No such thing as Common Sense!

Great Debates
1

The first day of my Psych 140 class my teach threw this out at the classroom. It “makes sense” in a way. I believe that I have come close to reaching this conclusion on my own many times- even have told people that there is no such thing as common sense before. I just didn’t understand why. Not fully.

I mean really, what IS common sense? If it really existed we would be able to tack on an objective definition onto it, and it would be… Well, common.

In America, especially, we have a collection of cultures, ethics, expectations, etc. With each and every culture, indeed with every single individual, we have a totally different classification of what common sense is.

My teacher in his class gave us a test- and asked us to state which are true and which are false:

http://www.kcmetro.edu/longview/ctac/psychology/Commonsense2.htm

(this works for me without a login- not sure how much of this page you can acess without one though…)

I would like to quote some of the things on the following pages as examples:

It goes on to describe cultural norms, Logical fallacies, attribution errors, correlation presented as causation, Pre-pubertal learning, etc.

The point being that it seems that commons sense is way too broad of a term, so broad that it becomes meaningless. YOUR common sense may not be the COMMON sense of anybody else. Not very common is it?

My plea with this thread has two parts- a call to quit using the term common sense by normally intelligent people, and perhaps a coining of a new, much better term. (intuition or something)

THERE IS NO COMMON SENSE!!

2

Common sense has a philosophical meaning that involves giving a miss to questions such as, “Do I exist?”

3

That may be SimonX, but I have never heard anybody say they do not exist, does that mean, therefore that everybody has Common sense, no matter how many people say they dont?

4

The term could go for some more apt definition.

5

Then define it as such, give some examples that fit into the more common usage. Not some abstract philosophical ideal that the average joe couldn’t even spell.

Give some examples of your “common sense”. This is GD after all, debate me, don’t toy with me.

6

Common sense: Don’t set yourself on fire. Don’t play in the road. Old people drive poorly (j/k). If you’re blind, you can’t read print. Don’t eat paste.

Basically, the things that you are taught from infancy to pre-adolescence make up ‘common sense.’ Now, as for retards who can’t figure out what “press any key” means, well, just because they don’t have signifigant levels of higher cognative skills doesn’t mean anything. Things like that can be attributed to lack of familiarity with technical or sociological themes which many of us take for granted. It’s not that they lack common sense so much as it is they lack common knowledge.

Just my .02.

7

People set themselves on fire quite often, old people don’t always drive poorly, if your blind, you can’t read print isn’t common sense, it begs the question. People eat paste all the time.

So tell me then, what is the difference between common sense and common knowledge. All common sense COULD be is common knowledge. We aren’t born knowing anything. Humans have NO instincts. Everything is taught to us. Even how we think, how we rationalize, how we tackle problems. And not everybody is brought up the same way.

“Common” sense implies that it is widespread. So is the knowledge to change your oil common? Is that common sense? If I have not been taught how to pump gas in my car and somebody tells me to use my “common sense” and figure it out- and I cannot, does that mean I lack common sense? If I go to Guinea and live amongst their people and cannot set a rabbit trap, do I lack common sense? (assuming they have rabbits there)

So are people retards if they don’t know how to properly operate a computer? Or do they just lack the experience needed to figure it out. This gets into the whole learning, development thing. A debate I don’t want to delve into because it covers such tenuous grounds.

However, the point is- There is no common sense, because everything, INCLUDING the way we think, logic, reasoning, etc is taught. Since everybody learns things differently, there can be nothing common about our knowledge.

Since it is apparent you didn’t read the link I provided, I will quote a pertinant part of it-

Common sense becomes this thing people like to throw at you to insult you. They say “I know it, I don’t remember learning it, and it seems blatently obvious, therefore everybody must know it, well, anybody that is smart.”

8

I should clarify on what I mean by instinct:

“An inherited, species-specific stereotyped pattern of pre-programmed behavior that involves a relatively complex pattern of response; generally characterized by less flexibility in adaptability to changes in an environment but greater assurance that a complex pattern of behavior will occur as it is pre-programmed to occur, without variation.”

9

Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen. -Albert Einstein

10

Nice, quote Einstein. That would be an appeal to authority fallacy.

Even so, the point still remains- if it isn’t so common it CANNOT be common sense. If everybody has different “prejudices”, then it isn’t common. Hence there is no common sense- just a bunch of people that have different opinions, ways of thinking, prejudices, etc. No common sense, something else.

11

Oh, come on. Tallayan wasn’t making an argument, but just reporting a point of view that’s appropriate, and citing the person who said it. That’s not an appeal to authority.

But I think you misunderstand the quote anyway. Einstein was saying, common sense is what we call the prejudices we get when we’re young. He meant exactly what you do by it. No common sense as such.

For what it’s worth, I agree with you. I know that the majority of people are heterosexual. I don’t know where I learned this. I imagine that many people would consider it an instance of common sense or common knowledge. Not me, though. Even if someone’s reasoning and observation skills are top notch, maybe they just never thought about it.

12

I have always understood the term “common sense” to refer to the basic information about how a society works, a sort of heuristic guide to a particular society. Common sense is therefore, by this definition, something that different for every society. Since “society” is not a crisp term, “common sense” is likewise fuzzy.

For example, how to fill out a check is “common sense” in certain societies. In other societies, how to hunt game with a spear is “common sense”. What makes it common is the ubiquitous nature of the knowledge within a society; it is not necessarily (and usually isn’t) common amongst numerous societies.

Of course, there are nested levels. There are subcultures where, say, a general knowledge of computers is common sense. This would include numerous overlapping but distinguishable groups. (Say, hacker culture, plus tech support culture, plus cubicle worker drone culture, etc.) For any given datum, there may be several cultures for which it is common sense.

I consider common sense and common knowledge to be not quite synonymous. Rather, common knowledge is a subset of common sense, since common sense (in my view of it) contains not only facts about the world which are shared by a culture or group (common knowledge), but also rules of social interaction that one is often not consciously aware of.

An aside: There are a large number of characteristics common to nearly all human societies. Although my definition of common sense does not address these specifically, one could easily consider the assumption of these characteristics to be truly human “common sense”. Look for Donald E. Brown’s list of human universals.

13

Anyone else have a few concerns over how some of those questions were worded?

Question 1 is a little vague. Does it mean in order to change actions, one must change all of the target’s attitudes? If not, then the explanation given doesn’t make sense.

Question 2 should more clearly refer to “most people” instead of the clumsy “one”, which could lead the reader to misread it as asking a question about himself instead of an abstract average person.

Question 4 is stated far too strongly for the amount of support it is given. A single study is cited, but the conclusion refers sweepingly to “most people” with no caveats or restrictions about what situations, which authorities, or what types of hurt it applies to. The writer has seriously overgeneralized from his cited data.

The answer to Question 5 is so clearly “False” that it makes me wonder why it was asked at all. If some sort of qualifying word were used instead of “always”, it would not have this problem.

Question 8 is hopelessly vague. Opposites attract given what context? If we’re talking about magnetism, the answer is yes. If we’re talking about something else, then something else. Not only that, the explanation of the answer given parses the expression “opposites attract” at such a literal level that it completely misses the meaning of the phrase.

Question 9 admits that the answer is True for some circumstances, but still gives the “official” answer as False. The question should either be reworded, or the answer should be changed.

Well, I could go on, but it seems that the author of those questions has taken some cliches, sayings, urban legends, and over-generalizations, shown that they are not literally true in all possible circumstances, and then concluded that this is evidence against there being common sense.

14

At some point I decided that the advice “use common sense” was bad, since often it means “abide by your cultural prejudices” - essentially what the Einstein quote implies. Rather, I would say we should always be suspicious of appeals to common sense.

While I generally like the site in the link, I agree with BlackKnight that the quiz isn’t the best. After about two questions I suspected that “true” was the answer it was expecting and “false” was the one they regarded as correct, as so often occurs such quizzes. The person writing it should at least vary which answer is correct. In addition, the fact that one can find some common misconceptions doesn’t imply that “common sense” is necessarily useless. On the whole, however, I agree that appeals to common sense are actually pretty useless.

15

Frankly, I think the OP is a little confused about what the definition of common sense entails. Common sense can be defined as “sound practical judgement”.

Merriam Webster says:
Main Entry: common sense
Function: noun
Date: 1535
1 : the unreflective opinions of ordinary people
2 : sound and prudent but often unsophisticated judgment

I checked a few other definitions and nowhere does it say that common sense is meant to be a universal theme that crosses cultures identically. So, why does the OP assume this?
For one thing, Americans and Guineans lead different lives, have many different needs. Setting a rabbit trap is not common in suburban America, hence it does not constitute common sense for your average American.

Fair enough. Now let’s take the example of my learning how to use the internet. Did anyone tell me explicitly “Double Click on Internet Explorer, Type www.randomsite.com in the Address Bar, Click Go, Use the Scroll Bar to browse up and down”? Nope. Nobody did. I was given a computer and told to get on with it. And I did. Could I perhaps have learnt by observation? Nope again. I’m one of those few unfortunate (?) ones to whom the internet was one big surprise: the first time I saw it was the first time I had to use it. So how did I figure things out? Common sense. A series of logical steps that seemed to me the right way to go about things.

‘Intuition’ does not cut it. Intuition implies a lack of rationality and logic, whereas the concept of ‘common sense’ requires these.

As regards the questions in that test, well, I’m a psychology major myself, and I’ve read pretty much all the research studies cited there. Here I’m going to agree with blacknight that many of the questions require re-wording in order to be acceptable in any questionnaire (as you, the OP, will find out once you start dealing with topics like psychometrics and psychological testing). Also, you have to consider the idea that answering 10 questions incorrectly does not mean common sense does not exist. Who says these 10 questions are fully representative of all that is considered to come under the umbrella of ‘common sense’?

16

“Common sense is what tells you the Earth is flat.” - the Principia Discordia

I’ve always found that a nice working definition.

17

Actually the test was not proving or disproving common sense. It was merely offering examples showing that the term common sense is not what is is touted to be. I agree with Blacknight in the regard that they are oversimplified and such. I would think a psychology major would be able to understand that science (psychology for instance), does not PROVE anything, only offers evidence. Obviously the psychology proffessor does not believe that he has proven anything. Only offering examples that he feels will confound the student taking the test and thus learn from it more througouly. Why didn’t you think about that? It’s just common sense… Sheesh.

If a rule has many exceptions that there is no way of telling if certain rules apply or not, then the rule should be pitched. Like the age old I before E except after C BS rule. There are more than a dozen exceptions, and none of them are excluded from the rule for any rational reason. That makes the whole rule break down and become useless.

The exact same rule goes for common sense. If it was only used in subgroups of society to refer to somebody in your own subgroup, Great, go for it! However, when that computer user tells Grandma that she lacks common sense because she cannot figure out how to log on the internet, well it is pretty much useless.

The Op assumes that common sense is cross cultural because it expects to cross subcultural boundries. I obviously cannot speak for EVERY single instance, but drawing an inferance upon the context of every person I have heard use the phrase, I glean that it means just what my OP stated. A knowledge or ability to learn just whatever the hell the person in question “thinks” should be known by everybody.

Oil changing is common sense.

Pumping gas is common sense.

Logging on the internet is common sense.

If your computer is acting funny, it is just common sense to get it checked for a virus.

The list can go on and on, and in every instance, there is no way that any of that stuff is common sensical.

Once again, we are taught how to think, rationalize and adapt to our surroundings. Older people have more difficulty in learning computer related stuff on average. Kids grasp it almost intuitively. It has nothing to do with common sense. The Older people were not brought up around it, and thus did not develop a thinking pattern that easily incorperates it.

Common sense, the way that EVERY SINGLE DAMN person I have heard use it, suggests that certain things should come easy to a person.

I conceed that Common Knowledge is not the same thing. Writing a check isn’t common sense, but in this culture it is common knowledge.
Let me just state this; This is a debate. We are debating whether common sense is a useful term, and thus if there is something to it. (I.E is there such a thing as common sense)
If you disagree, raise points. Sure, the teacher only gave 12 questions, and there may be something that falls under the umbrella of common sense. Apparently it isn’t all that easy because, guess what, NOBODY HAS SUGGESTED ANYTHING THAT HAS. If there were so many things that fell under the header “common sense” dont you think my OP would have been shot down by the millions of things that are truely common sense? How come you didn’t posit some?

In my own observation the people that defend common sense are those that aren’t “book smart”, and feel the need to have some way to justify to themselves that those “book smart” people are no better than them. So they just say “well, they sure are smart, make great grades, have a wonderful life and all, but dag nabbit, they have no common sense.” (I.E they don’t think like me, and everybody thinks like me, but they don’t so they REALLY are not smarter, and thus I feel all warm and fuzzy about myself)

So, what are some instances of common sense? You know, stuff that is actually common?

18

So in other words, because you know enough about computers that clicking things does other things, took one data set and inferred it into another, did some deductive reasoning and used past experiences with other applications that may ahve been similar to you, that it must be that easy for everybody or they are inferior and don’t have common sense.

Lets see, how much of the population owns computers? How many of them are proficient and intelligent enough that the first time they log on the computer they can figure it out rather easy? 15% seems a pretty liberal number. Is 15% common? No… It is RARE, so perhaps you showed a bit of “rare sense” instead of common sense?

19

I don’t think the test has anything to do with common sense, except maybe to show people who believe they can pass a pyschology course by using their common sense that they’re wrong (and there are such people). I don’t even think those statements are examples of “common sense”, more like “common beliefs”.

Common sense, to me is being able to draw an inference from common knowledge. It’s common knowledge in this society that electricity and water don’t mix. Given that common knowledge, it shows a lack of common sense to rest an ordinary radio on the ledge of the bathtub. Given the common knowledge that irons are hot, it shows a lack of common sense to iron clothes while wearing them. Now, if someone rests the radio on the edge of the bathtub, or irons clothing that they are wearing because they don’t have that common knowledge (maybe the person is three years old and hasn’t learned it, or grew up without electricity) , those actions tell nothing about the person’s common sense.

20

There is a working defintion that gives me pause to think.