Fission and the Facts

Abstract

1. How far is Common Sense, a thing only partly invented, only partly a useful fiction, committed to anything that is philosophically problematic? The answer one gives to that question must significantly determine one's conception of the point and scope of philosophy, one's view of how far philosophy legitimately can have revisionary ,aspirations, one's sense of how satisfying a description of our practices can be if that description indeed leaves everything as it is, if it aims only to dissolve or diffuse conflicts among the justifications give for those practices, if, as a matter of principle, it never finds a place for the diagnosis of vitiating error. The Revisionist makes his task easier by attributing to Common Sense proto-philosophical theories about features of our ordinary ,-practices, theories which may then be shown to be internally incoherent, inconsistent with other things we take for granted or simply too primitive to take seriously. Thus philosophical pictures sometimes seem to be foisted on Common Sense. Our ordinary understanding of the passage of time is sometimes supposed to embody the picture of reality growing at one end and perhaps diminishing at the other at the same unspecifiable rate. Our ordinary conception of free will is sometimes supposed to involve a picture of free will as a kind of causation itself uncaused and yet somehow properly associated with particular human beings, where human beings are themselves depicted as morasses of causal determination. Our ordinary notion