>
> One hell of a messy issue.
>
> Well for Sahlins, common sense in the above sense is bad, because it
> "objectively" attributes to human nature notions issuing from bourgeois
> society's particular form of social knolwedge.
>
> But on a broader plain MS's point is precisely that all societies have
> systems of meanings and signifying practices. So they all have their local
> "common sense." (BTW, MS doesn't mean that different perspectives don't
> exist within that "common" sense. People have different perspectives and
> motivations, which in turn have system-transforming consequences. But like
> Saussurean signs, the differences exist within sets of common meanings,
> else people wouldn't even be able to communicate with each other muchless
> disagree.)
>
> ...But back to your new strategy. I go back and forth on this. On one
> hand there are the against-the-grain reasons you mention, to try to show
> the jagged edge of common-sense. (Though I suppose all those eighties
> Gramscians would disagree with you about common sense always being either
> trivial or viciously wrong. For them it's the murky level in-between these
> two ends of the spectrum where all the interesting things happen. ...Where
> have all the Gramscians gone?)
>
>
> But if you use common sense to refer to (false) ideology or triviality,
> then don't you need some other term to replace the good and useful aspects
> of the term? For instance non-elites often refer to their own "common
> sense" to draw out the mystifications surrounding "professional" knowledge.
> And within the left, too, the term can be used in good anti-vanguardist
> ways. So how would we hold on to these positive usages of common sense?
Pardon my butting in here. Two of the greatest Enlightenment philosophers David Hume and Thomas Reid were defenders of the idea of common sense.
Reid argued that common sense beliefs followed from intuitive first principles, some of which are necessary, some contingent. First principles are intuitive judgements such that we are caused to believe them immediately upon understanding them. To understand them, is to understand that they are true i.e. first principles are self-evident. Intuitive judgments are the work of the nature and constituent powers of the mind like memory, conception, sense-perception, reason etc. Such powers of intuition are brute constitutional facts of the mind, part of the epistemic powers we are endowed with by nature. Thus Reid gives an account of why we believe in the existence in an external world in causal terms which both explains and justifies that belief ( as well as other of our natural beliefs.)
In contrast, Hume accepted skeptical arguments that we cannot justify our natural belief in the existence of an external world and the same for our other natural beliefs either by showing it to be a dictate of reason or by deduction from sense-data. Hume accepts that causal explanations of our natural beliefs cannot justify them as the skeptics have shown. Hume sets aside the question of justification and instead asks the quesiton "how do we come to believe in the existence of the external world". Hume thinks that the imagination constructs this belief. We have sense impressions that have a constancy to them. The constancy and coherence of these impressions makes us believe they have a continious and independant existence. Our imagination attributes continuity and independance to impressions that only have contiguity in order to make the world intelligible. We fail to note that the recurrence of sense impressions is only a relation of resemblance and not a qualitative identitical impression of one that occured earlier. So, strictly speaking, our belief in the existence of an external world is false yet a necessary belief for us to get on in the world.
Using Reid's approach, one could I think justify a theory of ideology as common sense following from self-evident first principles, but that is another post. That was today's lesson in British Empiricism 101, hope you enjoyed it.
Sam Pawlett