Common sense is what we refer to 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, when push comes to shove It’s hard to understand exactly what common sense is. We will talk about it in this article.
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 the same sensory stimuli in an almost identical way when they target our senses. When someone hears the crack of a branch breaking, you are perceiving the same thing that anyone else would have perceived in your place.
In a certain 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 most 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 this. For example, if a truck is heading at full speed towards us, it is urgent to get out of the way.
For this famous French philosopher, common sense was that which acts in 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 a physical reality exists, at the same time the imperfection of this physical world means that it is not directly understandable and that rationality is needed to understand it. Common sense is, thus, 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.
Pragmatists
The pragmatist philosophy that emerged in the Anglo-Saxon world starting in the 19th century has generated a whole series of thinkers who tend to maintain that common sense is simply a set of beliefs about practical and basic aspects of everyday life and that they are useful for getting along in life. they. Thus, common sense is defined not so much by its proximity to the truth, but rather 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 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 means that believing or not believing in certain things has different effects depending on the place and time in which we live. Since most people live in places that share many characteristics and rules, we share those ideas to a large extent.
Sometimes we ignore 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, a way to impoverish any debate, given that 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, which in theory everyone should be clear about. 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 nothing that guarantees that this is the case.
