Posted on 07/19/2002 5:39:41 AM PDT by AmericanCompatriot
Do you accept Fiat money?
Yugo away right now.
The phrase "common sense" is the survivor of one of the worst linguistic muggings in the history of the English language. A full third of it was carved off and carried away, and such is the tenor of our time that almost no one has noticed.
The phrase was originally three words. The missing word is the.
"Common sense" implies something rather different from "the common sense." "Common sense" seems to speak to a commonality of opinion, a unanimity among right-thinkers who share common postulates. "The common sense" is about the nature of reality: the facts that the world publishes to all our senses, and which we choose to ignore only at our peril.
It is permissible, even to be expected, for people to have varying opinions about the causes of things, at least until the causes have been firmly tied down by repeated experience. It is impermissible for people to deny the facts presented to us by the world around us. Only if "the common sense" -- the data that the metaphysically given universe provides to all of us, independent of our preferences or opinions -- is coherent can it function constructively. Indeed, only if it's coherent does it truly exist at all.
When Bishop Berkeley proposed that objects have no existence independent of human beliefs about them, Samuel Johnson said, "I refute it thus," and kicked a cobblestone. What Johnson was defending was the supremacy of factual data to all opinions about it: the very definition of "the common sense."
Freedom, Wealth, and Peace,
Francis W. Porretto
Visit The Palace Of Reason: http://palaceofreason.com
I'll stick with the nuclear family, I think.
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