© Chris Port, 2011
I overheard a stupid person a few months ago. They were talking about common sense. I bit my lip. I suspect I am exactly the kind of person they would say lacked common sense. They would be right. Here is why.
Philosophy For The Hard of Understanding (1)
‘Common sense’: the irrational belief that a false premise is true while a sound argument is false. For example, it was ‘common sense’ for most of human history that the sun went round the earth. This is demonstrably wrong and always has been with a little more thought and argument.
The fact that an obviously false belief was held for so long, and that intelligent people were burned to death for pointing out the slightly less obvious, was more to do with politics than logic. The real meaning of ‘common sense’ is local prejudice. Apart from a few tautologies like ‘pain hurts’, and a few platitudes about people’s general dislike of death and taxes, common sense differs depending on time, place and dominant ideology (political bullying or mass prejudice).
However, despite these fairly obvious objections, poorly educated, lazy thinking or frightened people still insist that ‘common sense’ carries more force than intellectual argument. They are, of course, right...
If enough people repeat a prejudice often enough then it becomes fact simply as a self-fulfilling prophecy. See Nazi Germany’s solution to the ‘Jewish Problem’. Intellectuals could (and, indeed, did) make the slightly more complex observation that it was the Nazis who were the problem rather than Jewish people, but this didn’t get them very far - in most cases, only about as far as Southern Poland...
If enough people repeat a prejudice often enough then it becomes fact simply as a self-fulfilling prophecy. See Nazi Germany’s solution to the ‘Jewish Problem’. Intellectuals could (and, indeed, did) make the slightly more complex observation that it was the Nazis who were the problem rather than Jewish people, but this didn’t get them very far - in most cases, only about as far as Southern Poland...
Only a few years ago these words would have been seen by many as common sense. Now they seem slightly dangerous. I wonder why?
If you have any love of learning, please watch this. Sir Ken Robinson. One of my gurus when I was at Central. Everything I was taught to bring to education. Everything that our system doesn’t let us do at the moment...
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