Nov. 5th, 2004 10:58 am
Common as hen's teeth
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muckefuckDoes 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?
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?