Wednesday, May 13, 2009

Common Sense

…and I’m not talking about the pamphlet written by Thomas Paine (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Sense_(pamphlet) )

We’ve all heard it before “common sense isn’t really all that common”, but what I always wonder is the “why”.

  • Why is it so uncommon now a days to have people without any common sense walk around the world?
  • Why is common sense called common sense if its not very common?

Now a quick search on the net will turn up many websites and definitions. For people who don’t know what common sense is here are a couple of those definitions:

  1. common sense reasoning reasoning on the basis of common knowledge, as opposed to purely logical reasoning, or reasoning that depends solely on the meanings of words. A purely logical inference might be from If it is Tuesday, Sam is in London and It is Tuesday to the conclusion Sam is in London. An example of common sense reasoning might be the inference that if someone asks for a phone book it is because they want to look up a number, and make a phone call
  2. "Common sense" in philosophy has two general meanings:
    1. a sense of things being common to other things
    2. a sense of things common to humanity
  3. commonsense knowledge is the collection of facts and information that an ordinary person is expected to know

Really the one “common sense” that I am referring to is the “commonsense knowledge” as this is the one I feel is lacking in today's society.

So what is the point of this blog, you ask.

I just want to point out and put to the forefront common sense in hopes the people who are lacking in it will take a closer look at themselves and work on gaining both a better understanding of themselves, and why they are lacking in the sense that is so common.

~Megs

The moment we fully and vitally realise who and what we are,
we then begin to build our own World even as God builds his.
  - Ralph Waldo Trine, "In Tune with the Infinite", 1897

1. http://www.essex.ac.uk/linguistics/clmt/MTbook/HTML/node98.html

2.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_sense

3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_sense_knowledge

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