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By Root 1030 0

“I’m a diehard conservative,” and so on. If that were true, however, then one would expect that people who identify as liberals would tend to espouse the “liberal” perspective on most matters, and that conservatives would espouse a consistently different view. Yet research finds that regardless of whether people identify themselves as liberals or conservatives, what they think about any one issue, like, say, abortion, has relatively little relation to what they believe about other issues, such as the death penalty or illegal immigration. In other words, we have the impression that our particular beliefs are all derived from some overarching philosophy, but the reality is that we arrive at them quite independently, and often haphazardly.15

The same difficulty of reconciling what, individually, appear to be self-evident beliefs shows up even more clearly in the aphorisms that we invoke to make sense of the world. As sociologists are fond of pointing out, many of these aphorisms appear to be direct contradictions of each other. Birds of a feather flock together, but opposites attract. Absence indeed makes the heart grow fonder, but out of sight is out of mind. Look before you leap, but he who hesitates is lost. Of course, it is not necessarily the case that these beliefs are contradictory—because we invoke different aphorisms in different circumstances. But because we never specify the conditions under which one aphorism applies versus another, we have no way of describing what it is that we really think or why we think it. Common sense, in other words, is not so much a worldview as a grab bag of logically inconsistent, often contradictory beliefs, each of which seems right at the time but carries no guarantee of being right any other time.

THE MISUSE OF COMMON SENSE

The fragmented, inconsistent, and even self-contradictory nature of common sense does not generally present a problem in our everyday lives. The reason is that everyday life is effectively broken up into small problems, grounded in very specific contexts that we can solve more or less independently of one another. Under these circumstances, being able to connect our thought processes in a logical manner isn’t really the point. It doesn’t really matter that absence makes the heart grow fonder in one situation, and that out of sight is out of mind in the next. In any given situation we know the point we’re trying to make, or the decision we want to support, and we choose the appropriate piece of commonsense wisdom to apply to it. If we had to explain how all our explanations, attitudes, and commonsense beliefs fit together, we would encounter all kinds of inconsistencies and contradictions. But because our experience of life rarely forces us to perform this task, it doesn’t really matter how difficult it would be.

Where it does start to matter, however, is when we use common sense to solve problems that are not grounded in the immediate here and now of everyday life—problems that involve anticipating or managing the behavior of large numbers of people, in situations that are distant from us either in time or space. This may sound like an unlikely thing to do, but in fact we do it all the time. Whenever we read a newspaper and try to understand events playing out in some foreign country—the Israel-Palestine conflict, the unfolding insurgency in Iraq, or the seemingly endless conflict in Afghanistan—we are implicitly using our commonsense reasoning to infer the causes and explanations of the events we’re reading about. Whenever we form an opinion about financial reform or healthcare policy, we are implicitly using our commonsense reasoning to speculate about how different rules and incentives will affect the various parties’ behavior. And whenever we argue about politics or economics or the law, we are implicitly using our commonsense reasoning to reach conclusions about how society will be affected by whatever policy or proposal is being debated.

In none of these cases are we using our common sense to reason about how we should behave in the here and now. Rather,