question, Berkeley explained that the world—“all the choir of heaven and furniture of the earth”—is given its regularity and consistency by an infinite all-perceiving mind: the world exists as it does, even when we are not looking or listening, because it consists of ideas perceived by God. The only reason objects do not disappear behind our backs is because from moment to moment God keeps them in mind. We are, thus, entirely dependent on an all-knowing and all-sustaining God.

Berkeley’s conclusion, perhaps, is not as surprising as the fact that he claimed it in the name of common sense.

As we will see in our first reading, Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid (1710–1796) could not have disagreed more sharply with Berkeley when it comes to mind-independent reality. Reid conceded Berkeley’s point that reason could not establish the existence of mind-independent reality—at least not alone. This, however, served only to illustrate how helpless reason is in the face of skepticism. Indeed, as Reid noted, skepticism could be extended considerably further than Berkeley had acknowledged: Reid’s fellow Scotsman and younger contemporary David Hume had shown in his then-recent book A Treatise of Human Nature (1738)³ that reason could also doubt the existence of minds, as discrete entities! Just as Berkeley could find no idea corresponding to mind-independent reality, Hume reported that he could find no idea or perception corresponding to his self, except as a loose bundle of ideas and impressions. In the course of Hume’s good-natured but devastating arguments, he went much further than Berkeley by casting into doubt the very notion of the continuity of personhood. What Hume left us with, then, is not minds and ideas, as Berkeley would have it, but mere passing ideas unattached to minds.⁴

If this is where philosophical skepticism leads us, Reid thought, then all the more reason to resist it. Far from conceding the point that reality independent of minds and ideas is incomprehensible, Reid held that we cannot avoid the nonphilosophical conviction that many of our impressions are caused by external objects. Indeed, for anyone but a complete skeptic, the idea of material objects must be taken as an unquestioned first principle. If the faculty of reason alone cannot establish the existence of either material objects or minds, then something else must underwrite our belief in these things. Fortunately, we have other inborn or innate capacities of the mind to fall back on, notably common sense. It is common sense—not reason alone—that certifies the existence of minds and material objects.

The next reading, “A Defence of Common Sense” (1925), is a classic of Anglo-American analytic philosophy. The author, G. E. Moore (1873–1958), convinced many British and American philosophers that it was not their business to question common certainties, but rather to analyze them, in a special meaning of that verb. In this essay, Moore presents his argument for “common-sense realism”—the view that things independent of thinkers exist. He argues that any reason a skeptic could give that we cannot know with certainty that mind-independent reality exists would be no more certain than the reasons we have to accept common sense claims about our knowledge of that reality.

Our third reading consists of remarks written in response to G. E. Moore’s paper by the influential twentieth-century Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951). From Wittgenstein’s notes emerge, lightly sketched, a holistic view of knowledge and doubt, and a strikingly original response to the skeptical challenge. “If you are not certain of any fact,” he writes, “you cannot be certain of the meaning of your words either”; thus, “the game of doubting itself presupposes certainty.”⁵ In a passage that is not included in our excerpt, Wittgenstein writes that, “… the questions that we raise and our doubts depend on the fact that some propositions are exempt from doubt, are as it were like hinges on which those turn.” These propositions or statements, exemplified by Moore’s utterance This is a hand (accompanied by the gesture of holding up his hand), are embedded in a much larger “nest of propositions.” Any of these statements, taken singly, can of course be subject to skeptical doubt; nevertheless, such statements taken together constitute “an unmoving foundation” without which our actual language practices cannot take place. “Our knowledge forms an enormous system,” Wittgenstein wrote, “and only within this system has a particular bit the value we give it.”⁶ It is only thanks to these hinge statements that certainty and doubting can take place. Banish all such statements and you banish doubt, along with linguistic practices themselves. Thus, “doubt itself rests only on what is beyond doubt.”⁷

In the final reading in Part 1, Canadian philosopher Mark Kingwell tries his hand at making sense of common sense. Kingwell first distinguishes “plain common sense”—the untutored, unreflective common sense that most adults are supposed to have—from the more reflective “philosophical common sense.” The latter sort of common sense is what the architect Frank Lloyd Wright was probably referring to when he quipped: “There is nothing more uncommon than common sense.” Kingwell appears to take common sense, in both its plain and its philosophical versions, to be a mental capacity, rather than a set of beliefs and assumptions. He connects the “main features of plain common sense” with the claims that: (1) there is an objectively existing world external to me; (2) it has existed for a long time in the past and will continue to exist in the future; (3) I exist as both a subject and an object in this world; (4) I existed in the past and will exist in the future; and (5) there are numerous other thinking subjects like me, who exist in time and the external world. For Kingwell as for Moore, then, plain common sense is incompatible with skepticism about the existence of other minds, and it entails metaphysical realism, the view that the world is the way it is independently of how humans take it to be.

The guiding thought of plain common sense is: a thing is what it is, and is not what it is not. But this very insistence leads beyond plain common sense, because it sets the stage for the distinction between appearance and reality, guiding us to a critical sort of sound judgment. This is the critical common sense that says, “the oar in the water appears to be crooked, but it is not really crooked.” As soon as we take seriously the distinction between appearance and reality, we move from plain common sense to what Kingwell calls philosophical common sense. But once we do this, what becomes of the insistence that a thing is what it is? Common sense leads to criticism, but the beginning of criticism marks the limit for common sense in its plain variety. Thus, common sense appears to subvert its own authority. “Since common sense clashes with itself,” Kingwell writes, “the requirement of consistency with common sense rules out common sense itself.”⁸

If Kingwell provides a reliable survey of issues we’ve encountered in Part 1, it would seem that the term common sense typically flags something vague and nebulous at best—either a particular set of beliefs and assumptions or a certain mental capacity that produces these beliefs and assumptions. The beliefs are supposed to be widely shared and so reliable that they usually go without saying, but as it turns out, many of these beliefs are not widely shared across time and space, and some of them are not especially reliable, either. Indeed, some of these supposed beliefs, namely those that qualify as Kingwell’s common nonsense, are not really even beliefs at all.

But whether or not a formulation is nonsense, to describe it as commonsensical is to rhetorically certify it. This fact, which is especially apparent when it comes to partisan claims and politics (as we will see in Parts V and VI), accounts at least in part for why common sense beliefs are so strikingly inconsistent. And the inconsistency, in turn, renders common sense incoherent. This is why, according to Kingwell, “we have no way of talking philosophically about it.”

Actually, though, we can speak philosophically about it, as Kingwell himself demonstrates in this paper. We can speak philosophically about common sense, just as we can speak philosophically about, say, providence or human nature. But if Kingwell is right, then we cannot put common sense to philosophical work, and we should not try to use common sense as Reid and G. E. Moore wanted to use it—as an authority to certify knowledge claims and to banish skepticism as it arises from case to case. In the philosophical contest between common sense and skepticism, skepticism wins.

Although skepticism may carry the day when it comes to philosophy, it is no way to conduct our daily lives. We cannot live in skepticism: as Wittgenstein has reminded us, doubt itself rests on what is beyond doubt. Nevertheless, plain common sense constantly pushes us toward doubt. What then are we to do? Competent modern adults must in the course of their daily affairs defer to common sense; however, Kingwell suggests, we should do so the way we would defer to a prudent but arrogant guide: let common sense be our guide in daily affairs, but do not believe its flattering self-descriptions. To speak seriously of common sense, we must not speak commonsensically about it. Kingwell concludes that the plain truth about common sense is that there is not much to say about it philosophically, except perhaps ironically.

But what of those of us who are “cursed with a peculiar kind of curiosity”—namely philosophical curiosity? It would seem that the best we can do is to live with skepticism. Kingwell suggests that Hume provides the model here: when philosophy starts to hurt our heads, we should beat a retreat to the backgammon board, a glass of sherry, and light conversation with friends.

¹ Rosenfeld, 114.

² See: George Berkeley, A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (Dublin: Aaron Rhames, for Jeremy Pepyat, Bookseller, 1710).

³ David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1888), 251–63.

⁴ Unlike Berkeley, though, Hume did not argue that this was all that existed; rather, he argued only that in the face of skeptical challenge, we could not rationally justify the existence of more than this. Hume was making a point about the limits of justification of matters of fact, and about the broad scope of skepticism.

⁵ The quoted passages are from On Certainty (ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright [New York: Harper & Row, 1969]), 114 and 115 (Sections 17e and 18e).

⁶ Wittgenstein, On Certainty, 52e (Section 410).

⁷ Wittgenstein, On Certainty, 68e (Section 519).

⁸ Here Kingwell is quoting Timothy Sprigge, “Philosophy and Common Sense,” Revue Internationale de Philosophie 40, no. 158(3) (1986): 203.

Chapter 1

The Human Mind and Common Sense

Thomas Reid

Thomas Reid begins our first reading by distinguishing between two distinct meanings of the word sense: on the one hand, there is the non-philosophical meaning of judgment “in common language.” This is the meaning that Reid will describe and defend. On the other hand, there is a meaning that the word took on in the writings of the “modern philosophers” whom Reid opposes, notably John Locke.¹ According to these philosophers, sense comprises sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch—the powers “by which we receive certain ideas or impressions from objects”²—as well as the “internal senses,” including consciousness, memory, reasoning, and other “operations of our own minds.”

It might help to say a few more words about what the “modern philosophers” have to say about ideas. An idea, according to Locke, is anything present to the mind, any immediate object of thought, whether simple (“round...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents 
• Preface: What This Book Is (Not) About
• Acknowledgments
• General Introduction: Paradoxes of Plain Thinking
• Part I: Common Sense and Skepticism
• Part II: Common Sense and Science
• Part III: Common Sense and Religion
• Part IV: Common Sense and Morality
• Part V: Common Sense and Economics
• Part VI: Common Sense and Politics
• Readings That Appear in This Book
• Index
• Imprint