“Common sense” means practicality.
What is “common sense"? The term is often associated with its provenance. Common sense is what anyone can have while people schooled with books and lectures can lack common sense and rely instead on these artificial ways of learning to learn the things needed to manage life and things while, paradoxically, common sense may also be a rare commodity in that most people may not have insight about people and processes, about appreciating the motives of people or how to adjust the tv set, while just about everyone can get a rudimentary formal education and remain clueless about how the world works. Common sense emerges as a major concept of epistemology in that assessing it means evaluating a claim that is a way to go on the road to truth. Indeed, John Dewey based his theory of knowledge on common sense. He thought that the practical activity of woodworking or managing farm machinery honed one’s mental abilities so as to appreciate more abstract matters. Practical knowledge led people to be objective and creative in finding solutions. I want to explore the idea of common sense more fully.
The dictionary definition of common sense is that it is judgment about practical matters and so makes it a kind of taste, a non-logical shortcut of thinking whereby a person gets a sufficient glimmer of the dynamics of a situation or a practice so as to cope with it without having an analysis of the components that make iyt up. So we can say that a carpenter has the common sense to cut with rather than against the grain without being able to explicate why, or a person can size up other people without a theory of psychology or know how political events will roll without deeply going into details and so these abilities are able to make people sort out life without the theoretical knowledge that most people never learn but need to know to carry out their lives. Most people aren’t sociologists and somehow manage, as doctors or tradespeople or farmers, to manage their businesses and private lives. Indeed, some might claim that the people who study sociology are deprived of their natural abilities at common sense and so have to assemble some theoretical knowledge to make up for the deficiency of being stone deaf to social life.
That makes common sense akin to an aesthetic taste, which is what David Hume and C. E. Moore thought about morals and other things, and perhaps Kant, who thought judgment had to do with assuming the purposefulness of an object, like a work of art, and then drawing its meanings including its causes from that rather than proceeding with a science of natural and therefore unpurposive objects. In that case, common sense is a necessary way of engaging the world rather than just the engagement of beautiful or moral things. But the necessity of common sense does not provide the processes by which it takes place, what is in that judgment rather than its necessity, just a black box that is judged by its consequences, which is to make practical life possible. And much reference to “common sense” is a command of what ought to be accomplished, like getting out of the rain, without understanding why one would be able to decide to do so, only using the term “common sense” as a pejorative for not having it, it being obvious that people will look out for themselves prudently enough so as not to catch cold, as Jane Bennet does, foolishly risking her life
Another definition of “common sense” is an analysis rather than a definition of the term. It can be said that the common sense of a time is whatever is conventional at the time, doing what people would find to be obvious and believing what they believe most people believe. So it was common sense to think before the civil rights movement that blacks and whites had to live separately whether by law or custom. Times change and beliefs change and that is just the way it is, like planting tomato plants in the spring without thinking it might be otherwise, neither ordained or chosen but just the custom-- until the custom changes. What is ordinary is common sense, a substitute for a definition as norms the standards for most behavior but without the compulsion and deviant variety of norm as baggage, conventionality a simple guide to the way tube world operates. But the claim of “common sense” as conventionality breaks down because, as in previous definitions, it does not explain how it works, only that it is functional, and also because it does not give common sense any bite as penetrating into the way things work when the core idea is that common sense allows us to notice new things, so that common sense will tell you to rotate crops or re-hone your shears or notice that a black acquaintance has something on the ball whatever are the conventions of social life. Common sense seems to command that reality is more compelling than convention as a guide to belief and behavior.
An alternative to common sense that is also part of folkways and so also claims that it is the “real” way through which people arrive at conclusions and is available to everyone rather than to a trained elite, which is both science and religion and is offered as the prior forms of understanding, are adages because, unlike common sense, they claim to be categorical. “Measure twice; cut once” applies to life as well as woodworking. People should consider and plan before acting. You shouldn’t rush into marriage. This is a universal rule however often violated and woe are the rewards of not heeding the adage. So adages come to be the equivalent of ethical imperatives even if these are not reduced to laws, but merely come upon as succinct images of what is universally available and invisible and mandatory, and so very much like a law. An adage is true because it feels right even though unjust. The opposite adage also holds as persuasive when that one is culled, as when invoking the adage “seize the day” to describe a quickly consummated marriage or a ruthlessness in war and business.
Here is an attempt to craft a definition of common sense that attends to the dynamics of how the mind works when engraved in common sense rather than pointing out the consequences of achieving common sense. The term means balancing the various conflicting or coexistent forces in making a decision, though that is already a worry because “balance” can mean nothing at all, as occurs when Aristotle meant justice to be a balance of equities. We can weigh weights on a balance scale but justice also means unequivocally decisions where one side is right and the other side just wrong and requires tube punishment of the offending party. So treat common sense as a sense of how complicated the various forces and situations at work are and make a summary judgment about how it all adds up without a utilitarian calculus of pleasure. You know as a matter of common sense and as your mother can tell you, smelling it out in an instant, that your new friends are disreputable and you should be wary of them. Mothers have common sense, just as an employer who should judge whether a new hire is reliable and that an aircraft design that looks ungainly probably is not airworthy.
The emphasis in this definition is to admit complexity and the ability to recognize the main thrust of the situation and so decide what to do quickly and well because life requires quick decisions about any number of matters just to get through the day, such as remembering to wear a sweater because the weather is getting cold and noticing that a person at first and therefore last acquaintance seems a bit skewed or is, on the other hand, a bit original and so worth cultivating. So many decisions to make just to get through the day, and common sense the only reliable resource, as happens when you jump to the conclusion that the solitaire deck is not promising because there are too many just sevens and eights rather than a variety of cards and so pack it in (or not) rather than work it out. Sometimes life knows you have a losing hand but you hope it might still work out. That is very different from calculating mathematical possibilities on the basis of available information, though cardsharps may indeed very quickly calculate the odds. That is a different process, scientific rather than folk wisdom.
The entire process of engaging in common sense can be treated as being reduced to a single virtue: that of prudence. Everyone has to be prudent in that they consider alternatives and maximize a formula of benefits and losses. But a virtue is, like bravery and compassion, something that is universal even if often violated, just as vices such as gluttony and betrayal are always bad even if everywhere evident. In real life, prudence may not apply. It was imprudent for Napoleon to attack Russia, but prudence was not relevant in Churchill’s eyes as to whether to surrender to Germany. Either Great Britain would become a vassal state or not, and so he fought on despite bad odds.
When large numbers of people depart from common sense with regard to large scale social and political issues, these can be considered frenzies: a departure from reality often thought as a mania whose infection will pass. Economists rely on common sense as what people appreciate about their economic situations. They do not need to read statistics or consult textbooks to arrive at their decisions. They sense that prices are going up or jobs have been eliminated. They decide which cars are out of their price range and buy accordingly. Even though they will keep sending their children to overcharged college tuition charges so as to gain prestige. By and large economics wouldn’t work if they could not use common sense to evaluate their interests. But what happens if people are flooded with external motives to depart from economic sense? At the present moment, polls show people think the American economy is lousy even though it is doing rather well according to the standard economic indicators. Perhaps the economics said that engaging in a frenzy where words are rendered meaningless is really a reflection on what political judgments are, but there you are, abandoning economic common sense. Similarly students who are in support of humanitarian aid to Gaza refuse to recognize that Hamas is genocidal and apply that term to their Israeli opponents and without a sense of irony about v daunting that term, and so having departed from common sense. People support Donald Trump and minimize the insurrection against the Capitol. Olden day Republicans wanted lower taxes and smaller government, which are issues about which I disagree, but currently people take preposterous decisions which don’t resort to a common sense assessment of the various aspects of a situation.
People who have departed from common sense can be said to engage in a frenzy where words lose their meaning and allow themselves to engage in the outrageous. Frenzies are temporary emotions that come from time to time but are relatively rare in that most movements are motivated by ideology, as was the case with McCarthyism and the Civil Rights Movement, as was also Hitlerism and Stalinism. UFO believers are in a frenzy, and so not very important because people need to rely on common sense to get through the day and that bleeds into politics except when it becomes separated from ordinary life and acts autonomously as can happen within vicarious experiences such as entertainment and politics. You can be in a frenzy about a rock star because it is so inconsequential and contained just within the arena and your headphones. Dangerous is an age when a lot of people become frenzied by important matters. France under Robespierre was in a frenzy for having lost sight of the common sense that people are precious. The years of Bleeding Kansas saw a frenzy in that both sides did not see the catastrophe that would ensue if there was a civil war. Some introspection would have helped.
What is to be made of the present frenzy where people are willing to topple the Constitution or let that claim by its political leader to ride? There seems no deep ideological division to motivate it, only trivial matters like the southern border and leasing more oil drilling and the Second Amendment, and the two border wars, one between NATO and Russia and the other between Israel, theWestern outpost of Israel and Hamas, the Arab states staying aside, have been well managed by the Biden Administration, who sends money but no land troops. Is it only Trump that is the fly in the ointment or are Republicans themselves and for their own reasons abandoning common sense? I don’t know.
What is the antidote to frenzies? It may not be a direct return to common sense which relies on sophisticated judgments of the complexity of things. I would suggest a step to recovery as the adaptation of ideology which may have outrageous conclusions but relies on an integrated set of ideas to guide thoughts. Marx may have been wrong about surplus value as the basis of wealth, but he was aware of class struggle and modifications of Marx led to Bernstein-like democracy as well as Soviet Marxism, a variety of dictatorship already familiar as a sort of Czarism, to which Russians continue to cling. And so America may emerge out of its current frenzy by adopting a strident view of law and order and/or a distrust of all government rather than a more practical way to work politics. I also don’t know.