Thought Experiment: "Common Sense"

Long thought to be a parlor game for philosophical types, this idea should be discussed much more widely, if only to see how..."common" common sense is. Lemme try 'n explain.

What is the OG on about now? It’s just common sense to think about common sense. Or is it?

[tl;dr¹: Using the term “common sense” is just me bullshitting myself and others; the plain (delightful) fact is we’re just gonna have to cultivate our thinking more.]

Three reasons impelled me to address this idea:

1. The seemingly sudden and swift decline of the unique self, the weirdo personality honestly derived, the desire to speak one’s mind without regard to Herd Hearsay and “I Done Seen It Onna Internet”-mind.

2. That this decline has been driven by algorithms and dopamine-addiction to screens, and the increasingly common fear that one’s individuality is seeping away, kinda like the Cheshire Cat’s body, but being glued to screens all day will eat that smile up too. I think the popularity of Severance and the newer show Pluribus (which I have not seen but have read quite a lot about), and my reading of a thousand testimonies in disparate places about the personal jihad of trying to wrest a human life away from Tik-TokFacebookXitterBlueskyInstagramLinkedIn, etc. also inform this query. Are our “selves” imperiled as of 2006, or 2014, or whenever everyone was suddenly obsessed with being “liked” by distant strangers?

3. This question should be wide-open to everyone. If you notice all your friends are agreeing about what “common sense” is (it’s highly likely it’s what you and your friends think it is), the only game-rule would be: name those who don’t seem to agree with you and at least one of you pretend you’re one of them, acting as an advocate for the people who disagree with you. In other words, temporarily pretend you’re one of Them. This should involve some acting and will be good for major laffs. Follow this up by having a good faith back ‘n forth about why those who don’t have “common sense” maybe think like they do, in that weird wrong way that’s not like the way you think. If you do this with aforementioned good faith while entertaining a little bit of your famous “open-mindedness” there’s a chance it will put you in a slight altered state of consciousness.

So: what “is” common sense? As of the date I’m writing this, I see it as a species of bullshit rhetoric that’s appealing to people who don’t want to think: what we already think about X,Q,Z, and R is just “common sense.” No more need to think about it. In this, it seems a kissin’ cousin to “human nature.” It bears a family resemblance to Naive Realism. Those Americans who still think little things like seceding from Britain and getting ourselves a Constitution ratified was a good idea will give Thomas Paine’s agitprop a bye for this round.

Some history and examples and Just Plain Fun ensues:

Giambattista Vico (1668-1744), arguably the father of the modern social sciences, wrote this line in his New Science: “Common sense is an unreflecting judgement shared by an entire social order, people, nation, or even all humankind.”²

Bertrand Russell had a line on this (because of course he did): “Common sense, do what it will, cannot avoid being surprised occasionally. The object of science is to spare it this emotion and create mental habits which shall be in such close accord with the habits of the world that nothing shall be unexpected.”³

Alfred Korzybski, in his 1921 book Manhood of Humanity seems to think that “common sense” is a very difficult problem - a Hard Problem - and he thinks an understanding of our deep history must play a big part in decoding what this strange beast “common sense” might consist of:

Such I take to be the counsel of wisdom - the simple wisdom of sober common sense. To ascertain the salient facts of our immense human past and then to explain them in terms of their causes and conditions is not an easy task. It is an exceedingly difficult one, requiring the labor of many men, of many generations; but it must be performed; for it is only in proportion as we learn to know the great facts of our human past and their causes that we are enabled to understand our human present, for the present is the child of the past; and it is only in proportion as we thus learn to understand the present that we can face the future with confidence and competence. Past, Present, Future - these can not be understood singly and separately - they are welded together indissolubly as one.⁴

In this “sober common sense” I don’t see anything “simple;” rather: the neo-Darwinian paradigm was just getting off the ground. He published this book in 1921, and in 1925 schoolteacher John T. Scopes was put on trial for teaching Evolution. I’m betting that somewhere in the transcript William Jennings Bryan argued that we could not have descended from apes was just “common sense.”

A funny thing happened along the way from Korzybski’s desiderata to our present time: History got vastly complex and entangled. Just hang with academic Amy J. Elias here when she’s explicating Linda Hutcheons’s poetics of postmodernism and history, as found in an essay about Thomas Pynchon’s uses of history:

{…] postmodern fiction questions the assumption that the writing of history is transparent and neutral by asserting that all values are context dependent and ideologically inflected, contests notions of history’s teleological closure and developmental continuity, and tries to demonstrate that all historical accounts are emplotted in the manner of fiction rather than merely recorded in the manner of science.⁵

Lest we assume the long hard slog of encircling some sort of philosophical anthropology derived from something like Neuroscience and Evolutionary Psychology…this uhhhh…seems like too tall an order to find out what “common sense” could really mean…and hey: maybe let’s get hard-headed and think like a Mathematician in order to close in on our prey. But then, in 1931, the same year as Gödels’ Incompleteness Theorem:

One of the chief services which mathematics has rendered the human race in the past century is to put “common sense” where it belongs, on the topmost shelf next to the dusty canister labeled “discarded nonsense.”⁶

George Lakoff the cognitive scientist wrote this about the claim of “common sense”:

One of the things most studied in cognitive science is common sense. Common sense cannot be taken for granted as a given. Whenever a cognitive scientist hears the words, “It’s just common sense,” his ears perk up and he knows there’s something to be studied in detail and depth - something that needs to be understood. Nothing is “just” common sense. Common sense has a conceptual structure that is usually unconscious. That’s what makes it “common sense.” It is the commonsensical quality of political discourse that makes it imperative that we study it.⁷

I don’t know about you, but by now my head is spinning and I feel like whatever common sense I had before I started writing this spew has long circled the drain and is headed straight for the Pacific Ocean. I muddle onwards!..

The phenomenological sociologists I’ve studied might call this “unconscious” aspect of common sense a variation on the “seen but not noted” world. It’s the invisible or not-noted stuff that seems ultra-powerful, mostly for being not noted. Or that it’s unseen. Unquestioned. I love anything like this because it takes me out of myself while I’m studying it, kinda like a mild psychedelic drug trip. Here, I’m tellin’ ya who I “am,” in case ya didn’t know. Let’s face it, to be interested in such things is just common sense.⁸

The worldly-universalist reader might immediately jump to knowledge of the social worlds of non-Anglo peoples found throughout the world and how their “common sense” seems wildly different than any of ours, as recorded by embedded cultural anthropologists since at least the early roarin’ 20th century. In E. Doyle McCarthy’s Knowledge As Culture: The New Sociology of Knowledge, there’s a fine discussion about the origins of the term “ideology” and by Napoleon’s time it seemed to be a battle between the eggheads and the owning class of the rich and their politicians:

Such a description brings to mind C. Wright Mills’s “men of affairs,” those sober citizens who parade themselves as hard-headed realists, epitomizing what Richard Hartland calls the Anglo-Saxon variety of common sense: “Anglo-Saxons have the feeling of having their feet very firmly planted when they plant them upon the seemingly solid ground of individual tastes and opinions, or upon the seemingly hard facts of material nature.” Accordingly, ideologists do not base their ideas on experience, but resort instead to ideas and deceits - to ideologies.⁹

One of my great intellectual loves, Robert Anton Wilson, loved to riff on “common sense” throughout his writing career, c.1959-2007. Here’s a line from an article he wrote in New Libertarian, c.1977: “Common sense” is…

[…] the body of hominid (or primate) prejudice that is so widespread that only philosophers, mathematicians, physicists, and other eccentrics ever contradict it.¹⁰

In a discussion about the flux of individual perception and experts and authorities refereeing over what thoughts and apparent sense perceptions and observations/abstractions are allowable and which reports must be damned, Wilson wrote:

The world is forever spawning Damned Things - things that are neither tree nor shrub, fish nor fowl, black nor white - and the categorical thinker can only regard the spiky and buzzing world of sensory fact as a profound insult to his card-index system of classifications. Worst of all are the facts which violate “common sense,” that dreary bog of Stone Age prejudice and muddy inertia.¹¹

Perhaps better (or worse, depending on how much you think we can nail down this gnome “common sense”), RAW, in a long excursion on various epistemologies in the foxy 20th century, cites P.W. Bridgman, also a fave of Korzybski:

Operationalism, created by Nobel physicist Percy W. Bridgman, attempts to deal with the “common sense” objections to Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, and owes a great deal to pragmatism and instrumentalism. Bridgman explicitly pointed out that “common sense” derives unknowingly from some tenets of ancient philosophy and speculation - particularly Platonic Idealism and Aristotelian “essentialism” - and that this philosophy assumes many axioms that now appear untrue or unprovable. Common sense, for instance, assumes that the statement, “The job was finished in five hours” can contain both absolute truth and objectivity. Operationalism, however, following Einstein (and pragmatism) insists that the only meaningful statement about that measurement would read, “When I shared the same inertial system as the workers, my watch indicated an interval of five hours from start to finish of the job.”¹²

Because you haven’t heard enough from RAW here: “You are walking down the street, and you see an old friend approaching. You are astonished and delighted, because you thought he had moved to another city. Then the figure comes closer and you realize your perception-gamble (as transactionalists call it) had been in error: the person, as he passes, is clearly registered as a stranger. This does not alarm you, because it happens to everybody, and daily ‘common sense,’ without using the technical terms of quantum physics and transactional psychology, recognizes that perception and inference are probabilistic transactions between brain and incoming signals.”¹³

Now I gotta get outta here ‘cuz Lulu is ringin’ the dinner bell, so I’ll add to this flummery by citing a living philosopher, Eric Schwitzgebel, who was at UC Riverside last I saw. Prof. Schwitzgebel argues that all famous philosophers, when arguing about metaphysics, all sound “crazy” at some point. Why? ‘Cuz “there’s no way to develop an ambitious, broad-ranging, self-consistent metaphysical system without doing serious violence to common sense somewhere. It’s just impossible.” But: “common sense”, Schwitzgebel asserts, is an “acceptable guide to everyday practical interactions in the world. But there’s no reason to think it would be a good guide to the fundamental structure of the universe.” To bolster this last thought he cites Relativity and Quantum Mechanics.¹⁴

And here I stand, with Schwitzgebel, not in the same inertial frame as me right at the moment, but close enough, the Professor is.

Thought Experiment results: I have no idea what the fuck I’m talking about when I mention “common sense.”

(Site logo artwork done by Bobby Campbell)

1. I realize my articles are usually longer than what most writers do here, but if “tl;dr” why are we reading my Substack, anyway? Move on to the next person’s thing! There’s a lot of shorter good stuff out there. I don’t wanna be a bring-down.

2. New Science, Vico, trans. by Dave Marsh, Penguin ed, section #142. Vico’s “unreflecting” is one of my favorite takes on this topic of “common sense.” Nota bene the ballsy gall of Vico to claim this for an entire people! No wonder James Joyce loved Vico so much. Later, the Frankfurt School tended to see similarly that common sense was for common thinkers, and one of them called common sense “the spontaneous ideology of everyday life.” - see The Dialectical Imagination, Martin Jay, p.60.

3. found in Science and Sanity, Korzybski, 4th ed, p.491. This outlook on what science ought to be able to do for us was shared by Korzybski, and feels like “scientism” now. We need to get to the point where nothing is unexpected (fat chance, Bertie, I say to you in 2025!), and that poor ol’ “common sense” is no longer surprised or caught off guard. But we know now we will always be caught off guard with astonishment, Lord Russell. It shall not cease! The utopian ideals for critical thinking and rational technological utopianism by so many great thinkers in the first half of the rollicking 20th century feels like 500 years ago, and not merely 100, at least to me. The scientific millenarianism of folks like Russell and Korzybski - that we’re in for a future of justice, peace, prosperity and end of hunger, war, and ignorance, possibly the end of death - is a world long lost, but then again a lot of these dudes were feelin’ it then. Some sort of Golden Age will return, etc. Korzybski knew of the social powers of science and mathematical thought but also warned, as I mention in the next footnote, that we gotta get our act together as homo sap or we’re cooked. Hack language thoroughly: this we must do in order to get to some sorta Engineer’s Dream Garden. It seemed like common sense to them. At the time. Wittgenstein thought common sense was “nothing more than a web of linguistic practices common to a certain community.” Or at least that’s Richard Rorty’s reading of Wittgenstein. See Take Care of Freedom and the Truth Will Take Care of Itself, p.78. Rorty himself thought common sense was part of the workings of philosophers who took pleasure in linking new, weird ideas with old ones, an idea that of course I would favor too.

4. Manhood of Humanity, Korzybski, pp. 171-172. He wrote this book in the wake of the Great War, having been in it, and injured. A Polish Count who spoke five languages, his main thesis at this point was that humanity needs to grow the fuck up ASAP. We did not. He saw the 1939-1945 war and kept working to help humans understand how language can lead us astray, and very many ways to hack language so you don’t keep acting like a damned ape. Among those writers who were influenced by him: Neil Postman, Robert Anton Wilson, Robert Heinlein, Alan Watts, Fritjof Capra, William S. Burroughs and many others. That the physical sciences were just beginning their cultural ascendance in the West need not be remarked upon, but by the early 21st century, polymathic scientist Jared Diamond argued that too many brilliant scientists had gotten too caught up in the details of some “fanciful” hypothesis that they really should think with more “common sense.” See This Idea Is Brilliant, (2018), ed. John Brockman, pp.221-224.

5. Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon, pp.124-125. When you actually get into a grokduel with others over “common sense” it might be a good idea to rehearse some of these phrases to pull out and use to throw your interlocutors off their game, and win points:

Your pal: So I say common sense is a mere historical contingency as used by diverse groups in a class struggle.

You: Yes, yes, but the notion of teleological closure implied within any argument for common sense contains a suspect developmental continuity and conceals, like, ya know? how history is written more like fiction, with emplottments and…

Another pal; Where are you getting this shit? Pass the bong over here, please.

Weird roommate: Yea dude, you’re being ideologically inflected bigger ‘n shit. Anyone seen my Marley CD?

6. Mathematics: Queen of the Sciences, Eric Temple Bell. (1931). I found this quote in Robert Anton Wilson’s novel The Universe Next Door, p.68, original paperback ed. Bell was a student of Cassius Keyser, who was a close friend of Korzybski. Bell’s work influenced John Nash and the prover of Fermat’s Last Theorem, Andrew Wiles. It seems highly likely that “The map is not the territory”, usually attributed to Korzybski, was derived from Bell. When Bell taught at CalTech, Korzybski lived nearby and they traveled in some of the same circles.

7. Moral Politics: What Conservatives Know That Liberals Don’t, G. Lakoff, p.4. My copy is an early version of the book, and the subtitle was changed to How Liberals and Conservatives Think, possibly because the earlier version might lead you to think this was another Frank Luntz-type book? Psychonaut-intellectual Dale Pendell asked his mentor Norman O. Brown about common sense and NOB replied, “Common sense never interested me.” See Walking With Nobby, p.151 The context was a conversation in which William James comes up and Pendell says James has a certain common sense, then NOB says William James didn’t turn him on, then the above line about common sense, then NOB says this was a Freud problem: Freud and his crew tried to make psychoanalysis common sense and to NOB that was a mistake. Lakoff’s bete noir (or one of ‘em: Chomsky’s way up there), Steven Pinker, asserted that common sense is not in operation when a decision must be made between two competitors whose interests are partly shared. See How The Mind Works, p.409

8. No, it ain’t.

9. Knowledge As Culture: The New Sociology of Knowledge, McCarthy, p.32 (Routledge, 1996) My favorite model of ideology is from Mannheim, who in the 1920s thought we all have ideologies which are based in our “situatedness” in the social scheme, or Standorsgebundenheit. Further, he emphasized a “relationism” that we all have to the truth, though no one owns the truth. There are those who are more free and open to exploration within other ideologies, and Mannheim thought they were the relatively unattached stratum of intellectuals, writers and artists. These people had a clearer view of the landscape and more sophisticated takes on “knowledge” “the truth” and “common sense.” We can safely assume the better discourses around “common sense” would come from these types of thinkers. They will not come from C. Wright Mills’s “men of affairs.”

10. The exact date/issue currently eludes me and I found this quote with something else I’d scribbled on a 4x6 notecard on “common sense” and the “self.” Similarly, Marshall McLuhan supposedly has something in common with William Blake regarding common sense in that they both thought of human touch as the “sensus communis” and, at least for McLuhan, touch reintegrates our sense ratios which were thrown out of balance by various forms of media and their effects on the nervous system. Presumably we need this now more than ever, but I may have been stoned. This from a notecard fragment that looks written in the mood of ephemerality and possibly after waking from a dream. Sorry I even mentioned it.

11. Email To The Universe, p. 179, Hilaritas Press ed, p.169 in New Falcon ed. “Damned Things” is a nod to Charles Fort, a major influence on Wilson’s philosophy of science. The quoted passage is from an essay, “Damnation By Definition,” which RAW traces back to his 1964 unpublished book, Authority and Submission. Note the term “prejudice” again here. RAW’s deep study of perception informed his reading in General Semantics and led him to think that we literally don’t notice substantial parts of the world that are right in front of our faces, because our brains have already decided what’s “real” or worth paying attention to. This idea has gained enormous ground in the neurosciences since 1964.

12. Quantum Psychology: How Brain Software Programs You and Your World, Robert Anton Wilson, pp. xxi-xxii, Hilaritas Press ed; pp.18-19 New Falcon ed. You wondered if Einstein would show up in “common sense” didn’t you? Well here he is. Again: steal at least one idea here for your lively conversation about common sense:

Your friend Thaddeus: I remember some writer saying common sense was just some prejudice coming out of a dreary stone age bog or some shit.

You: Yes. Let’s not forget to mention our inertial frames when making any statement involving a claim of space-time, as Einstein would urge us. Man, this Unicorn Poop is da bomb!

(Silky Sylvia walks in from another Substack screed): What’re you guys talkin’ about?

13. Natural Law: Or: Don’t Put a Rubber on Your Willy & Other Writings From a Natural Outlaw, Wilson, pp.72-73, Hilaritas Press ed; p.59 original Loompanics ed. Man, this “common sense” thing is gettin’ out in the weeds, eh?

14. Philosophy at 3 a.m: Questions and Answers with 25 Philosophers, ed. Richard Marshall (2014), Oxford U. Press, p.39.