Common sense

For the pamphlet by Thomas Paine see Common Sense (pamphlet)

Common sense means what people would agree about. It is a personal judgement based on the facts of a situation. Common sense is usually the simplest and most direct account of a situation. It is the knowledge and experience which most people have, or should have. The Cambridge Dictionary defines it as, "the basic level of practical knowledge and judgment that we all need to help us live in a reasonable and safe way".

"Common sense" has at least two philosophical meanings. One is a capability of the mind to perceive things like movement and size. The second is our natural sense for other humans and the community. Both of these refer to a type of basic awareness and ability to judge. Most people are expected to share these things naturally, even if they can not explain why.

It is quite possible for common sense to be wrong, and science often explains things in quite a different way from common sense. People lack any common-sense intuition of the universe at subatomic distances, or of speeds approaching that of light. Today it is well known that the Earth travels around the Sun but before the scientific revolution people thought that the Sun going around the Earth was common sense.

According to the Simple English Wiktionary “Common sense is something that everybody knows and understands.”

Common Sense Media

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  Aristotle, the first person known to have discussed "common sense", described it as the ability with which animals (including humans) process sense-perceptions, memories and imagination (φρονεῖν, <span title=" transliteration" class="Unicode" style="white-space:normal; text-decoration: none">phroneîn) in order to reach many types of basic judgments. In his scheme, only humans have real reasoned thinking (νοεῖν, <span title=" transliteration" class="Unicode" style="white-space:normal; text-decoration: none">noeîn), which takes them beyond their common sense.

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  Avicenna became one of the greatest medieval authorities concerning Aristotelian common sense, both in Islamic and Christian lands.

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  Marcus Aurelius, emperor and Stoic philosopher, and an important influence upon the concept of "humanist" common sense

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  René Descartes' illustration of perception. Sensations from the senses travel to sensus communis, seated in the pineal gland inside the brain, and from there to the immaterial spirit.

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  René Descartes is the source of the most common way of understanding the "common sense" as a widely spread type of judgement.

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  Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, a proponent of a Roman-inspired concept of common sense.

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  Giambattista Vico. A defender of classical education in rhetoric, who analysed evidence of ancient wisdom in common sense.

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  Thomas Reid, founder of the Scottish school of Common Sense.

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  Immanuel Kant proposed that sensus communis (German: Gemeinsinn) was a useful concept for understanding aesthetics, but he was critical of the Scottish school's appeals to ordinary widely shared common sense (gesunden Verstand) as a basis of real knowledge.

Related pages

• Custom
• Endoxa