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Common Sense


Vladimir

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CommonSense.jpg

How often it is that things are reduced to a matter of 'common sense'. It is usually used as a synonym for 'obvious', but its use goes much deeper than that, attempting to stigmatise the one supposedly lacking this sense and brush aside anything more nuanced as intellectual claptrap that flies in the face of what the common man knows to be true. But how does he know it?

Almost by definition common sense is unanalysed, unconsidered assumption, learned by assertion from past generations and peers. It is that which is so obvious to the holder that to question it is to step outside the realms of reality and make yourself worthy of little more than ridicule: it is the essence of something being true because it is perceived as being true. Already we can begin to see the problems inherent to it: it puts the cart before the horse, taking the conclusion before the facts.

Of course, there are times when it can be used as an appropriate shorthand -- if you walk off a ledge you will fall; if you touch boiling water you will burn; if you don't drink you will thirst. These are things that are all easily and constantly verified through thousands of experiments; they are things experienced by us all in common and with no secondary interpretation open to them. In this way they can legitimately be said to be common sense since they are the absolute lowest level of common experience from which everything else is based. However, we can also recognise that this is not true because it is common sense but because it is scientific -- repeatable experiments confirm the predictions of the hypothesis. Nevertheless it is the scientific method inherent to these most base levels of understanding that give the invocation of common sense such power, and it is this power that scrupulous politicians, in the absence of scientific argument, come to rely on.

The problem with common sense is that it is such a big fish in such a small pond that it has to constantly try and break out into larger and more important areas. Not content with its dominance of daily axioms it demands a place in political and historical circles, and it is here that it begins to flounder. While an "unanalysed, unconsidered assumption" may hold in cases of self-evident truths, it does less well in the complex field of empirical-theoretical analysis. Indeed, this is true to such an extent that in my experience the common sense of politics and history is almost universally demonstrated to be wrong by actual scientific inquiry. This is because it is far from the repeatable experiments of of daily common experience that it is instead forced to rely on long chains of assumptions and anecdotes taken from those around it. Indeed, it is flawed to such an extent that the more complex an area becomes the more versions of common sense it produces, inevitably ending in self-contradiction.

In this way common sense goes from being scientific to being the worst kind of circular logic. While the facts remain basic, common sense is capable of witnessing the truth of the situation; but when the facts become more complex and open to debate common sense is forced to make an assumption about the truth, and so it becomes: this is common sense because it is true, this is true because it is common sense -- a closed loop that denies contrary opinion and refuses evidence.

It is in this way that any appeal to common sense in political or historical matters immediately fails to meet the standard. Beyond the most basic of self-evidents the reasoning of 'because it is' can no longer be considered legitimate or justified. Instead we must replace the belief in common sense with a belief in the scientific motto "Question Everything." Only when politicians and historians learn to live by this new motto will they be able to look the facts in the face and come to an objective, scientific conclusion.

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