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Common sense

Philosophy
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

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The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

Common sense refers to shared, everyday beliefs or assumptions taken as self-evident. It often serves as a baseline for reasoning and understanding.

Detailed Definition
Philosophically, common sense has been both defended as a foundation of knowledge and critiqued as unexamined assumption. In poetry, it appears in the use of familiar language, idiom, or perspective that grounds the reader before being questioned or subverted. Poets often play against common sense to reveal deeper truths, exposing how ordinary beliefs can conceal complexity or contradiction.
Example
Example in poetry:
Antonio Gramsci's concept of common sense — the unreflective, inherited worldview of a social class, which contains elements of both ideological mystification and practical wisdom — has influenced poets who work to defamiliarize the taken-for-granted assumptions of everyday life; Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, which begins from the "rough ground" of ordinary language and common use, informs a tradition of poetry that takes common speech and common sense as its philosophical starting point rather than as obstacles to be transcended; A poet writing in plain language about domestic experience might invoke common sense philosophically — not as the lowest form of knowing but as a form of practical wisdom grounded in the shared experience of ordinary life; Thomas Reid's philosophy of common sense — the claim that certain fundamental beliefs (the existence of the external world, the reality of other minds) are epistemically basic and require no justification — appears implicitly in poetry that refuses skeptical abstraction in favor of confident, grounded perception; The Romantic poets' interest in "the language of common men" (Wordsworth's Preface to the Lyrical Ballads) is a philosophical claim about common sense — the ordinary person's direct engagement with experience is philosophically privileged over the abstractions of educated discourse; Adrienne Rich's later poetry appeals to common sense as a feminist philosophical resource — the concrete, embodied knowledge of women's daily lives against the abstract "common sense" of patriarchal institutions that systematically misrepresents that experience
Additional Notes
Common sense in philosophy has a complex status. For Reid and the Scottish Common Sense school, common sense refers to a set of basic, self-evident beliefs (that the external world exists, that other people have minds) that are properly basic — they require no justification and serve as the foundation for all other inquiry. Moore's defence of common sense against idealist philosophy drew on this tradition. Gramsci's analysis of common sense as a form of ideological consciousness — containing both practical wisdom and mystification — provides a critical alternative, arguing that common sense is always the common sense of a particular class and historical moment. Wittgenstein's later philosophy treats common sense as an expression of shared forms of life. For poets, common sense is both a resource (the poem that speaks from and to shared experience) and a target (the poem that defamiliarizes the taken-for-granted). Related terms: Reid, Moore, Gramsci's ideology, doxa, forms of life, defamiliarization.
Also Known As
shared wisdom folk rationality practical judgment
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