While common sense and rationality often have been viewed as two distinct features in a unitifed cognitive map, this this volume offers novel, even paradoxical views of the relationship. Touching on various disciplines, it considers what constitutes human rationality, behavior, and intelligence.

While common sense and rationality have often been viewed as two distinct features in a unified cognitive map, this volume engages with this notion and comes up with novel and often paradoxical views of this relationship.

This book stands in the tradition of past and current common sense philosophers, like Reid, Berkeley, Sidgwick, Moore, Conant, Slote, Bogdan, and Lemos, who defend common sense, yet it goes beyond their accounts by not only defending common sense but also considering what common sense means. Besides giving a historical exegesis of common sense in Thomas Reid and showing parallels in Austin, Searle, Moore, and Wittgenstein, common sense is also discovered in Hume's An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals and in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. It is made clear how far common sense generalizes, whether proverbs are a form of common sense, and whether common sense can be found in the common knowledge assumption in game theory. Also, folk psychology as a common sense psychology is discussed. In its account of common sense, this book draws on research from history of philosophy, philosophy of mind, and science, linguistics, and game theory to substantiate its position.

While common sense and rationality have often been viewed as two distinct features in a unified cognitive map, this volume engages with this notion and comes up with novel and often paradoxical views of this relationship.

Common Sense and Science from Aristotle to Reid reveals that thinkers have pondered the nature of common sense and its relationship to science and scientific thinking for a very long time. It demonstrates how a diverse array of neglected early modern thinkers turn out to have been on the right track for understanding how the mind makes sense of the world and how basic features of the human mind and cognition are related to scientific theory and practice. Drawing on a wealth of primary sources and scholarship from the history of ideas, cognitive science, and the history and philosophy of science, this book helps readers understand the fundamental historical and philosophical relationship between common sense and science.

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For almost 2,500 years, the Western concept of what is to be human has been dominated by the idea that the mind is the seat of reason - humans are, almost by definition, the rational animal. In this text a more radical suggestion for explaining these puzzling aspects of human reasoning is put forward.