COMMON SENSE

Several things can be learned about common sense from Dr. Johnson's attempt to refute George Berkeley by kicking the stone. Its philosophical incompetence is not one of them. Dr. Johnson of course misunderstood Berkeley, and his misunderstanding was not a collapse of common sense. He thought that if stones had, as Berkeley said, no "material substance" and were collections of "ideas," a boot ought to go through them without resistance. And if Berkeley had been maintaining that solid objects were only apparently solid and were really collections of what we would ordinarily call ideas, the refutation would have been an appropriate reaction of common sense.

The Notion of Common Sense

Whatever other aspects of meaning the word sense may retain in the compound "common sense," it has prominently the force of sense as opposed to nonsense. In what is contrary to common sense there is always something more or less—but obviously—nonsensical. It produces the feeling, varying in strength according to circumstances, that argument is only precariously in place in dealing with it. For to deploy arguments at all directly against the manifestly absurd is to invest it with some intellectual dignity and to muffle its self-annihilating character. It is, moreover, to invite the suspicion that one has failed to recognize absurdity, and such failure has a very foolish look. As a man of redoubtable common sense, Dr. Johnson kept dialectic for the right occasion. He did not kick the stone formally in the name of common sense, but his action has traditionally been praised and condemned as a piece of commonsense behavior. Yet he was demonstrating against a philosopher who was also determined to be on the side of common sense.

berkeley

Berkeley's notebooks contain the reminder to himself: "To be eternally banishing Metaphisics &c & recalling Men to Common Sense" (Philosophical Commentaries, No. 751). Confident that he could always secure the neutrality of common sense when he could not have its assistance, Berkeley went about his own metaphysical enterprise, which was to exhibit the dependence of physical objects on their being perceived. His Three Dialogues (1713) is studded with references to common sense: to opinions that are "repugnant" or "shocking" to it, to its "dictates," to the judgment of men of "plain common sense." The objections that have to be most carefully answered are those which appear to proceed from common sense. Since the issues concern mainly the world of perception, the man of common sense in the Dialogues is eminently the man who "trusts his senses," who will not tolerate the suggestion that the things he sees and handles are not real things but their mere representations.

The eighteenth century also brought into existence, in France and Scotland, philosophies of common sense—philosophies, to a greater or lesser degree, centered on this notion. They safeguarded what they held to be the beliefs (or "truths") of common sense by defending its authority and—in the Scottish philosophy—by exposing contraries of these beliefs to its blunt rejection.

common-sense beliefs

It may be asked whether common sense had beliefs until philosophers engaged in its defense ascribed them to it. The Oxford English Dictionary lists a variety of meanings for the expression. Three of these, referring to a mental endowment, might be taken together: ordinary understanding—without which a man is out of his mind, or feeble-minded (an early meaning); ordinary, practical, good sense in everyday affairs; and the "faculty of primary truths." Ordinary understanding is not obviously, and practical, good sense is obviously not, the sort of thing that could stamp a set of beliefs with a special character. The third of these meanings is marked "philosophical." A further meaning must be noticed: "the general sense, feeling, or judgement of mankind." Here common sense seems to be a cluster of beliefs or persuasions, somehow "felt" to be true by most people. An argument drawn from common sense, in this case, would amount to an appeal to an ancient tribunal of opinion, common consent. (The most absolute modern proponent of this tribunal has probably been Lamennais, in his Essai sur l'indifférence, Paris, 1817–1823.)

Philosophers have frequently meant by common sense an intuitively based common consent. And the philosophers, during and after the eighteenth century, who have argued from common sense and for its beliefs have often thought of common sense in this way. They have, however, as often thought of it in a more ordinary way, as the common sense that is opposed—always at first sight, sometimes irreconcilably—to high and obvious paradox.

Can the common sense that is opposed to gross paradox properly be thought of as having beliefs, however strong? If there is some artificiality in saying that common sense has beliefs, there is none in speaking of its rejection of an opinion; the reason—it might be suggested—is that common sense does not declare itself in advance of attack upon it. The man of plain, ordinary common sense cannot readily be said, for instance, to believe that the things around him continue to exist in his absence—the idea of their not doing so does not cross his mind. But when he encounters the contrary opinion, his common sense asserts itself. On the supposition that the declarations of common sense are essentially reactive, to ascribe to it beliefs specified by what it rejects—and this the philosophers who have maintained its beliefs seem often to have intended—would be a minor linguistic innovation, justified in that it makes its commitments explicit. The supposition would have to be modified in some cases. It does not come naturally to us to speak of a belief in our personal identity through time, because this identity is something of which we are aware. Nevertheless, it can be argued that here also common sense has commitments which are not apparent before its reaction to various assertions.

reaction to skepticism

A philosophy of common sense is a natural reaction to the fact, or to the threat, of philosophical paradox or skepticism. The French Jesuit Claude Buffier (1661–1737) saw us as threatened, since René Descartes, with skepticism about all matters of fact beyond the range of our consciousness, the states of which cannot be doubted. What we need is unimpeachable authority for the fundamental convictions shared by all normal men about matters of fact with respect to which consciousness can give no guarantees. Common sense supplies it. It puts us into assured possession of such "first truths" as that there is an external world, that our minds are incorporeal, that we are capable of free agency. First truths have characteristic marks: No attack upon them, and no attempt to prove them, can operate from premises that surpass them in clarity or evidence. They are, and always have been, acknowledged by the vast majority of humankind. Those who imagine they reject them act like others in conformity with them.

hume

David Hume's work A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–1740) produced by reaction a more important philosophy of common sense than Buffier's. In parts of the Treatise —to isolate what gave the book its most generally "shocking" aspect—things were reduced to the contents of the mind and the mind to its contents. While many of Hume's conclusions are capable of a milder interpretation than they were given by his readers, Hume himself did not pretend that a number of them were anything but profoundly disturbing to our natural beliefs. At the same time he thought these beliefs had us too tightly in their grip for reasoning to be able to pry us loose. In the Treatise "nature" has the last word, but its meaning is left uncertain. We must submit, but whether in submitting to nature we are also submitting to truth is quite another matter. In Hume's later An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, "common sense and reflection" are mentioned as correcting, in some degree, the indiscriminate doubt of an extreme skepticism, but nature and reasoning are still seen as coming into conflict. However, it should be remarked that there is another side to Hume in which these skeptical tendencies are in abeyance.

The "Scottish School"

reid

A central purpose of Thomas Reid's An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense (1764), and of his two later books, was, with Hume kept steady in view, to defend common sense against philosophical paradox and skepticism. It was for Reid a doubly difficult undertaking; if, as he held, the truths of common sense were self-evident, how could they be denied? And again, if they were self-evident, how could they be made evident when denied?

The great source of paradoxical or skeptical repudiations of common sense, Reid thought, was an innocent-looking theory that he believed philosophers had very generally adopted in order to explain the possibility of our awareness of anything beyond the present contents of our minds. According to this theory, such awareness is secondhand, necessarily mediated by "ideas" within our minds that are representative substitutes for external things. As its implications were drawn out, the theory, Reid maintained, committed philosophers to a steadily increasing range of conflict with common sense, with no stopping before "ideas," losing their representative character, monopolize existence. The "theory of ideas" is to be found in John Locke, needing only, Reid believed, an unsparing logic such as Hume's to produce Hume's world. (Locke's An Essay concerning Human Understanding [1690], has a deceptively commonsense air; its tone is down-to-earth, and experience is set up as the source of knowledge. Locke wanted no paradoxes, and when they were approached by what he said, he was not very efficient at drawing conclusions.)

The truths of common sense cannot be made evident by deductive proofs, but, Reid maintained, there is always absurdity in opinions contrary to its dictates. His most general procedure in defending common sense was to remind us of its command over us. Common sense has so fundamentally determined the scaffolding of ordinary language that the philosopher, in trying to word an opinion which is against common sense, is liable to need another language; and his utterance is continually threatened with incoherence between its structure and its content. The beliefs of common sense govern the behavior even of those who repudiate them in opinion, and they are only fitfully repudiated even in opinion; the paradoxical or skeptical philosopher is no sooner off his guard than he is believing with, as well as acting like, other men. Reid stressed a truism about matters of common sense: They lie within "the reach of common understanding." If this were not so, the judgment of the great bulk of humankind would carry no weight against a philosopher's superior competence. But in "a matter of common sense, every man is no less a competent judge than a mathematician is in a mathematical demonstration" (Intellectual Powers, Essay VI, Ch. 4). Whether or not something is a matter of common sense may well have to be investigated—prejudices shamming common sense must be exposed; what Reid denied is that the philosopher is in a better position than anyone else to pronounce on the truth of what really comes from common sense.

Many of the opinions that Reid rejected as contrary to common sense do not appear to be in conflict with the necessities of action he held common sense to impose. Thus, he attacked Berkeley as having denied the existence of a material world, but Berkeley denied that the truth of his opinion would make any changes in our experience; stones, for instance, would remain the solid objects we find them to be. Reid's limited success in vindicating the beliefs of common sense by pointing to inconsistencies between the profession and the practice of dissenters was connected with his interpretation of many of these beliefs; they presented themselves to him as containing an element that lies beyond verification by experience and that might therefore be called metaphysical. He construed, for example, our belief in the existence of a material world as disallowing any phenomenalistic account of the nature of material things, our belief in personal identity as involving a reference of all our experience to its (immaterial) subject, our belief in the freedom of our will as involving indeterminacy of choice.

reid's followers

The notion of an appeal to common sense in great matters of philosophical dispute was crudely taken up by two of Reid's contemporaries, James Beattie (the poet) and James Oswald. When they were regarded as its representatives, the school that became associated with Reid's name could easily be spoken of as appealing to "the judgment of the crowd." Dugald Stewart (1753–1828), teaching and writing with Reid's moderation, though without his penetrating simplicity, consolidated the school's position in Scotland, and his books helped to make the influence of the ideas he shared with Reid strongly felt in France and America.

sir william hamilton

Sir William Hamilton (1788–1856) produced a philosophy in which doctrines of Reid and Immanuel Kant were fused into an unstable compound. It proclaimed the sovereignty of common sense and compromised its deliverances, which for Reid were necessarily objective, with an ambiguous assertion of the "relativity" of knowledge. According to Hamilton, the convictions of common sense come to us with the backing of our entire cognitive nature. They are tests of other truth; their own must be presumed, for they are too elementary to have antecedents from which they could be derived. The only possible falsification of common sense would be demonstrated inconsistency in its deliverances, and this would bring in epistemological chaos. J. S. Mill's An Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy (1865) gave a reactionary, obscurantist look to the authority that Reid and Hamilton claimed for common sense. The "psychological" method, which Mill opposed to their "introspective method," was damagingly designed to show how a belief—such as everyone's belief in an external world—had grown up, taking on in the process the appearance of obviousness; the psychological method would undermine the doctrine that a belief is a dictate of nature by exhibiting its natural history.

Critical Common Sense

Reid and Hamilton both thought that criticism is or may be necessary in order to determine whether a belief is in fact a belief of common sense. They also held, however, that once this fact is established, it follows that the belief is true. The label "critical common sense" might be used, not too misleadingly, to distinguish from this position those philosophical views which combine the greatest respect for common sense with the insistence or admission that at least some of its beliefs are open to critical revision.

aristotle

If common sense is identified with what is commonly believed and its criticism is thought of as designed to elicit and defend the truth in common beliefs, then Aristotle may be called the first commonsense philosopher. "We must," Aristotle said, "as in all other cases, set the observed facts before us and, after first discussing the difficulties, go on to prove, if possible, the truth of all the common opinions about these affections of the mind, or, failing this, of the greater number and the most authoritative; for if we both refute the objections and leave the common opinions undisturbed, we shall have proved the case sufficiently" (Nicomachean Ethics, 1145b2–7; cf. 1172b35–1173a2, Eudemian Ethics [attributed to Aristotle], 1216b26–35).

c. s. peirce

The "Critical Common-sensism" argued for by the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) was largely defined in relation to the views held by the Scottish school. It saw the beliefs of common sense, Peirce said, as changeless, the same for all men at all times. It rightly thought of them as having a kind of instinctive character—but instincts can undergo modification. Peirce was sure that these beliefs show some modification as people become civilized and civilization develops. They are not, as ordinarily held, beliefs that have been up for acceptance or rejection; they exist as lifelong "belief-habits." And they possess a logical feature in virtue of which they are doubt-resistant when criticized: They have an essential vagueness. Peirce illustrated this with "our belief in the Order of Nature." Let an attempt be made to give this belief precision, and what results will be found disputable. "But who can think that there is no order in nature?" (Collected Papers, Vol. V, p. 359).

The "Critical Common-sensist," Peirce said, tries to "bring all his very general first premisses to recognition" and to develop "every suspicion of doubt of their truth" (ibid., p. 363). But the doubt he is looking for must be the real thing, not "paper" doubt; we can no more induce genuine doubt by an act of will than we can give ourselves a surprise by deciding to. "Strong thinkers" are "apt to be great breath-holders," but holding one's breath against belief is not doubting. In claiming "indubitability" for a belief of common sense, Peirce was not declaring its truth—"propositions that really are indubitable, for the time being" may "nevertheless be false" (ibid., p. 347). The future holds possibilities of surprise for all our beliefs. Yet Peirce seems to have held that though any one of our indubitable beliefs might turn out to be false, they could not all do so.

henry sidgwick

"Common sense organised into Science," Henry Sidgwick (1838–1900) remarked, "continually at once corrects and confirms crude Common Sense" (Lectures on the Philosophy of Kant, p. 425). Sidgwick saw common sense as a great mass of ore, rich in valuable metals, that needs philosophical smelting. It must have removed "inadvertencies, confusions, and contradictions" (ibid., p. 428). However, the procedures by which this is done—rigorous reflection, the adjustment of its beliefs to the assured results of science—are not alien to it. Sidgwick's Methods of Ethics (1874) contains a detailed examination of the "morality of common sense," directed toward showing its frequent vagueness, its areas of indecision, its compromises between conflicting ideas, and also toward showing how its fundamental convictions can be taken up into a form of utilitarianism that can reasonably claim the acquiescence of common sense.

g. f. stout

For G. F. Stout (1860–1944), common sense has been self-correcting in its evolution and it is still to some extent modifiable. The man in the street is not to be taken as its representative; the common sense of philosophical importance resides in the consensus of ignorant and educated belief. This unanimity is the result of a long development, during which idiosyncrasies of opinion have been worn down by mutual attrition, and mistakes—which common sense itself can see to be such—have been corrected. Common sense is less a matter of particular beliefs than "the persistence of plastic tendencies to certain most general and comprehensive views" (Mind and Matter, p. 11). These include such strongly metaphysical dispositions as "the tendency to find Mind in Nature generally" (ibid., p. 14). When a conflict arises between common sense and some scientific or philosophical opinion, the final decision, Stout maintained, rests with common sense, "however indirectly"; for common sense must either be provided with reconciliatory explanations or be brought to see that the considerations in favor of the opinion more than cancel the presumption against it.

russell and broad

It is convenient to mention here two contemporary philosophers who have thought that there are philosophical opinions which can be described as common sense but who have thought that some of these opinions are quite radically mistaken. Science takes common sense as its starting point, Bertrand Russell says; it has arrived at results with regard to the nature of physical things and their relation to perception that are incompatible with parts of the "metaphysic" of common sense. One does what one can for common sense, but, according to C. D. Broad, sometimes not much is possible; nor should a philosopher feel disturbed at a break with common sense that results from seeing together facts that average people notice only separately and from taking into account other facts of which they are altogether ignorant.

Common Sense and Ordinary Language

g. e. moore

G. E. Moore (1873–1958) did not think that common sense never errs. He seems often to have treated universal, or very general, acceptance as the identifying mark of a commonsense belief, and, as he mentions, things that everybody once believed have turned out to be false. He was prepared to allow that, for all he knew to the contrary, there might be many false propositions included within the vague boundaries of "the Common Sense view of the world." Moore had no special interest in critically sifting the beliefs of common sense for truth and falsity. He was primarily interested in its massive certainties.

Moore's paper "A Defence of Common Sense" (1925) lists sets of propositions that are as obviously true as almost any imaginable: for instance (with considerable paraphrase for the sake of brevity), propositions stating that the earth has existed for many years; that its inhabitants have been variously in contact with, or at different distances from, one another and other things; and that these facts are matters of common knowledge. According to Moore, these "truisms," taken together, imply the truth of the commonsense view of the world in certain of its "fundamental features," for they imply that there are material things, space, time, and other minds besides one's own—in a clear meaning of each of the expressions "material thing," "space," "time," and so on. The abstract words contain ambiguities that are absent from, for example, "The earth has existed for many years," but Moore thought that some philosophers who have denied the existence of material things, of space, of time, or of other minds besides their own are to be understood as having expressed views incompatible with such banally obvious truths. He thus regarded them as paradoxically uttering opinions inconsistent with what they themselves know to be true. They constantly reveal this knowledge in its incompatibility with their opinions; a solipsistic philosopher, for example, sets himself to persuade others that he alone exists.

There is very great doubt, Moore thought, about the correct "analysis," in some important respects, of propositions of common sense that are quite certainly true. (Roughly, for Moore, the analysis of a concept or a proposition lays bare its structure by indicating the concepts it implicitly contains and the way they are combined.) Moore did not think that a phenomenalistic analysis of the concept of a material thing could be ruled out as absolutely impossible. It follows that, in his judgment, a philosopher who was using the sentence "Material things do not exist" simply to word a phenomenalistic doctrine and to repudiate its alternatives would not be repudiating a conviction of common sense that is manifestly true. And if this is so, it is hard to see what a philosopher could have in mind in using the words that would constitute such repudiation. By contrast, denials of the "reality" of space and time on the ground that their concepts are self-contradictory do appear to be in irreconcilable conflict with the most commonplace facts about position and distance, and about past, present, and future.

norman malcolm

The philosophical paradoxes that Moore attacked on many different occasions are construed in Norman Malcolm's essay "Moore and Ordinary Language" as disguised, variously motivated rejections of common language, and Moore's defense of common sense is construed as its vindication. A philosopher declares, for instance, "We can never know for certain the truth of any empirical statement." As interpreted by Malcolm, he is saying that it is never right to say "I know for certain" when it is logically possible that one is mistaken, that the words are always improperly used in this situation. Moore's reply, characteristically translating from the abstract to the concrete, pointed out the absurdity of anyone's suggesting, when he is sitting on a chair, that he believes he is, that he very probably is, but that he does not know it for certain. What Moore's reply did, on Malcolm's interpretation, was "to appeal to our language-sense," "to make us feel how queer and wrong" it would be to speak here in the way the philosopher proposes and substitute "believe" for "know for certain" or to turn to such words as "probable" ("Moore and Ordinary Language," p. 354).

"A philosophical paradox," Malcolm says (pp. 359–360), "asserts that, whenever a person uses a certain expression, what he says is false." However, from the fact that the expression has a use in ordinary language, it follows, Malcolm argues, that it is free from self-contradiction (since a self-contradictory expression necessarily has no use) and therefore that it can be employed to make true statements. And this is enough to refute the paradox. Whether or not people always say something false when using these expressions becomes a matter to be settled by matter-of-fact evidence, and the paradoxical philosopher does not deal in evidence of this sort.

In Malcolm's essay a stronger claim is made in effect for Moore's refutations: They produce indisputably true statements employing the expressions that the paradoxes reject, for they present paradigms of the correct application of these expressions. And it is maintained that we could not learn the meaning of some expressions without such paradigms or standard cases; that we could not learn, for example, the meaning of "material thing" without being shown examples of material things, or the meaning of spatial and temporal expressions without acquaintance with spatial and temporal relations, or the meaning of "certain," "probable," "doubtful" without being introduced to the contrasted situations to which they apply. Thus, a statement denying that there is anything answering to one of these expressions must be false. Scrutiny of "the argument from paradigm cases" has been an incident in the recent shift of philosophical interest from common sense (at least under that name) to ordinary language.

ludwig wittgenstein

The way to philosophical paradox is opened, according to Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951), when some feature of ordinary language is misconstrued as only philosophers are likely to misconstrue it. This disorder, along with such other characteristic philosophical aberrations as directionless bafflement, is to be got rid of by bringing words back from their alienation in metaphysical discourse to the familiar surroundings from which they have been abstracted and watching them at work there. Philosophers have not carelessly misunderstood ordinary language; it is waiting for them with "bewitchment" and "illusion." In the emancipation that is achieved when one is able to "command a clear view" of the functioning of language, everything is left, but seen to be, "as it is." Wittgenstein rarely mentioned common sense. He referred in The Blue Book (Oxford, 1958, p. 48) to the "common-sense philosopher" (such as Moore or Reid) who, "n.b., is not the common-sense man." The commonsense man, Wittgenstein may be taken to suggest, is man before the philosophical Fall.

See also Paradigm Case Argument.

Bibliography

the notion of common sense

Berkeley, George. Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous. London, 1713.

Buffier, Claude. First Truths. Translated anonymously. London: J. Johnston, 1780.

Isaacs, Nathan. The Foundations of Common Sense. London: Routledge and Paul, 1949.

Lewis, C. S. "Sense." In Studies in Words. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1960.

Also see the works listed below by Grave, Reid, Stewart, Peirce, Stout (Mind and Matter ), Malcolm, Moore (Philosophical Papers, Ch. 2), and Woozley.

the "scottish school"

Beattie, James. An Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth. Edinburgh: A. Kincaid and J. Bell, 1770.

Chastaing, Maxime. "Reid, la philosophie du sens commun." Revue philosophique de la France et de l'étranger 144 (1954): 352–399.

Grave, S. A. The Scottish Philosophy of Common Sense. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960.

Mill, John Stuart. An Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy. London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts and Green, 1865. Chs. 3, 8–14.

Reid, Thomas. Works. 2 vols, edited by Sir William Hamilton. Edinburgh, 1846–1863. Hamilton's appendices include a long historical and expository dissertation on the notion of common sense.

Stewart, Dugald. Works. 2 vols, edited by Sir William Hamilton. Edinburgh, 1854–1860. Vol. III, Ch. 1.

"critical common sense"

Broad, C. D. The Mind and Its Place in Nature. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1925. Chs. 2–4.

Broad, C. D. "A Reply to My Critics." In The Philosophy of C. D. Broad, edited by P. A. Schilpp, 803–805. New York: Tudor, 1959.

Peirce, C. S. Collected Papers. 6 vols, edited by Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1931–1935. Vol. V, pp. 293–313, 346–375.

Russell, Bertrand. "Reply to Criticisms." In The Philosophy of Bertrand Russell. 2nd ed., edited by P. A. Schilpp, 700–705. Evanston, IL: Library of Living Philosophers, 1946.

Russell, Bertrand. Human Knowledge. London, 1948. Part III; Part IV, Ch. 10.

Sidgwick, Henry. The Methods of Ethics. 6th ed. London: Macmillan, 1901.

Sidgwick, Henry. "The Philosophy of Common Sense." In Lectures on the Philosophy of Kant, edited by J. Ward, 406–429. London: Macmillan, 1905.

Stout, G. F. Studies in Philosophy and Psychology. London: Macmillan, 1930. Ch. 6.

Stout, G. F. Mind and Matter. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1931.

common sense and ordinary language

Campbell, C. A. "Common-sense Propositions and Philosophical Paradoxes." PAS 45 (1944–1945): 1–25.

Chappell, V. C. "Malcolm on Moore." Mind 70 (279) (July 1961): 417–425.

Chisholm, R. M. "Philosophers and Ordinary Language." Philosophical Review 60 (1951): 317–328. Malcolm's reply follows immediately.

Duncan-Jones, A. E., and A. J. Ayer. "Does Philosophy Analyse Common Sense?" PAS, Supp. 16 (1937): 139–176. Symposium.

Flew, A. G. N., ed. Essays in Conceptual Analysis. London: Macmillan, 1956. Chs. 1 and 6. Discusses paradigm cases.

Malcolm, Norman. "Moore and Ordinary Language." In The Philosophy of G. E. Moore, edited by P. A. Schilpp, 345–368. Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University, 1942.

Malcolm, Norman. "Defending Common Sense." Philosophical Review 58 (1949): 201–220.

Moore, G. E. "A Reply to My Critics." In The Philosophy of G. E. Moore, edited by P. A. Schilpp, 660–675. Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University, 1942.

Moore, G. E. Some Main Problems of Philosophy. London: Allen and Unwin, 1953. Chs. 1, 5–7, 11.

Moore, G. E. Philosophical Papers. London: Allen and Unwin, 1959. Ch. 2, "A Defence of Common Sense," and Ch. 7, "Proof of an External World."

Passmore, J. A. Philosophical Reasoning. London: Duckworth, 1961. Ch. 6. Discusses paradigm cases.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Blackwell, 1953.

Woozley, A. D. "Ordinary Language and Common Sense." Mind 62 (247) (July 1953): 301–312.

other recommended titles

Audi, Robert. The Architecture of Reason: The Structure and Substance of Rationality. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Barker, S. F., and T. C. Beauchamp, eds. Thomas Reid: Critical Interpretations. Philadelphia: Monograph Series, 1976.

Chisholm, Roderick. Theory of Knowledge. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1966; 2nd ed., 1977; 3rd ed., 1989.

Cornman, James W. Perception, Common Sense, and Science. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1975.

Foley, Richard. Intellectual Trust in Oneself and Others. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Goldman, Alan H. "Epistemic Foundationalism and the Replaceability of Ordinary Language." Journal of Philosophy 79 (1982): 136–154.

Guyer, Paul. "Kant on Common Sense and Scepticism." Kantian Review 7 (2003): 1–37.

Lehrer, Keith. Thomas Reid. London: Routledge, 1989.

Lemos, Noah. "Common Sense and 'A Priori' Epistemology." Monist 81 (3) (1998): 473–487.

Lycan, William. "Moore against the New Skeptics." Philosophical Studies 103 (2001): 35–53.

Moore, G. E. Philosophical Studies. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1922.

Moser, Paul K. "A Defense of Epistemic Intuitionism." Metaphilosophy 15 (1984): 196–209.

Moser, Paul K. "Epistemology (1900–Present)." In Routledge History of Philosophy, Vol. 10: Philosophy of the English Speaking World in the 20th Century, edited by John Canfield. London: Routledge, 1996.

Reid, Thomas. Essays on the Active Powers of the Human Mind, edited by B. Brody. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969.

Reid, Thomas. Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, edited by B. Brody. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969.

Schneewind, J. B. "Scottish Common Sense Philosophy." In The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, edited by Robert Audi. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1995; 2nd ed., 1999.

Wolterstorff, Nicholas. "Reid on Common Sense." In The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Reid, edited by Terence Cuneo. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

S. A. Grave (1967)

Bibliography updated by Benjamin Fiedor (2005)