[ExI] common sense

[Gordon Swobe]

--- On Sun, 3/7/10, Stefano Vaj <stefano.vaj at gmail.com> wrote:

>>> We can perhaps. But why ever should we?
>>
>> We should for the sake of saving the notion of "common sense".
 
> Common sense is simply a number of assumptions implicit in
> a (normally collective) worldview. What is "obvious" changes in space
> and above all in time. Some parts of it have mainly epistemological
> implications, other are more emotional. Of course, we cannot ever
> escape having one worldview, but it also evolves through
> the relativisation of its tenets, which is mostly performed
> through the deconstruction of its genealogy. Such process is of course
> resisted in different degrees by any of us owing to our "faith" in the
> old ways to interpret things.

Yes, I agree, but by "common sense" I mean also something a little more basic and literal. 

I look around and see some 6 billion or so entities who literally have senses in common with me. 

Why do you suppose, for example, that we humans like to talk about the weather, especially when we do not know one another well? It seems to me we discuss the weather because it appeals to our common sense of reality, and that our common sense of reality literally has to do with the physical senses that we share in common. We all feel the warmth of the sun, the coldness of snow and ice, the solidity of the earth beneath our feet, the colors of nature, and so on. Our common subjective sense of physical reality unites us as a species and allows us to literally make sense of the world. 

You asked why ever should we do an epistemic but not an ontological reduction of mental phenomena, and I hope you can see what I meant by my answer: we can reduce mental phenomena epistemically and causally (the job of neuroscience) but we cannot reduce those phenomena ontologically without losing our common sense. It literally makes no sense to reduce subjectivity to something objective, and for this reason I subscribe to a flavor of non-reductive physicalism in the philosophy of mind. 

-gts