Common Sense Theory Research Articles

Towards an Intellectual Reformation: The Critique of Common Sense and the Forgotten Revolutionary Project of Gramscian Theory

This article examines Gramsci’s theory of common sense and the implications of this theory for understanding social transformation and theorising political activity. Gramsci analyses common sense as a pervasive, though confused and contradictory, variety of ideology. For Gramsci the point is to challenge and question this pervasive ideology and its incoherence, confusion, passivity, and political conservatism. The task is to involve the construction of a new conception of the world, in opposition to existing belief‐systems, and what he terms an ‘intellectual and moral reformation’. By transforming modes of thinking and acting, such a transformation is conceived as revolutionising political possibilities, altering the potentialities inherent in a conjuncture. This approach of Gramsci’s dovetails with revolutionary and radical political movements, suggesting a more fundamental challenge to capitalism and a forgotten but very energetic potential project of revolutionary transformation.

‘Seeing is believing’ and ‘believing is seeing’

The principal concern of my paper is a distinction between two ways of appreciating works of art, characterised here in terms of the phrases ‘seeing is believing’ and ‘believing is seeing’. I examine this distinction in the light of an epistemological requirement at times at least grounded in what David Davies, in his Art as Performance, refers to as the ‘common sense theory of art appreciation’ in order to assess exactly what aspect of the philosophical approach generally known as aesthetic empiricism his account commits him to reject. I argue that the ‘experiential requirement’, if only conceived in a slightly broader way than is usual, might very well have an important role to play not only in the appropriate appreciation of works that do not demonstrate the need for such a requirement (primarily works of late modern and conceptual art), but also in the ontological account Davies himself favours.

Leader succession and organizational performance: Integrating the common-sense, ritual scapegoating, and vicious-circle succession theories

Our study examines the impact of leader succession on organizational performance. We use organizational learning theory and the concept of time compression diseconomies to frame our conceptual arguments. Previous sports-related studies have concluded that between-season succession (ritual scapegoating theory) does not impact team performance, and within-season succession (vicious-circle theory) tends to worsen team performance. We confirm these conclusions. We also argue that it takes time for a new team leader to “take charge,” and the taking charge process requires that the team and new leader experience regular-season play together in addition to off-season practice to improve performance in the subsequent season (common-sense theory). Evidence from a 60-year data set from the National Hockey League provides support for our hypotheses.

Brown Is Beautiful

Brown Is Beautiful Racism on Trial: The Chicano Fight for Justice. By Ian F. Haney Lopez. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003. vii + 324 pp. $27.95 cloth. In one of his most compelling speeches Malcolm X cried out, want freedom by any means necessary. We want justice by any means necessary. We want equality by any means necessary (Malcolm X 1970:37). In this conservative era, it feels a bit odd to recall how fervently students, activists, parents, and even a few parish priests debated the range of strategies and goals available to the Chicano Movement (1960s to early 1970s). Dozens of scholarly works have examined the Chicano Movement, including diverse groups ranging from the United Farm Workers (UFW)1 (Matthiessen 1969; Ferriss & Sandoval 1997; Jenkins 1985; Levy 1975) to the Chicano Liberation Front2 (August Twenty-Ninth Movement 1975), from the G.I. Forum3 (Allsup 1976; Marquez 1993) to the Crusade for Justice4 (Vigil 1999) and La Alianza Federal de Mercedes5 (Nabokov 1969; Tijerina 2000; Blawis 1971). Movement struggles have included the fight for bilingual education and school desegregation (Carter & Segura 1979; Donato 1997), attempts to gain representation on school boards (San Miguel 1987, 2001), and seeking representation in local and state government and on juries (Acuna 1981), but the movement has also included bombings (Vigil 1999); Reies Lopez Tijerina's 1967 courthouse raid (Nabokov 1969), student walkouts in spring 1968 (jail breaks, as they were frequently called) (Munoz 1989), the August 29, 1970, Chicano Moratorium against the Vietnam War (Chavez 2002; Mariscal 1999), and an incredible loathing toward the police (Morales 1972). A growing number of books (e.g., Trevino 2001; Chavez 2002; Resales 2000), dissertations (e.g., Gomez 2003), and articles (e.g., Chavez 2000), as well as a documentary film series (Norberg 1995), have contributed to preserving as well as interpreting the history of the Chicano Movement. Each addition to this project adds new perspectives, challenges interpretations, and identifies new links connecting past approaches to current political agendas. Ian F. Haney Lopez's Racism on Trial: The Chicano Fight for Justice focuses on two pivotal criminal cases during the Chicano Movement involving litigation that Mexican identity is a distinct racial group. Lopez uncovers court proceedings providing detailed descriptions that he dissects alongside his insightful analysis of the defendants' legal defense. These are important sources that social scientists and historians have not mined in studying the Chicano Movement. Court cases and lawyering strategies open a perspective on the Chicano Movement that adds to studies of more familiar struggles: in the streets, against police brutality; in the schools, for better education; in the fields, for the unions; and on college campuses, for admissions and relevant curricula. The first part of the book sets up the increasing activism in Los Angeles that led up to cases known as the East L.A. Thirteen and the Biltmore Six in 1968 and examines the challenges posed by the decision to use an equal protection defense to expose judicial bias. By examining legal violence toward Mexican American youth, and the responses that Los Angeles Superior Court judges gave to inquiry about their grand jury selections, Lopez unearths micro-levels of the social construction of race and begins to reveal the rise, dissemination, and acceptance of racial ideas, racist practices, and racial inequality. Lopez postulates the notion of race as common sense to explain how Chicano youth, community activists, and judges draw from their everyday experiences to construct racial ideas that are then acted upon. Applying his common-sense theory of racism and court and police discrimination as legal violence, the second part analyzes judges' selection of grand juries and policing in Mexican American communities. In the last section, Lopez demonstrates the increasing use of race rather than ethnicity as identity in the Chicano Movement and draws a connection between protest, legal repression, and race. …

Have we Misinterpreted CAPM for 40 years? A Theoretical Proof

The validity of CAPM has been contingent on its security market line hypothesis, which asserts that higher-beta-risk assets should carry higher expected returns. Owing to a lack of empirical support for that hypothesis, many have declared CAPM dead. However, by surrogating assets' following-period ex-post returns as asset expected returns, most empirical studies have misinterpreted CAPM. This paper shows that higher-beta-risk assets will not necessarily generate higher or lower ex-post returns and that CAPM is such a common sense theory that one can literally observe its ex-post return paradigms at work in the daily capital marketplace.

Preferences need no inferences, once again: germinal elements in the public perceptions of genetically modified foods in Colombia.

This paper explores the public perceptions of genetically modified foods in Colombia in a phase considered germinal: the topic was too novel at the time of research. The analysis covers media, informal conversations, and the word associations made by a sample of residents in the city of Bogotá. The results show that the public capability of associating with the topic, even intuitively, is due to the availability of culture themes, the primary categories that help conceptual elaborations, and the construction of common-sense theories. Three themes are proposed: natural/artificial, tradition/change, and health/disease. It is argued that cultural themes are not only cognitive, but also affectively laden entities, which explains the evaluative force expressed by social beliefs. Acknowledging the relevance of the non-attitude thesis, the author suggests that people associate novel objects with latent cultural meanings, explaining why words, images, and metaphors are readily available in elaborating social knowledge.

A “Legitimate Beef” or “Raw Meat”?Civility, Multiculturalism, and Letters to the Editor

This article looks at the news production practices surrounding letters to the editor as a case study in the difficulties of creating a civil public debate in multicultural societies. It examines how letters editors make decisions about publishing uncivil letters—letters that are sexist, racist, homophobic, or generally intolerant. If letters contribute to the public debate, editors are reluctant to reject them, even if they challenge norms of propriety. Editors reject only letters that fall into one of two categories: (1) personal attack letters that might result in libel suits and (2) letters that are openly racist, sexist, or homophobic and do not in any way contribute to the public debate. They justify their decisions in common sense theories sympathetic to deliberative democracy. Editors thus see a policy of limited editorial intervention as the only way to ensure an open and honest debate about the varied issues that face the citizens of a multicultural society.

Qualitative reasoning about population and community ecology

Traditional approaches to ecological modeling, based on mathematical equations, are hampered by the qualitative nature of ecological knowledge. In this article, we demonstrate that qualitative reasoning provides alternative and productive ways for ecologists to develop, organize, and implement models. We present a qualitative theory of population dynamics and use this theory to capture and simulate commonsense theories about population and community ecology. Advantages of this approach include the possibility of deriving relevant conclusions about ecological systems without numeric data; a compositional approach that enables the reusability of models representing partial behavior; the use of a rich vocabulary describing objects, situations, relations, and mechanisms of change; and the capability to provide causal interpretations of system behavior.

Introduction: Progress in formal commonsense reasoning

This special issue consists largely of expanded and revised versions of selected papers of the Fifth International Symposium on Logical Formalizations of Commonsense Reasoning (Common Sense 2001), held at New York University in May 2001.1,2 The Common Sense Symposia, first organized in 1991 by John McCarthy and held roughly biannually since, are dedicated to exploring the development of formal commonsense theories using mathematical logic. Commonsense reasoning is a central part of human behavior; no real intelligence is possible without it. Thus, the development of systems that exhibit commonsense behavior is a central goal of Artificial Intelligence. It has proven to be more difficult to create systems that are capable of commonsense reasoning than systems that can solve “hard” reasoning problems. There are chess-playing programs that beat champions [5] and expert systems that assist in clinical diagnosis [32], but no programs that reason about how far one must bend over to put on one’s socks. Part of the difficulty is the all-encompassing aspect of commonsense reasoning: any problem one looks at touches on many different types of knowledge. Moreover, in contrast to expert knowledge which is usually explicit, most commonsense knowledge is implicit. One of the prerequisites to developing commonsense reasoning systems is making this knowledge explicit. John McCarthy [25] first noted this need and suggested using formal logic to encode commonsense knowledge and reasoning. In the ensuing decades, there has been much research on the representation of knowledge in formal logic and on inference algorithms to

Why do lay people believe that satisfaction and performance are correlated? possible sources of a commonsense theory

AbstractDecades of research have shown that the correlation between job satisfaction and job performance is modest in magnitude, yet lay people are thought to believe strongly that satisfied or ‘happy’ employees are more productive at work. This paper first documents the strength and pervasiveness of belief in several versions of the happy–productive worker hypothesis (Study 1), then proposes and explores potential substantive explanations for these beliefs (Study 2). It is possible that lay people base their beliefs on genuinely stronger relationships that occur at a different level of analysis than usually studied by researchers, and/or that exist between satisfaction‐like and performance‐like variables other than the constructs typically investigated by scholars. Study 2 provides data relevant to several of these possibilities. The most compelling findings were at the within‐person level of analysis. The average within‐person correlation between momentary task satisfaction and concurrent perceived task performance was 0.57. Individuals feel more satisfied than usual when they believe they are performing better than usual for them. If lay persons mistakenly generalize from their own within‐person experiences of satisfaction–performance covariation to the between‐persons level, this relationship may be the basis for the strong lay belief that satisfied workers perform better. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Behavior analysis and the scientific study of couples.

Behavior analysis has recently contributed a great deal to the study of couples. The current paper reviews several of those contributions. First, the contributions of behavior analysis to the development of Integrative Behavioral Couple Therapy (ICT) are discussed. It is concluded that behavior analysis has guided ICT to be more flexible, more thoroughly contextual, and more attentive to naturally occurring contingencies for change. Second, a behavior analytic exploration of acceptance is discussed, highlighting the what, when, and how of acceptance in therapy. Third, a behavioral conceptualization of intimacy is reviewed, highlighting the contributions that behavior analytic principals make to our understanding of the intimacy process. Finally, the contributions of behavior analysis to the study and treatment of depression are briefly reviewed, with an emphasis on conceptualizing depression in context. ********** Behavior analysis has recently contributed a great deal to the study of couples. Although the study of couples has a long history of using behavioral observation as a key method, a great deal of the work has been either consciously pre-theoretical (in an inductive sense; e.g., Gottman, 1994) or inspired by common-sense theory. Recently, however, those in the field are rediscovering the theoretical and practical utility of behavior analysis. A Behavior Analytic Approach to Couple Therapy An excellent example of this process of rediscovery can be found in the evolution of traditional behavioral marital therapy (Jacobson & Margolin, 1979) into its current manifestation as integrative couple therapy (Christensen & Jacobson, 1991; Jacobson & Christensen, 1998). Traditionally, behavioral marital therapy was rooted in social learning and behavior exchange theories. As such it was primarily focused on identifying relationship skill as the etiology of relationship distress and addressing those skill through systematic skills training. In addition to being focused on observable interpersonal skills, traditional behavioral marital therapy was inspired by the results of nomothetic research that highlighted the differences between groups of distressed couples versus groups of non-distressed couples. In other words, the targets of intervention were those things that had been found through nomothetic research to distinguish distressed from non-distressed couples. For example, distressed couples appeared to communicate more poorly, to have more difficulty solving even small problems, and to engage in fewer exchanges of positive behaviors than non-distressed couples. From a social learning theory perspective, these group differences were interpreted as skill and interventions were formulated to teach partners the skills that would allow them to communicate and solve problems more effectively, and exchange positive behaviors more frequently. Unfortunately, these topographical group differences in many instances may have been simple reflections of other problems having little to do with literal skill deficits. For example, what appeared to be poor problem-solving skills may have been in fact the end result of partners being too emotionally upset with each other to cooperate effectively. In their daily lives, the partners in these couples tend to have no difficulty communicating and problem solving with others. It is only in the context of an emotionally strained marriage that these deficits materialize. In addition to seeing skill where no such actually existed, outcome studies of traditional behavioral marital therapy were finding that only approximately half of those couples presenting for therapy eventually improved their marital satisfaction and remained improved over time (Jacobson & Follette, 1985; Jacobson, Schmaling, & Holtzworth-Munroe, 1987). Although a 50% success rate is admirable, it remained the case that a great many couples were not benefiting as much as would be ultimately desirable. …

Do Venture Capitalists' Implicit Theories on New Business Success/Failure have Empirical Validity?

In assessing new business proposals, venture capitalists rely on their own implicit theories (beliefs) about the attributes that a potentially successful business should possess. From these 'commonsense theories' venture capitalists develop decision rules (selection criteria) to assess the potential viability (and likely profitability) of new business proposals. Although identifying these selection criteria is important, it is also important to determine whether the criteria actually work; that is, are they related to future business success? Despite a call for such confirmatory research, there have only been a handful of studies to date that have attempted to validate venture capitalists' selection criteria. This article reviews and analyses previous empirical studies examining the reasons for small and mediumenterprise success and failure, and the results provide support for (validate) the selection criteria developed for a sample of UK venture capitalists.

G.E. Moore's ethical theory: resistance and reconciliation

Introduction: irony, naivete and Moore 1. Simplicity, indefinability, non-naturalness 2. Good's non-naturalness 3. The paradox of ethics and its resolution 4. The status of ethics: dimming the future and brightening the past 5. The origin of the awareness of good and the theory of common sense 6. Moore's argument against egoism 7. The diagnosis of egoism and the consequences of its rejection 8. Moore's practical and political philosophy 9. Moore's cosmic conservatism 10. Cosmic conservatism II Bibliography Index.

Developing Children's Thinking Through Multimedia in the Context of Local Wildlife Areas

This article explores the results and implications of enabling pupils to create their own multimedia sequences in relation to local wildlife areas within easy reach of schools. The research, based on personal experience in the media and teaching about environmental matters over 20 years, employed what Bassey (1995) calls ‘common-sense theory’ using knowledge gleaned and moulded over those 20 years, informed by the constant comparative method (Glaser and Strauss, 1968). The approach was interventionist, where a change was made to an existing situation and the consequences studied. The result suggests that there could be an important role for information communication technology in relation to wildlife sites and the recent New Opportunties Fund focus on green spaces and sustainable communities sponsored by the UK national lottery.

Theorem Proving with Structured Theories (Preliminary Report)∗

Abstract Abstract Motivated by the problem of query answering over multiple structured commonsense theories, we exploit graph-based techniques to improve the efficiency of theorem proving for structured theories. Theories are organized into sub theories that are minimally connected by the literals they share. We present message-passing algorithms that reason over these theories using consequence finding, specializing our algorithms for the case of first-order resolution, and for concurrent theorem proving. We provide an algorithm that restricts the interaction between subtheories by exploiting the polarity of literals. We attempt to minimize the reasoning within each individual partition by exploiting existing algorithms for focused incremental and general consequence finding. Finally, we propose an algorithm that compiles each subtheory into one in a reduced sublanguage. We have proven the soundness and completeness of all of these algorithms. We wish to thank the anonymous IJCAI reviewers for their thorough review of this paper, and Alvaro del Val and Pierre Marquis for helpful comments on the relationship between our work and previous work on consequence finding. This research was supported in part by DARPA grant N66001-97-C-8554-4, NAVY grant N66001-00-C-8027, and by DARPA grant N66001-00-C-8018 (RKF program).

Seeing is believing: A common sense theory of the adoption of perception-based beliefs

In this paper we present a formal common sense theory of the adoption of perception-based beliefs. We begin with a logical analysis of perception and then consider when perception should lead to belief change. Our theory is intended to apply to perception in humans and to perception in artificial agents at the level of the symbolic interface between a vision system and a belief system. In order to provide a context for our work we relate it to the emerging field of cognitive robotics, give an abstract architecture for an agent which is both embodied and capable of reasoning, and relate this to the concrete architectures of two vision-based surveillance systems.

Forging the links between phenomenology, cognitive neuroscience, and psychopathology

Debates in the philosophy of mind and cognitive sciences in the anglo-american tradition of analytic philosophy have been venturing into new topics: consciousness, the self, common sense theories of mind (intersubjectivity) and the timing of distributed processes in the brain as they may be correlated with a subjective sense of time. There have been appeals to phenomenology from various directions. In addition, there has been a sudden burst of monographs, edited books and articles which actually apply philosophical phenomenology and continental philosophy to cognitive neuroscience. A new triangulating discipline linking phenomenology, cognitive neuroscience and psychopathology is tentatively emerging. In this article, we examine how phenomenological approaches to subjective experience (i.e. first person data) are becoming increasingly important to cognitive neuroscience and its application to psychopathology. Phenomenological studies of disturbances in different mental disorders to body-schema, intentionality (i.e. self-world relationship), time-consciousness and intersubjectivity are found to have particularly promising applications to the research of their neurobiological correlates. A relationship between these disciplines which does not restrict itself to mutual constraint but allows for mutual enrichment is proposed. Curr Opin Psychiatry 11:567-573.

Reasons and Causes: Children's Understanding of Conformity to Social Rules and Physical Laws

The notion of conformity to law is an explanatory principle that appears in commonsense theories of both intentional and natural phenomena. Yet, adults distinguish sharply between conformity mediated by intentions and conformity mediated by physical interactions. To what extent do young children also see these processes as different? Three‐ to 5‐year‐old children gave different justifications for why actors “can't” violate physical laws or social rules. Consequences and permission/obligation were said to produce conformity to social rules. Justifications for laws involved reference to physical limitations or explicit statements of impossibility. Two follow‐up studies assessed understanding of the role of mental states in producing conformity. Older preschool‐aged children (but not 3‐year‐olds) appreciated that conformity to social rules depended on the knowledge and intentions of actors, whereas conformity to physical laws was independent of mental state. These studies suggest that, by age 5, children recognize different sorts of constraint or modality expressed in laws.

Reasons and Causes: Children's Understanding of Conformity to Social Rules and Physical Laws

The notion of conformity to law is an explanatory principle that appears in commonsense theories of both intentional and natural phenomena. Yet, adults distinguish sharply between conformity mediated by intentions and conformity mediated by physical interactions. To what extent do young children also see these processes as different? Three- to 5-year-old children gave different justifications for why actors “can't” violate physical laws or social rules. Consequences and permission/obligation were said to produce conformity to social rules. Justifications for laws involved reference to physical limitations or explicit statements of impossibility. Two follow-up studies assessed understanding of the role of mental states in producing conformity. Older preschool-aged children (but not 3-year-olds) appreciated that conformity to social rules depended on the knowledge and intentions of actors, whereas conformity to physical laws was independent of mental state. These studies suggest that, by age 5, children recognize different sorts of constraint or modality expressed in laws.

Lay Theories of Spring: Displacement of Common-Sense Understandings of Nature by 'Expert' Ideas

To explore the interplay between expert and common-sense ideas of nature in lay minds, a social representations approach was applied to a simple cognitive field, namely ideas about when spring begins, and why. Results from content analysis confirmed that an explanation derived from science is displacing common-sense theories of spring in samples of high school students resident in the Niagara Peninsula, Ontario, Canada. However, the 'expert' theory has no real explanatory value for those who hold it, whereas some of the common-sense theories do. These findings may have implications for environmental education and planning when the object is not transmission of knowledge about science for its own sake but a person's competence in thinking about nature as an ordinary citizen.