Common Sense Statement

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A Common Sense Statement is a statement that represents a common sense belief.



References

2020

  • (Fang, 2020) ⇒ Fang Fang. (2020). “Wuhan Diary.” Bentang Pustaka.
    • QUOTE:
      • Common sense tells us that as long as people exist, disease will always coexist with us. And the same holds true for our social lives — as long as there are people, there will always be those diseased people (what I mean is those ethically corrupt boneheads) living among us.
      • They know that those cadres who go around giving speeches on political education, but who never take concrete action are utterly useless. We refer to them as people who live off the labor of their mouths. And they certainly know that a society that lacks common sense and fails to pursue the facts as they present themselves, not only ends up harming people through words, but can actually result in the loss of human lives....
      • … Only when you understand common sense will you be able to truly understand how to take care of practical matters.
      • …The problem is that your so-called humanistic spirit hasn’t allowed you to think about things from someone else’s perspective. If you did, then you would have taken all this into consideration already.... Adhering to the principles of humanism is the most basic and fundamental type of common sense.

2015

  • (Wikipedia, 2015) ⇒ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/common_sense Retrieved:2015-7-26.
    • Common sense is a basic ability to perceive, understand, and judge things, which is shared by ("common to") nearly all people, and can be reasonably expected of nearly all people without any need for debate. [1] The everyday understanding of what common sense is derives from philosophical discussion, involving several European languages. Related terms in other languages include Latin , Greek (koinē aísthēsis), and French and idée reçue, but these are not straightforward translations in all contexts. Similarly in English, there are different shades of meaning, implying more or less education and wisdom: "good sense" is sometimes seen as equivalent to "common sense", and sometimes not. [2] "Common sense" has at least two specifically philosophical meanings. One is a capability of the animal soul (Greek psukhē) proposed by Aristotle, which enables different individual senses to collectively perceive the characteristics of physical things such as movement and size, which all physical things have in different combinations, allowing people and other animals to distinguish and identify physical things. This common sense is distinct from basic sensory perception and from human rational thinking, but cooperates with both. The second special use of the term is Roman-influenced and is used for the natural human sensitivity for other humans and the community. [3] Just like the everyday meaning, both of these refer to a type of basic awareness and ability to judge which most people are expected to share naturally, even if they can not explain why. All these meanings of "common sense", including the everyday one, are inter-connected in a complex history and have evolved during important political and philosophical debates in modern western civilisation, notably concerning science, politics and economics. [4] The interplay between the meanings has come to be particularly notable in English, as opposed to other western European languages, and the English term has become international. [5] In modern times the term "common sense" has frequently been used for rhetorical effect, sometimes pejorative, and sometimes appealed to positively, as an authority. It can be negatively equated to vulgar prejudice and superstition, or on the contrary it is often positively contrasted to them as a standard for good taste and as the source of the most basic axioms needed for science and logic. This began with Descartes' criticism of it, and what came to be known as the dispute between “rationalism” and “empiricism”. In the opening line of one his most famous books, Discourse on Method, he established the most common modern meaning, and its controversies, when he stated that everyone has a similar and sufficient amount of common sense (bon sens), but it is rarely used well. Therefore a skeptical logical method described by Descartes needs to be followed and common sense should not be overly relied upon. [6] In the ensuing 18th century Enlightenment, common sense came to be seen more positively as the basis for modern thinking. It was contrasted to metaphysics, which was, like Cartesianism, associated with the ancien régime. Thomas Paine's pamphlet Common Sense has been described as the most influential political pamphlet of the 18th century affecting both the American and French revolutions. Today, the concept of common sense, and how it should best be used, remains linked to many of the most perennial topics in epistemology and ethics, with special focus often being upon the philosophy of the modern social sciences.
  1. Merriam-Webster gives: "sound and prudent judgment based on a simple perception of the situation or facts." [1], Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionary. The Cambridge Dictionary defines it as, "the basic level of practical knowledge and judgment that we all need to help us live in a reasonable and safe way".[2], Cambridge Dictionaries Online. say that "common sense consists of knowledge, judgement, and taste which is more or less universal and which is held more or less without reflection or argument". C.S. wrote that what common sense "often means" is "the elementary mental outfit of the normal man".
  2. For example, Thomas Reid contrasted common sense and good sense to some extent. See , page 340.
  3. The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary of 1973 gives 4 meanings of common sense: (1) An archaic meaning is "An internal sense which was regarded as the common bond or centre of the five senses"; (2) "Ordinary, normal, or average understanding" without which a man would be "foolish or insane" (3) "The general sense of mankind, or of a community" (two sub-meanings of this are good sound practical sense and general sagacity) (4) A philosophical meaning, the "faculty of primary truths".
  4. See the body of this article concerning for example Descartes, Hobbes, Adam Smith, and so on. Thomas Paine's pamphlet named "Common Sense" was an influential publishing success during the period leading up to the American revolution.
  5. See for example , page 282; and : "today the Anglo-Saxon concept prevails almost everywhere".
  6. Part I of the Discourse on Method. NOTE: The term in French is "bon sens" sometimes translated as "good sense". The opening lines in English are

    "Good Sense is, of all things among men, the most equally distributed; for every one thinks himself so abundantly provided with it, that those even who are the most difficult to satisfy in everything else, do not usually desire a larger measure of this quality than they already possess. And in this it is not likely that all are mistaken: the conviction is rather to be held as testifying that the power of judging aright and of distinguishing Truth from Error, which is properly what is called Good Sense or Reason, is by nature equal in all men; and that the diversity of our opinions, consequently, does not arise from some being endowed with a larger share of Reason than others, but solely from this, that we conduct our thoughts along different ways, and do not fix our attention on the same objects. For to be possessed of a vigorous mind is not enough; the prime requisite is rightly to apply it. The greatest minds, as they are capable of the highest excellencies, are open likewise to the greatest aberrations; and those who travel very slowly may yet make far greater progress, provided they keep always to the straight road, than those who, while they run, forsake it."

2011

  • http://www.cyc.com/faqs/what-do-you-mean-common-sense
    • As a rule of thumb, commonsense is the knowledge we all have but it not necessarily recorded in reference books explicitly. For example, it is somewhat difficult to find an encyclopedia or dictionary that says that when a bowl is inverted, its contents run out. In addition to the broadly applicable information that is found in reference books, Cyc has many hand entered facts required to understand the assumptions that underlie human discourse. Commonsense representation and reasoning in the Cyc Knowledge Base has the goal of avoiding the brittleness observed when scaling up typical expert systems to include more knowledge. Cyc is engineered to eventually have a suitable representation for the full range of human expression, so that expert knowledge bases can be created by extending from the Cyc upper and middle ontology. Our methodology assumes that representing new knowledge is much easier when a large body of general purpose knowledge is already present. Cyc uses inheritance hierarchies within its major object types (e.g. terms, relationships and contexts) to concisely represent knowledge.