page_title: Common sense
section_title: Aristotelian
hierarchical_section_title: Common sense / Aristotelian
caption_attribution_description: Ibn Sina (Avicenna)
context_page_description: Common sense is sound practical judgement concerning everyday matters, or a basic ability to perceive, understand, and judge that is shared by nearly all people.
  The first type of common sense, good sense, can be described as "the knack for seeing things as they are, and doing things as they ought to be done". The second type is sometimes described as folk wisdom, "signifying unreflective knowledge not reliant on specialized training or deliberative thought." The two types are intertwined, as the person who has common sense is in touch with common-sense ideas, which emerge from the lived experiences of those commonsensical enough to perceive them.
  In a psychological context, Smedslund defines common sense as "the system of implications shared by the competent users of a language" and notes, "A proposition in a given context belongs to common sense if and only if all competent users of the language involved agree that the proposition in the given context is true and that its negation is false."
  The everyday understanding of common sense derives from historical philosophical discussion involving several European languages.
context_section_description: The origin of the term is in the works of Aristotle. The best-known case is De Anima Book III, chapter 1, especially at line 425a27. The passage is about how the animal mind converts raw sense perceptions from the five specialized sense perceptions, into perceptions of real things moving and changing, which can be thought about. According to Aristotle's understanding of perception, each of the five senses perceives one type of "perceptible" or "sensible" which is specific (ἴδια, idia) to it. For example, sight can see colour. But Aristotle was explaining how the animal mind, not just the human mind, links and categorizes different tastes, colours, feelings, smells and sounds in order to perceive real things in terms of the "common sensibles" (or "common perceptibles"). In this discussion, "common" (κοινή, koiné) is a term opposed to specific or particular (idia). The Greek for these common sensibles is tá koiná (τά κοινᾰ́, lit.  ''that which is common to many''), which means shared or common things, and examples include the oneness of each thing, with its specific shape and size and so on, and the change or movement of each thing. Distinct combinations of these properties are common to all perceived things.
  In this passage, Aristotle explained that concerning these koiná (such as movement) we already have a sense, a "common sense" or sense of the common things (aísthēsis koinḕ), which does not work by accident (κᾰτᾰ́ σῠμβεβηκός, katá sumbebēkós). And there is no specific (idéā) sense perception for movement and other koiná, because then we would not perceive the koiná at all, except by accident. As examples of perceiving by accident Aristotle mentions using the specific sense perception vision on its own to see that something is sweet, or to recognize a friend by their distinctive color. Lee (2011, p. 31) explains that "when I see Socrates, it is not insofar as he is Socrates that he is visible to my eye, but rather because he is coloured". So the normal five individual senses do sense the common perceptibles according to Aristotle (and Plato), but it is not something they necessarily interpret correctly on their own. Aristotle proposes that the reason for having several senses is in fact that it increases the chances that we can distinguish and recognize things correctly, and not just occasionally or by accident. Each sense is used to identify distinctions, such as sight identifying the difference between black and white, but, says Aristotle, all animals with perception must have "some one thing" that can distinguish black from sweet. The common sense is where this comparison happens, and this must occur by comparing impressions (or symbols or markers; σημεῖον, sēmeîon, 'sign, mark') of what the specialist senses have perceived. The common sense is therefore also where a type of consciousness originates, "for it makes us aware of having sensations at all." And it receives physical picture imprints from the imaginative faculty, which are then memories that can be recollected.
  The discussion was apparently intended to improve upon the account of Aristotle's friend and teacher Plato in his Socratic dialogue, the Theaetetus. But Plato's dialogue presented an argument that recognizing koiná is an active thinking process in the rational part of the human soul, making the senses instruments of the thinking part of man. Plato's Socrates says this kind of thinking is not a kind of sense at all. Aristotle, trying to give a more general account of the souls of all animals, not just humans, moved the act of perception out of the rational thinking soul into this sensus communis, which is something like a sense, and something like thinking, but not rational.
  The passage is difficult to interpret and there is little consensus about many of the details. Gregorić (2007, pp. 204–205) has argued that this may be because Aristotle did not use the term as a standardized technical term at all. For example, in some passages in his works, Aristotle seems to use the term to refer to the individual sense perceptions simply being common to all pe
caption: Avicenna became one of the greatest medieval authorities concerning Aristotelian common sense, both in Islamic and Christian lands.
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