It's odd how sometimes it takes something so incredibly stupid that to ponder it would cause blood to shoot out of your nose to point out to yourself that you've never seen something in a certain way. To me, Common Sense has always been a immutible guide as to whether one will be able to actually survive by oneself out in the scary "real world".
I've known people with 'book sense' that were completely clueless and could actually be scammed by the whole "heads I win, tails you lose" deal. To me, common sense was the one quality that you could use in an argument, or proof, or whatever and just point to it and say "see?!". It required no definitions, no qualifiers, no quantitative states. It was the one thing that leveled the playing field.
My perception has had a severe corrective jolt.
After a particular political conversation recently, I realized that the notion of common sense is perhaps the most relativistic quality of human nature. Consider this thought experiment (or if you're brave, actually try this): Go up to a random person on the street and ask them something about civil rights. Affirmative action as applied to college applicants is usually a good test bed for raw data. You'll get as many answers saying that 'common sense dictates that's it's clearly unfair, promoting a bias that it's intended to alleviate' as you will that 'common sense dicates that it's clearly fair, promoting equal chance for entrance to college for all'.
Here's where the relativism comes in. A third party observer to these two viewpoints sees that they are contradictory. However, suppose this third party observer has clairvoyant powers, and can see all of the experiences the two people have had in their life that influence their perception of this topic. The outcome is that both of them are right.
For those keeping score, Schrodinger's Cat just slipped into a non-Euclidian hyperspace of order pi. Consequently, the cat is hungry.
So now the question is begged "What exactly is Common Sense?" How common does something have to be to be included in common sense? Is common sense something that immutable (i.e. 1+1=2 in a sufficiently described numerical system)? Or is common sense just a construct that humans have created as a psychological defense mechanism to ensure that their viewpoints are justified, and keep themselves from going completely bonkers?
Don't think about that too much or you might rip a hole in space-time.
