COMMON SENSE AND COMMUNICATION

Introduction  

Common sense means paying attention to the obvious. In other words it is the practical know-how knowledge that governs our everyday-communication process. We all know how to act in certain circumstances with certain people not so much through scientific theories but through common sense learning. This is not as easy as it sounds; for common sense, as many say, is uncommon these days. We all have vivid imaginations, and we tend to get lost in our fantasies.
When fantasy replaces common sense, communication becomes farcical and even tragic. Life is a series of ordinary events that follow the laws of logic and probability. These ordinary events are indifferent to our fantasies and require the careful, accurate steering of common sense.

Lonergan who is concerned with authentic communication between human persons notes: “To err is human, common sense is very human.” This is rather an interesting statement of Lonergan to be noticed. No doubt common sense is limited and we need to move from common sense to scientific reasoning or thinking, as common sense alone is incapable of creating the Cosmopolis, the biasless community. Common sense is concrete, practical and incomplete unlike the scientific accurate theories. In this short essay we shall see how common sense is essential to our life; the discard and disappearance of common sense and its effects; eventually the need to move from common sense knowing to scientific knowledge for better communication while not sidelining the aspect of common sense in every day life. 

The Eclipse of Common Sense and Its Consequences

On February 1^st I read horrendous news in the Indian Express. A mother of two children shot and killed both her children (11 year old boy and 16 year old girl) for they were talkative and refused to listen to her at times. It is basically a problem of communication as I perceive it. Certainly we have seen children talkative, adamant and troublesome   in our homes, in our neighbourhoods and in our places of apostolate or work.

For parents it takes common sense to adjust and accept their children despite the idiosyncrasies of their children or anybody at home. It is also a matter of common sense to communicate in such a way to people so that they may understand the seriousness of things we wish to communicate. Unquestionably there is a camouflage of common sense these days. This is seen in psychological disorders and complex behavioural patterns we witness. Today the number of people flogging to the hospitals precisely to the councilors and psychiatrists have risen in leaps and bounds. My problems of today are relatively fewer and insignificant in comparison to that of my parents’ in their early 20s. Common sense taught them that it is foolishness to expect a trouble-free or problem-free life instead one must be content with what one has and continue to relate with people at all times inspite of their hidden agendas. This is something that we lack in our modern society, if not completely. I believe my parents and everyone else too, I believe, were and are outgoing and knew and know the right thing to say and do without any formal education. When doing a right thing they turn to common sense.

We all know that there is rush in the world especially in the academic world for objectivity. Common sense being incomplete and practical without absolute certainties is disappearing from the horizon of our every day living. I came to senses of this fact when I first came across guides like How to Wash Your Clothes; How to Brush Your Teeth, etc. Looking at these I can’t but affirm that there is an eclipse of common sense these days. If parents have communicated through common sense how to look after oneself, attend to one’s needs and alike there wouldn’t be any need for writings of this sort. On the contrary we have failed to appreciate and communicate meaningfully the matters of common sense, the very human gift as Bernard Lonergan puts it.

The Need to Move from Common Sense Knowing to Scientific Knowing

As stated earlier common sense is particular, practical and concrete to some situations alone and therefore, it cannot be universalized and it isn’t the ground for people to come together to create biasless communication. For instance it takes common sense to understand that I can’t speak to a person in authority as I speak to my father or mother at home; I can’t greet people in Maharashtra as I greet people in Tamil Nadu, for cultural expressions are different. Moreover our common senscical knowing, at times, is deluded with superstitions and short-sightedness. Hence we need methods which are intelligible to human mind regardless of cultural, linguistic, national differences so as to form the biasless community.

In our attempt to move from common-sense-knowing to scientific knowing we need to consider the fact that both are equally essential – the scientific knowing and common sense knowing. The incompleteness of common sense in a way makes us more human to search for alternatives and be creative than to be caught in the scientific circle of certainty.

Conclusion

Communication is never a monologue but dialogue between human persons. For an authentic communication or dialogue to happen in our day to day living it is important to depend on common sense while recognizing its limitations. Most of the hurdles that we face in our intersubjectivity are due to communication gap, the neglect of common sense in our relationships. There is no fixed absolute scientific theory as to how I should behave myself with people and it is not possible also to provide such one. It takes common sense to understand human behaviour in particular situations and communicate in such a way to create union rather than division. If such is the place of common sense in our daily life of communion and communication the neglect of it is a loss to us. Biasless communication transcends common sense (the practical know-how knowing) but does not do away with it.  


Reference


Ellis, Elisabeth. "Common Sense." New Dictionary of the History of Ideas. Maryanne Cline Horowitz, Jonathan Berkey, et al (eds.,). Detroit: Gale center for Learning, 2005. I: 381-383.


Forest, Michael. "From Bias to Method: Pierce and       Lonergan on Common Sense and Its Limitations." Method: Journal of Lonergan Studies 1/1 (Spring 2010) 17-34.

“Common Sense.” Flanagan, Joseph. Quest for Self-Knowledge. Toronto: University          of  Toronto Press, 2002. 69-94.