What is common sense? 3 theories that explain it

A concept that we often use without knowing very well what it means.

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 we reach almost automatically when we try to analyze what we perceive.

However, when it comes down to it 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 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, is perceiving the same thing that anyone else would have perceived in his or her 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 experience on a day-to-day basis: the taste of coffee, the view from a balcony, etc.

However, as we shall see, other thinkers used the concept of common sense to argue that beyond the senses, we all have a common psychological matrix that makes us able to critically analyze various things and extract similar ideas from this. For example, 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 rational and immaterial being. bridge between the rational and immaterial being, which according to him governed the body, and the physical world.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 there is a physical reality, at the same time the imperfection of this physical world makes it not directly comprehensible and requires rationality 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.but it is a very vague knowledge from which we cannot extract great truths capable of giving meaning to what happens to us. Water wets, the sun shines... those kinds of ideas are the ones that would emanate from common sense.

Pragmatists

The pragmatist philosophy that emerged in the Anglo-Saxon world 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 daily life that are useful for getting by. Thus, common sense is not so much defined by its proximity to truth as by the consequences of believing certain ideas.

In theory, it is possible for an idea to bring us closer to the truth and at the same time be of little use to us for living well and being happy, and in that case, it would be arguable that it constitutes common sense. In short, a lot of what is or is not common sense depends on the contextbecause 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 of us live in places that share many characteristics and rules, we largely share these ideas.

The argument from authority

We sometimes overlook the fact that the use of language not only serves to communicate ideas, but that they also have an effect, they cause 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, 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 self-evident, 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 makes the concept's ability to explain human thinking not very powerful.

In other words, if the concept of common sense is problematic, it is because we take it for granted. 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 to guarantee that this is so.