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Philosophy and Common Sense

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

Keith Campbell
Keith Campbell
Affiliation:
University of Sydney
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Extract

This paper raises once more the question of the relationship between philosophy on the one hand and common sense on the other. More particularly, it is concerned with the role which common sense can play in passing judgment on the rational acceptability (or otherwise) of large-scale hypotheses in natural philosophy and the cosmological part of metaphysics. There are, as I see it, three stages through which the relationship has passed in the course of the twentieth century. There is the era of G. E. Moore, the Quine–Feyerabend period, and now a new and modest vindication of common sense is emerging in the work of Jerry Fodor.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy , Volume 63 , Issue 244 , April 1988 , pp. 161 - 174
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1988

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References

1 See in particular ‘A Defence of Common Sense’ in Moore, G. E., Philosophical Papers (London: Allen and Unwin, 1959), 32–59.Google Scholar

2 ‘Proof of an External World’ in Philosophical Papers, 146.Google Scholar

3 The idea is to be found on p. 107 of his Our Knowledge of the Externat World (London: Allen and Unwin, 1914).Google Scholar

4 Cf. Quine, W. V., Philosophy of Logic (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1970), 5–7Google Scholar, for a succinct account of this view.

5 See Churchland, P., Scientific Realism and the Plasticity of Mind (Cambridge University Press, 1979)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for a presentation of this view which is not irrationalist.

6 Fodor, J., ‘Observation Reconsidered’, Philosophy of Science 51 (1984), 23–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7 The Modularity of Mind: An Essay on Faculty Psychology (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983).Google Scholar

8 This particular illusion merits more extended treatment. I learn from Denise Russell that the illusion is not universal but (to some degree at least) culture specific to communities where precise machined edges and straight lines are common. If this is sustained, perhaps Fodor's nativism will need to be modified. On the other hand, David Armstrong reports David Sanford's work at Duke illustrating the strength of the illusion among Westerners, who not only cannot shake off the mistake about length, but compound it when asked to estimate the real difference between unequal lines which have arrowheads to exaggerate the apparent inequality.

9 Metaphysics: an Introduction (Encino: Dickenson, 1976), 69–71.Google Scholar

10 Against Method (London: NLB, 1975).Google Scholar

11 Ways of Worldmaking (Hassocks: Harvester Press, 1978).Google Scholar

12 My thanks to Michael Devitt for helpful suggestions. Armstrong, David, in an unpublished paper ‘An Epistemic Base’Google Scholar, earlier traversed much of this countryside, and found for common sense a role similar to that identified here.