tourbot: Perhaps, but that is semantics. We don’t have a regularly used term like personal sense, and indeed as InquisitiveIdiot pointed out, there is enough common knowledge that using common instead of personal in the term “common sense” is safe enough.
I can safely assume that the vast majority of the people I see on the street know a lot of the same things I do about regular everyday things. Thus, even though my definition more technically could be called personal sense, we can use it in the same way for common sense because it really doesn’t change much. Once we start getting into specifics of who knows what and how much, the argument becomes far too demanding and leaves us with an impossible task. I don’t think anyone needs to be that picky, unless they eventually want to have a heart attack.
Epithemus seems to be of the opinion that the world must be amenable to objective arguments and rigorous definitions, else any sort of function is hopeless.
Since it is my belief (see my first definition) that common sense is a mishmash of aquired rules and associations that we learn, for common sense to have an objective definition it must have an objective creation, which it doesn’t. Epithemus then argues that common sense is therefore worthless and should be done away with. I counter that common sense (and its formation) has a very noble purpose, that of teaching children how to be adults, thus refuting his argument.
In short it is different, but still applicable. Unfortunately, I can’t think of a term for the formation of common sense apart from "larnin’ " as in “Yeah! Hurts to touch the stove, huh? That’ll larn ya!”
I still “feel” that there is something wrong with such a defintion termed so losely, but I think I have come to the limit of my abilities, I have posted my problems with it and gone as far as I can at my current level of understanding of the world. Am I pigheaded for still believing that common sense is meaningless after such intelligent arguments against it? I don’t know, but I have not been conviced, yet pretty much lost the debate. Perhas at a later level of development of my hopefully budding intelligence I can come back here and put forth a better debate.