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By Root 1108 0

particular have wondered about the place of common sense in understanding the world, with the tide of philosophical opinion going back and forth on the matter of how much respect common sense ought to be given. In brief, the argument seems to have been about the fundamental reliability of experience itself; that is, when is it acceptable to take something—an object, an experience, or an observation—for granted, and when must one question the evidence of one’s own senses? On one extreme were the radical skeptics, who posited that because all experience was, in effect, filtered through the mind, nothing at all could be taken for granted as representing some kind of objective reality. At the other extreme were philosophers like Thomas Reid, of the Scottish Realist School, who were of the opinion that any philosophy of nature ought to take the world “as it is.” Something of a compromise position was outlined in America at the beginning of the ninteenth century by the pragmatist school of philosophy, most prominently William James and Charles Saunders Peirce, who emphasized the need to reconcile abstract knowledge of a scientific kind with that of ordinary experience, but who also held that much of what passes for common sense was to be regarded with suspicion (James 1909, p 193). See Rescher (2005) and Mathisen (1989) for discussions of the history of common sense in philosophy.

7. It should be noted that commonsense reasoning also seems to have backup systems that act like general principles. Thus when some commonsense rule for dealing with some particular situation fails, on account of some previously unencountered contingency, we are not completely lost, but rather simply refer to this more general covering rule for guidance. It should also be noted, however, that attempts to formalize this backup system, most notably in artificial intelligence research, have so far been unsuccessful (Dennett 1984); thus, however it works, it does not resemble the logical structure of science and mathematics.

8. See Minsky (2006) for a discussion of common sense and artificial intelligence.

9. For a description of the cross-cultural Ultimatum game study, see Henrich et al. (2001). For a review of Ultimatum game results in industrial countries, see Camerer, Loewenstein, and Rabin (2003).

10. See Collins (2007). Another consequence of the culturally embedded nature of commonsense knowledge is that what it treats as “facts”—self-evident, unadorned descriptions of an objective reality—often turn out to be value judgments that depend on other seemingly unrelated features of the socio-cultural landscape. Consider, for example, the claim that “police are more likely to respond to serious than non-serious crimes.” Empirical research on the matter has found that indeed they do—just as common sense would suggest—yet as the sociologist Donald Black has argued, it is also the case that victims of crimes are more likely to classify them as “serious” when the police respond to them. Viewed this way, the seriousness of a crime is determined not only by its intrinsic nature—robbery, burglary, assault, etc.—but also by the circumstances of the people who are the most likely to be attended to by the police. And as Black noted, these people tend be highly educated professionals living in wealthy neighborhoods. Thus what seems to be a plain description of reality—serious crime attracts police attention—is, in fact, really a value judgment about what counts as serious; and this in turn depends on other features of the world, like social and economic inequality, that would seem to have nothing to do with the “fact” in question. See Black (1979) for a discussion of the conflation of facts and values. Becker (1998, pp. 133–34) makes a similar point in slightly different language, noting that “factual” statements about individual attributes—height, intelligence, etc.—are invariably relational judgments that in turn depend on social structure (e.g., someone who is “tall” in one context may be short in another; someone who is poor at drawing is not considered