Common sense

May 15, 2007 3:08 PM

Looking for quotations about common sense.

(Posted for a friend.) I'm writing about theory in the social sciences and am looking for quotations about or definitions of "common sense". Ones I have already found that are useful are, for instance, Judith Butler writing in the New York Times - "Many quite nefarious ideologies pass for common sense ... " etc, and Kant in the Prolegomena on appeals to common sense by "superficial ranters". These two are discussions of common sense as often based on irrationality, but references to explorations of the usefulness of common sense would also be helpful.

Thanks for your help.

posted by paduasoy to religion & philosophy (16 comments total)

not exactly common sense, but conventional wisdom:

The enemy of the conventional wisdom is not ideas, but the march of events. John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society (1958).
posted by snailer at 3:20 PM on May 15, 2007

“Common sense is not so common.”
-Voltaire
posted by yohko at 3:21 PM on May 15, 2007

Here.
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 3:31 PM on May 15, 2007

"Horse sense is the thing a horse has which keeps it from betting on people."
-W.C. Fields
posted by solotoro at 3:35 PM on May 15, 2007

G.E. Moore's famous "Defense of Common Sense" comes to mind, though I don't remember if he gives a definition therein.
posted by ontic at 3:42 PM on May 15, 2007

Common sense is not very common. (paraphrased, can't attribute)
posted by valentinepig at 3:57 PM on May 15, 2007

'Common sense is neither' (O. W. Holmes?).
posted by jamjam at 4:02 PM on May 15, 2007

"Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen." Albert Einstein
posted by atrazine at 4:10 PM on May 15, 2007

160 results from this search at Bartleby.
posted by jbickers at 4:34 PM on May 15, 2007

Andrew Hodges quoting Wittgenstein in his review of an Alan Turing Biorgraphy for Notices of the AMS:

One of Wittgenstein's ambitions was to compel his students to recognize the importance of common sense even in philosophical enquiry. ('Don't treat your common sense like an umbrella', he told them. 'When you come into a room to philosophize, don't leave it outside, but bring it in with you'.)

posted by caek at 4:57 PM on May 15, 2007

The first meaning was proposed by John Locke in his An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. This interpretation is based on phenomenological experience. Each of the senses gives input, and then these are to be integrated into a single impression. This is the common sense, the sense of things in common between disparate impressions. It is therefore allied with "fancy", and it is opposed to "judgment", or the capacity to divide like things into separates. Each of the empiricist philosophers approach the problem of the unification of sense data in their own way, giving various names to the operation. However, if approaches can agree, it is over there being a sense in the human understanding that sees commonality and does the combining. This is "common sense".
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 5:00 PM on May 15, 2007

“The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.” Vladimir Nabokov
posted by trip and a half at 5:54 PM on May 15, 2007

"Common sense breeds common results". I don't know who said it but it's the quote that keeps me sane.
posted by any major dude at 7:20 PM on May 15, 2007

"If I had all the money I'd spent on booze, I'd spend it on booze." - Viv Stanshall

(OK, that *is* common sense, as opposed to being *about* common sense.)
posted by Jofus at 2:52 AM on May 16, 2007

Update from the person I posted this for: I wasn't clear enough and should have specified that I am looking for academic or serious definitions/discussions of what common sense is, rather than popular quotations about it (that's why the examples I gave are both from philosphers). Thanks for people's help so far, but if anyone has a more serious slant that would be great.
posted by paduasoy at 4:01 AM on May 16, 2007

"Common sense" is a notoriously vague term. It can refer either to widespread and deeply held beliefs, or the process of reasoning and the structure of our minds that leads us to good beliefs. Keep that possible equivocation in mind as you look for quotations. The two meanings are easy to confuse and are two entirely different species. Most of the quotations above that treat common sense negatively (the Kant, the Butler, the Einstein) interpret common sense to simply be the collection of our most strongly-held convictions. "Common sense" is here identified with the content of our beliefs. (With G. E. Moore, ontic gives a good example of someone who idetifies common sense with the content of deeply-held beliefs but is praiseful of it.)

The term "common sense" didn't originally have much to do with the content of our beliefs, though. I believe the term originates with Locke, who used it in the abstruse sense mentioned by Cool Papa Bell above (you might want to check the OED to see where it actually did originate. It would also give you some good quotations, I'll bet. I don't have access to the OED online at this particular computer). You can see that the word "common" in the phrase used to mean "common to the senses", but has semantically drifted and come to mean "common to a group of people." Locke was talking about an intrinsic and innate feature of the mind: not the content of our beliefs, but the structure of our belief-forming capacities.

Anyway, a "common sense" school of philosophy in the early modern period came about as a response to Locke; the biggest name in this school is Thomas Reid: "Reid is a staunch defender of "common sense", or, as he sometimes puts it, the opinions of "the vulgar". In fact, in almost every arena of philosophical inquiry, Reid's positions are in various ways tied up with his overall project of defending common sense. Common sense, for Reid, are those tenets that we cannot help but believe, given that we are constructed the way we are constructed." That is, Reid thought that the content of our beliefs tell us something about the way that we are structured. (This is, incidentally, something that Kant agreed with, though he was highly critical of the specific beliefs that Reid thought told us something about human reason. There's a nice discussion, including Kant's distinction between sensus communis and "common human understanding", here.)

Hm, I just checked the wikipedia entry on common sense and it looks like I just repeated a lot of info given there. Oh well. It's pretty good; check it out.

A few more quotes:

"A man may say "I will content myself with common sense." I, for one, am with him there, in the main. I shall show why I do not think there can be any direct profit in going behind common sense -- meaning by common sense those ideas and beliefs that man's situation absolutely forces upon him."
-- Charles Saunders Peirce, from "Common Sense (Seminary vs Laboratory)".

"Common sense is a settled body of theory — unsystematic folk theory — which at any rate we do believe; and I presume that we are reasonable to believe it. (Most of it.)"
-- David Lewis, from On The Plurality of Worlds, p. 134.
posted by painquale at 4:17 AM on May 16, 2007