Common as hen's teeth

[muckefuck]

Does common sense exist?

Last night, I came across a pamphlet entitled Street sense is common sense. My immediate reaction was that street sense is cover a term for a number of learned skills. I wouldn't necessarily expect someone from a radically different environment--say a proverbially idyllic pastoral setting--to walk into a major urban area already possessed of them.

That got me thinking: Is "common sense" just a rhetorical turn of phrase used by a speaker to emphasise that he considers certain skills especially simple and basic or is it actually possible to codify a body of skills which together constitute "common sense"? Has anyone formally tried, say in the way that Hirsch et al. tried to define "cultural literacy"?

What d'y'all think? Or is the answer so commonsensical that I'm foolish to even pose the question?

Comments

[dilletante.livejournal.com]

well, the question has seen a fair amount of study in the field of artificial intelligence. where, alas, my knowledge is about a decade out of date. notably there was the cyc project, which billed itself as an effort to codify all of commonsense knowledge.

its results, if i remember right, were roughly:

• the problem is omg hard
  
• the problem is really omg hard
  
• we have a sooper sekrit database which we will sell to you.
  

they took common sense as essentially meaning common knowledge, i.e. of the "grass is green" variety. i'm not sure that captures what we really think of as common sense, which to me seems more to imply cached higher-order inferences ("if you put your hand in water, it will get wet"). but i imagine one might take a similar approach to those; and you would need a base of common knowledge to start from.

i think their model for what was common was roughly "the encyclopedia." though i'm sure it was refined over time.

[lifeandstuff.livejournal.com]

I think it is a great question.

Personally, I don't think there is any such thing as common sense and thusly I never use "it's common sense" to try to prove a point.

Actually, if common sense did exist, I don't think I'd have to say "it's common sense" in order to prove a point because the other person would already agree with me. :)

[snowy-owlet.livejournal.com]

I don't think there's a universal "common sense." An evangelical Christian might think it's common sense that of course Jesus actually rose up in the body after 3 days in the grave. A Hindu might thing it's common sense that of course statues of Ganesha drink milk.

My mother's common sense tells her that you wear a coat at anything under 40 degrees, you wear long sleeves at anything under 65, at 75 you wear short, and at 80 you can swim. These are unassailable laws in her world. And so she's obviously crazy. Therefore, so such thing as common sense.