BBC Bias
9th January 2023
Common sense. How can you possibly be against it? Americans of a certain generation used to talk about “Mom and apple pie” as examples of things that you cannot help but love, and it looks like common sense should get the same thumbs-up. But what is common sense?
If we are going to be persnickety then we have to go back to Plato and Aristotle. The ancient Greek word equivalent to “common sense” was doxa, which actually turns philologically into “dogma.” Latin-speaking translators of Aristotle (Boethius being the most famous, before he went to jail) used “sensus communis,” but this is more to do with our actual physical senses, as you would expect from the empirical Aristotle. It means that we all experience the world in much the same way. But common sense now has a more modern meaning, essentially translating from the classical world as “Don’t be a dumbass.”