Commonsense View Research Articles

‘Wailing for purity’

Abstract This article gives a critical overview of recent trends and developments in the academic use of oral history. The paper focuses on some of the deep‐level assumptions guiding this work. The first of these is that the medium of the evidence — its ‘oralness’ — often confers a privileged status on the material being examined. Arising out of commonsense views of language which portray speech as authentic and intimate in contrast to the supposed deadness of print, these ideas have often privileged orality as the pure and authentic essence of national cultures. In relation to oral historiography, this valorisation of the voice manifests itself in a number of ways, one of which is that scholars view their informants as ‘oral people’ apparently untouched by literacy, media and the like. The article probes how these shortcomings can be overcome and suggests a range of methodological routes for bypassing these problems.

Social Understanding at the End of the First Year of Life

Social behaviors, such as joint attention, social referencing, and protocommunicative acts, which emerge toward the end of the first year of life, have commonly been taken as evidence of considerable social understanding, even an "implicit" theory of mind. We identify the theoretical assumptions that this "commonsense view" entails and argue against this view of these behaviors by suggesting that the phenomena are entirely compatible with an account which does not attribute to the infant an understanding that others have psychological relations to objects or that self and others are equivalent in their potential for such psychological relations. We end by arguing that the account we propose potentially provides a developmental solution to the problem of how the child develops a theory of mind that is equally applicable to self and other without postulating the existence of considerable innate knowledge.

Content and Causal Powers

Owens (1993) argues that a tension exists between our commonsense view of mental states and the scientific view that psychological explanations not contradict supervenience. He suggests that one cannot accept the anti-individualistic conclusions of Twin-Earth thought experiments and continue to use folk psychological states to explain behavior. I argue that his conclusions are based on individuating content widely and causal powers narrowly, and that such individuation violates consistency assumptions about the terms of his discussion. Thus, I argue, the tension he points to evaporates when we adopt either a consistently wide view or a consistently narrow view.

Making sense of social experiences and moral judgments

In a recent review of James Q. Wilson's The Moral Sense,(1) Alan Ryan observed that the book s astonishingly ambitious and at the same time disarmingly restrained.(2) I believe that most readers of The Moral Sense would readily agree with this observation. The book is ambitious not only because, as Ryan notes, Wilson aims to our everyday moral intuitions,(3) but also because Wilson attempts to do so by integrating most of the relevant areas of scholarship - including philosophy, psychology, psychiatry, sociology, anthropology, religion, politics, education, and evolutionary biology. The book is disarmingly restrained because, as Ryan also notes, Wilson aims to rehabilitate our moral intuitions without pushing any public policy agenda.(4) Indeed, Wilson's book is all the more disarming because it appears to be inclusive and balanced in accounting for the innate and the learned, nature and nurture, the individual and the group, freedom and constraint, the old and the modern, self-interest and sympathy for others. Wilson's analysis is broad and inclusive; he supports his position with knowledge of research findings from many fields. At the same time, he omits or dismisses out-of-hand much of immense significance for morality. Especially, Wilson minimizes writings of some highly recognized thinkers and largely ignores the role of rationality or judgment in his analyses. From my limited knowledge of moral philosophy, he appears to exclude a very significant body of thought. From more extensive knowledge of developmental psychology, I do know that reasoning is now regarded as central (along with emotions) by most who have directly studied children's morality (to be sure, there are many differences in explanations of developmental processes, the contributions of biology and culture, the relations of judgment and action, and so forth). In Wilson's view, however, moral reasoning is mainly the province of the scholar or the rather than the person, whose natural, commonsense moral views are based, to a much greater extent, on emotions. This contrast between scholars and ordinary persons is revealing of Wilson's general position. He states that science has challenged common [viii], resulting in some people talking themselves out of the moral sense most of us possess. Argumentation, justification, and intellectual analyses, for the most part, do not stand us well in the moral realm. Instead, it is our feelings that matter: In fact, when people act fairly or sympathetically it is rarely because they have engaged in much systematic reasoning. Much of the time our inclinations toward fair play or our sympathy for the plight of others are immediate and instinctive, a reflex of our emotions more than an act of our intellect, and in those cases in which we do deliberate ... our deliberation begins not with philosophical premises ... but with feelings - in short, with a moral sense. The feelings on which people act are often superior to the arguments that they employ. [7-81] Moreover, feelings translate into moral ideals through habits (moral ideals arise out of habitual human behavior [243]), and not intellectual analysis. One of the theoretical constructions of scholarly intellectual analyses has been the idea of complete individual autonomy, an idea resulting in such moral ills as drug abuse, street crime, and political corruption [234]. This kind of moral populism moves me to ask a question I am unaccustomed to asking: Am I an ordinary person? As a social scientist conducting research on children's moral development (and other related topics) and theorizing on topics like moral reasoning, moral conduct, culture, and education, I suppose I am not in Wilson's world view an person. But I do not normally ask myself this question because I do not categorize people this way. I assume that most people have expertise in the realm of morality and that there is as much variety in views among the general public as among philosophers or social scientists. …

Anscombe and the First Person

Resumen

Certainty and Surface in Epistemology and Philosophical Method: Essays in Honor of Avrum Stroll (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 151 sure, an extensive investigation into Schopenhauer's surrounding social setting will not always inform his arguments. With regard to Schopenhauer's denial of the possibility of the ontological and cosmological arguments, however, a careful regard for the philosophical spirit of the times might have generated a rather fascinating and fertile inquiry into the ramifications of denying the coincidence between logical and historical patterns of necessity. On a related methodological note, White rarely cites the existing literature on Schopenhauer in either English or German, and leaves his intended audience-introductory readers of Schopenhauer--with only a minimal sense of how other scholars have alternatively interpreted the issues at hand. Moreover, White draws freely from Schopenhauer's works as if they were composed simultaneously, and gives slight indication of how Schopenhauer's views evolved, if ever so subtly. In his own defense, White remarks in his preface that "sehopenhauer would have approved of this way of treating his works as a single corpus." Invoking Schopenhauer as a hermeneutical authority, though, only veils what is undeniable: an author's reworking of a twentyfive -year-old dissertation manuscript tends to complicate, rather than simplify, questions of interpretation. In sum, though White's critical commentary contributes nicely to the existing literature, there is certainly room for a more historically and philologically responsive study of Schopenhauer's dissertation. ROBERT WICKS University of Arizona A. P. Martinich and Michael J. White, eds. Certainty and Surface in Epistemology and Philosophical Method: Essays in Honor of Avrum Stroll. Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1991. Pp. ~13. Cloth, NP. This collection in honor of Avrum Stroll, professor of philosophy at the University of California at San Diego, consists of eleven philosophical papers together with a list of Stroll's publications. Most of the papers discuss topics and issues that are of special interest to Stroll (certainty and skepticism, the foundation of knowledge, surfaces and perception, and common sense and philosophical method), and some of them (those by Hannay, Popkin, Alexander and Martinich) contain critical discussions of Stroll's own philosophical views. All of the papers are of general philosophical interest and can be read with profit and enjoyment by anyone interested in these topics, whether or not he is familiar with Strolrs writings. One of the papers, "How I See Philosophy: Common Sense and the Common Sense View of the World," is by Stroll himself. His approach to philosophy is in the tradition of Moore, Wittgenstein, and Austin in that he appeals to common sense to argue for and against various viewpoints put forward by philosophers. In this stimulating discussion, Stroll distinguishes between The Common Sense View of the World, "which is wholly true, that conforms to those precepts of common sense that are true, and accordingly that is not paradoxical in the way in which most traditional philosophi- 152 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 32" 1 JANUARY 1994 cal views are" (187), and common sense itself which is not a view at all, which therefore is not a philosophical view, and which contains widely divergent ingredients some of which are not beliefs. I am not convinced, however, that The Common Sense View of the World is wholly true. For example, according to Stroll, this view "asserts that somet/mes things are different from the way they appear to be" (196). But I think that it can be established by argument that even though there are material things, there are no colored material things, so that things are frequently different from the way they appear to be. The sort of reflection on secondary qualities initiated by Galileo, Hobbes, and Locke leads us away from the type of realism that accords with The Common Sense View to a realism grounded in science. Thus I found Alastair Hannay's assertion in "New Foundations and Philosophers" that "where theory confounds common sense there is no objection in principle to allowing settlements in favour of theory" (36) more plausible than Stroll's claim that since The Common Sense View is wholly true, when theory dashes with it, theory must always give way. In a provocative paper suggestive of Leibniz's monadology, Zeno Vendler claims that "what we experience at...

The Economic Imagination and Public Policy: Orthodoxy Discovers the Corporation

The contention of this paper is that the similarities and identities of the neoclassical orthodoxy and transaction cost economics far outweigh in number and importance the differences; that, in fact, transaction analysis fills in some major gaps in standard analysis and spins orthodoxy out to a logical conclusion. Transaction cost economics is concerned with the nature and function of the firm in the modern economy. Now, it hardly requires stating that the corporation is, and for some considerable period of time has been, a fact of modern enterprise, at least in a common sense view of the world. This is a view, however, that economic orthodoxy long has resisted. Indeed, much of contemporary orthodoxy still tends to treat the firm in undifferentiated terms, seeing little to distinguish the largest conglomerate from the neighborhood mom and pop hardware store. Moreover, it tends also to view the firm in individualistic terms, rather than as an aggregation; that is, as an owner-operated entity driven by the incentives and actions of a more or less innovating, risk-taking entrepreneur. It generally is recognized that Ronald Coase established the

The interaction between reasoning and decision making: an introduction

Reasoning and decision making are high-level cognitive skills that have been under intensive investigation by psychologists and philosophers, among others, for the last thirty years. But, methods and theories have developed separately in the two fields so that distinct traditions have grown with little to say to one another. The aim of this special issue of Cognition is to encourage and help workers in these two traditions to understand one another’s research and to reflect and enhance some recent signs of “crosstalk” between them. It seemed to us high time to consider the growing interactions between reasoning and decision making for at least three reasons. First, the two abilities are often interwoven in real life, at least according to the common-sense view epitomized in the maxim at the head of this introduction. Second, their study has led to striking parallels in the conclusions that investigators have reached and to the recent signs of crosstalk. Third, the two fields have important lessons for each other. We will explore each of these reasons before we introduce the papers in this special issue. We begin with a sketch of the everyday assumptions that relate reasoning and decision making - a background that we will defend, though it is sometimes disparaged by philosophers as “folk psychology”.

Mirrors, Butterflies, and Training Policy

Training holds a central place in the activities required to enable an economy to change and grow, but because it relates largely to process and changing capacity over time, it is an area where the limitations of traditional economics as an aid to decision-making are readily seen. Examples are given of practical areas where the narrow methodologies of neo-classical economics are unable to analyze training in a way which is useful for policy purposes. The abandonment of the view that theory can provide a perfect mirror of nature allows appraisal of the common sense view of the training professional. A broad range of social science methodologies can be applied to the analysis of the economic aspects of training. Economics itself has a contribution to made, but a limited one. Most of the problems of training policy today are much the same across industrialized countries and concern the different institutional responses to similar challenges. The search for good procedures in training policy, as in other areas of decision-making, is more important than many of the particular decisions taken. It is good planning and evaluation procedures which can modify the unforeseen impacts of poor decisions in time.

Reply to Fulda on animal rights

Joseph Fulda has proposed a somewhat recherchd reply to my criticism of the doctrine of "animal rights. ''I It is always permissible to kill any number of animals rather than let a human being die, not because animals lack rights, says Fulda, but because the rights of animals are denumerably infinite in size while human rights are non-denumerable. (Fulda mistakenly asserts that R I is the number of sets of integers; this assertion is the famous Continuum Hypothesis, which is neither provable nor refutable within standard set theory.) Since any non-denumable exceeds any finite number of denumerables, animal rights may be supposed to exist but are infinitesmal compared to human rights. I am not sure that Fulda's "non-standard-moder' differs much from the common-sense view I endorsed, for reasons that a few preliminary points make clear. First, Fulda's terrorist example does not compel a non-additive view of rights, since, as is a commonplace in the literature, handing over a hostage to a terrorist is doing something wrong, whereas refusing to hand over the hostage is allowing a wrong to happen. Perhaps the governing intuition is not that killing one person is as bad as killing a thousand, but that, standing finn, you have killed nobody while all the moral blood is on the terrorist's hands. Maimonides notwithstanding, most people would chose actively taking one life over actively taking ten million, implicitly treating the value of lives as additive. Fulda's second motive for his model, the supremacy of animal rights over property rights, is also not compelling. If millions of termites are destroying my house, am I not allowed, morally, to kill them? If a wolf is decimating a flock of sheep and mining a rancher's livelihood, isn't the rancher allowed to kill it? If a limit exists to the destruction the rancher must endure, animal rights in Fulda's scheme become finite numbers considerably smaller than most property rights. Third, Fulda's model solves the central man 2 - vs. - animal problem only if the universe is sufficiently small. Suppose you are the quartermaster

The ontological status of computers or what is a computer?

The development of computers as ‘mind tools’ has generated intriguing and provocative views about their potential human-like qualities. In this paper an attempt is made to explore the ‘real’ nature of computers by an examination of three widely different perspective, (1) the common-sense view of computers as tools; (2) the provocative view of computers as persons; and (3) the challenging view of computers as texts. In the course of the discussion an extended critique of the use of anthropomorphic terms in relation to machines is conducted and the fundamental differences between human persons and machines is reasserted.

Three bad arguments for intentional property epiphenomenalism

As I sit at my desk on a warm and sunny day, I begin to desire a cold drink. Because I believe I can get cold drinking water from the fountain in the hallway I leave my office and go down to the fountain where I satisfy my thirst. Having done so, I return to my office. It's a boring story, but one that illustrates the common sense view that intentional states, such as beliefs and desires, cause behaviors and do so because of their intentional content. Had I not desired a cold drink or not believed that the fountain would provide cold water, I would not have acted as I did. However, even if a causal story about intentional states is implicit in common sense and not everyone agrees it is (Dennett 1987, Bennett 1990) that story need not be true. Many reasons might be found to reject it. One could be an anti-realist of one sort or another about propositional attitudes; if there really are no beliefs or desires then obviously any story that appeals to them as causes must be false. According to the neuro-scientific eliminativists (P. M. Churchland, 1981; P. S. Churchland 1986), brain science will show us that the real causes of human behavior are so unlike beliefs and desires that propositional attitudes will join phlogiston and caloric in the dustbin of mistaken theoretical posits. One could also take an instrumentalist or quasi-realist view of propositional attitudes by allowing that statements about beliefs and desires can be literally true, but holding that their truth consists entirely in facts about patterns of actual and counterfac tual behavior (Dennett 1987, 1991). On such a view, belief and desire talk makes no reference to internal causes of behavior or to any states or events below the personal level (i.e., below the level of facts about the whole person and her behavior). Eliminativists and instrumentalists are alike in denying that there are any beliefs or desires that act as causes of behavior; the success of either version of anti-realism would suffice to refute the common sense causal story. However, defeating anti-realism would not conversely suffice to save the causal story. Showing that there really are propositional attitudes and that they are among the causes of our behavior would not vindicate

The anthropomorphic machine: Causal order in nature and the world view of common sense

The first two studies investigate naïve ideas about the causal order in natural processes, using a cause‐effect pair construction method. Results show that people are not naïve systems theorists: they produce fewer feedback loops than would be expected by chance and treat nature as an Aristotelian one‐way causal hierarchy in which causal chains are overwhelmingly linear and causal influence is disseminated down from the top level of the system in an anthropomorphic manner involving the action of the causal powers of things. The action of the top level is treated in a manner analogous to the exercise of free will. In the third study, people endorsed a view of the world in general as a large and complex machine that never runs down, but which is endowed with the Aristotelian properties of purposiveness, direction towards mature forms, constructiveness, and natural justice.

The function of bill-wiping

Three experiments were performed on captive European starlings, Sturnus vulgaris, to investigate the function of bill-wiping. The common-sense view, that wiping serves primarily to clean the bill, was confirmed experimentally: wiping frequency was adjusted to food ‘stickiness’ and the suitability of perches for cleaning. However, by manipulating the degree of abrasion from perches, wiping was also shown to have a significant effect on mandible length and overlap, which in turn affected handling efficiency in certain foraging tasks. Birds with reduced abrasion from wiping showed compensatory increases in wiping frequency as their beaks grew. This lends support to the idea that wiping frequency may be strategically adjusted to tune bill shape to current diet.

Heroic with Grace: Legendary Women of Japan.

Benefiting from the authors' many years of teaching undergraduate and graduate students and practitioners, here is a clear, comprehensive, practice-oriented text for public budgeting courses. Rather than presenting each budgeting concern in mind-numbing detail, the book offers a commonsensical view of public budgeting and its importance to current and future public managers. The text is designed to show readers how managers relate to budgeting and how their actions make a difference in the operation and performance of public organizations. The book covers the historical development of public budgeting, sources of public revenues, revenue management, budgeting processes and formats, operating techniques, politics within public budgeting, and more. Budgeting for Public Managers is concise, clearly written, well illustrated, and grounded in the real-world concerns of public managers. Each chapter concludes with a helpful list of additional reading and resources for readers who want to dig deeper into budgeting practice and application.

Precis of The Limits of Morality

Most of us believe that there are limits to the sacrifices that morality can demand of us. Intuitively, it seems, I am not morally required to be forever making my greatest possible contribution to the overall good-for this would involve considerable hardship and sacrifice on my part. Instead, I am permitted to favor the various goals and projects that I most care about, even if by doing so I fail to perform the act that would lead to the best consequences overall. Of course, if I so choose, I am permitted to sacrifice my interests for the sake of the greater good. But such sacrifices are only rarely required. Typically, I am permitted to promote my own interests instead. In short, morality includes agent-centered options: the agent has the option of performing (or not performing) acts which from a neutral perspective are less than optimal. This, at least, is the view of ordinary, commonsense morality. Despite its considerable intuitive appeal, however, I think that the belief in options cannot in fact be justified. Or so I argue in The Limits of Morality. More precisely, the attempt to defend options runs afoul of various other beliefs that are themselves important parts of our commonsense moral view; defending options pushes us in directions that are unacceptable from the standpoint of ordinary morality. Thus, options of the sort we intuitively believe in cannot be given anything like an adequate defense. In embracing options, the defender of ordinary morality-the moderaterejects a general requirement to promote the good. His position is thus less extreme than that of someone who actually endorses such a general requirement-the extremist. This is not to say, of course, that the moderate believes that there is never any case at all in which an agent is required to perform some act for the sake of the greater good. But such cases tend to be rather modest and limited. Still, there are cases of this sort. For example, ordinary morality would require me to throw a life preserver to save a drowning child, even though the

Suicide: Survivors: A Guide for Those Left Behind

As its title indicates, Wrobleski has written a self-help manual for persons who are closely related in some way to someone who died by suicide. While it is directed at the general public and, of course, at those who have need for help in relation to the crisis of losing a loved one by suicide, it also contains important information and a point of view that could benefit health care professionals. The volume opens somewhat dramatically with the author's description of her own loss, a married 21-year-old daughter who shot herself. Wrobleski then goes well beyond her personal experience to present a commonsense view of suicide in the United States for those who need to come to terms with it as a personal loss. The self-help approach to problems of every imaginable type has become a kind of American vogue, and I approached this volume with a bit of acquired

Pain, suffering, and anxiety in animals and humans

We attempt to bring the concepts of pain, suffering, and anxiety into sufficient focus to make them serviceable for empirical investigation. The common-sense view that many animals experience these phenomena is supported by empirical and philosophical arguments. We conclude, first, that pain, suffering, and anxiety are different conceptually and as phenomena, and should not be conflated. Second, suffering can be the result--or perhaps take the form--of a variety of states including pain, anxiety, fear, and boredom. Third, pain and nociception are not equivalent and should be carefully distinguished. Fourth, nociception can explain the behavior of insects and perhaps other invertebrates (except possibly the cephalopods). Fifth, a behavioral inhibition system associated with anxiety in humans seems to be present in mammals and most or all other vertebrates. Based on neurochemical and behavioral evidence, it seems parsimonious to claim that these animals are capable of experiencing anxious states.

Effect of solar absorptivity and emissivity of exterior surfaces on the thermal performance of a building

The effects of the solar absorptivity and the thermal emissivity of exterior building surfaces on the indoor air temperature of a one room building are evaluated in terms of the discomfort index. The thermal performance of the building has been investigated for four different climates prevalent in India, namely, composite (New Delhi), hot and dry (Jodhpur), cold and humid (Srinagar), and cold and dry (Leh). The results confirm the common-sense view that the building surface should have low solar absorptivity and high thermal emissivity in hot climates and high solar absorptivity and low thermal emissivity in cold climates for indoor thermal comfort conditions.

'A Common-Sense View of All Music': Reflections on Percy Grainger's Contribution to Ethnomusicology and Music Education

'A Common-Sense View of All Music': Reflections on Percy Grainger's Contribution to Ethnomusicology and Music Education