Should Philosophy be Commonsensical?
By: Benjamin Cain
Tags: Philosophy, Theology, Psychology, Society, Life

Commonsense and Authentic Philosophy

There’s no sense in demonizing commonsense or intuition or in being automatically opposed to every intuitive proposition on the assumption that they’re tainted and worthless. We know from cognitive science that there are two main ways in which we can reason: slowly, algorithmically, and logically, on the one hand, or quickly, heuristically, and holistically on the other.

We evolved to make snap decisions to overcome desperate situations and to avoid being slaves to procedure. Sometimes we need to break the mould or sum up our attitude or our total body of knowledge in a flash of insight. In that case, we appeal to intuition, to our gut instinct to get to the bottom of the matter. Without intuition, we wouldn’t survive, if only because we don’t always have time to ponder every facet of a problem. In the real world, we often need to compromise, to cut matters short, to prioritize certain sources of information while giving others short shrift.

However, building up a worldview by lionizing commonsense or deferring, on principle, to intuition on all deep questions would be an egregious dereliction of our intellectual and ethical responsibilities. The analogy here would be with someone who never learns how to think as an adult, but who retains a sense of childlike wonder and naivety without ever questioning her natural impulses. Indeed, Jesus said that those who inherit the kingdom of God are childlike, presumably in being innocent of worldly doubts (Luke 18:15–17).

What, though, is the relation between intuition and commonsense? Intuition, again, is one of those two modes of reasoning, immediate apprehension of what feels like the truth. At its best, when an intuition proves to be correct in hindsight, we call the intuition an insight. Likewise, at its best, intuition can free us from a rut and be instrumental in creative or otherwise practical pursuits, as when we suddenly see a new way of proceeding.

“Commonsense” is defined as sound practical judgment that’s independent of specialized knowledge or training. By not deriving from specialized sources or experts, commonsense is our “normal native intelligence.” In short, commonsense is what the average person would say about a matter if left to his or her devices, without the aid of inside information.

At its best, commonsense pertains indeed to practical decision-making, as when we have to judge whether someone is lying and we trust our gut. At its worst, commonsense is prejudicial and narrow-minded, as in the case of what Stephen Colbert called “truthiness.” This is especially so when the issue isn’t the practical one of what we should do in a situation, but what the facts are in the first place. The intuitions and heuristics that are responsible for our snap judgments evolved hundreds of thousands of years ago to enable us to thrive as hunter-gatherers, not to fathom the nature of the universe.

Here, then, is the crux: philosophy has both practical and theoretical tasks, although both have been largely eclipsed by other fields such as psychiatric therapy and science. Still, for the very general questions that are still in its purview, philosophy deals both with normative issues of how we should live in moral and political terms, and with issues of epistemology, metaphysics, and conceptual analysis that clarify the facts.

Perhaps intuition and commonsense have a respectable role to play on the practical side of philosophy, and they may even be decisive in fulfilling that role. But they seem to have no special authority in the understanding of facts. Indeed, to rely on commonsense in coming to grips with the facts is a barrier to understanding them. Commonsense gives us a rough estimate of how things are, especially in the social world with which we’re most familiar as higher mammals, but amounts to a woeful ignorance of the wider universe of facts.

To rely on commonsense in a philosophical exploration of the facts is to reduce the world to the humanized image that our intuitions evolved to project. It’s like wanting everything to be a nail so you can always use your hammer.

This is sheer human-centred personification of the world, the result being the religious mindset that’s biased our judgment for millennia. We treat the universe as though it were a wider society of minds with whom we can bargain.

As we know from history, natural philosophers and scientists made a mockery of that traditional indulgence in commonsense, as when we learned not only that there are no spirits in the “heavens” of outer space, but that we, too, have brains and mental programs rather than immortal souls. Physics tells us also that the tensed view of time is subjective and illusory, not a fundamental part of nature, contrary to Craig’s commonsense conviction.