Philosophy of Common Sense | William James Pragmatism Lecture 5

Common sense is an often used term used to portray an ideas as obvious, without further explanation. But what really is common sense? This question is answered in William James’ fifth lecture on Pragmatism.
James identifies generally three stages of human thought: common sense, science, and philosophical critique. James sees the first stage, common sense, as those intuitions and categories that our ancestors believed and which have stood the test of time, eventually landing in our own minds. One of the strongest ideas resulting from common sense is object permanence, the belief that an object will still be there even after we leaves our vision.
This is contrasted with the stage of science, brought upon with people like Galileo and Bacon, who went away from intuition and towards examination and “intellectualizing” a belief for lack of a better word. With common sense we can intuitively believe that it will continue to rain when it starts raining, with science we can explain weather and forecast it.
The stage of philosophical critique does exactly that, critiques. It critiques our attempts at understanding the physical world. While there is some merit in this stage, it comes with little practicality. Ultimately, however, all of these stages have their own merit and James doesn’t prioritize one over the other.
#philosophy #pragmatism #williamjames

Music by: Lukrembo

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[amirhosseinimanizadeh]

Great videos. Thank you. Think about making at least one on Bhaskar's Critical Realism too.

[Rico-Suave_]

Great video, thank you very much, note to self(nts) watched ……

[gracefitzgerald]

I love that you read about pragmatism for fun! I hope your new lady friends appreciate how smart you are. I know they think your cute! 😊

[masternoob]

So…you can’t have one without the other??