Common Sense Thinking Research Articles

Deficits in Analytic and Common-Sense Reasoning in Schizophrenia.

Human rationality has a dual nature including analytic and common-sense thinking. Symptoms of schizophrenia have been suggested to be related to deficits in these aspects of logical reasoning. However, empirical studies investigating logical reasoning errors in schizophrenia and their clinical and neurocognitive correlates are scarce. Formal thought disorder and theory of mind (ToM) might be particularly important for understanding logical reasoning errors in schizophrenia. The current study compared the performances of 80 patients with schizophrenia with those of 49 healthy controls on syllogistic and counterfactual reasoning tasks and investigated clinical, neuropsychological, and social cognitive correlates of logical reasoning in schizophrenia. Patients with schizophrenia were impaired in both analytic and common-sense thinking. ToM impairment was a significant predictor of analytic reasoning abilities in schizophrenia. Executive functions and verbal memory were also significantly associated with analytic reasoning in schizophrenia. Further studies investigating logical reasoning errors in the early phases of the illness are needed.

Urban Taxi Slogans: The People's Arts

Urban Taxi Slogans: The People's Arts

Beyond equality of opportunity: from 'common sense' to 'good sense'

This article addresses the Labour Party's apparent inability to capitalise on the ready availability of good, progressive ideas. It suggests the key is to be found in the idea that the Labour Party no longer represents working-class people, a disjunction that can be best understood using Gramsci's distinction between 'common sense' and 'good sense'. Good sense is a more coherent development of everyday, commonsense thinking, based on its 'healthy nucleus'. However, it must never lose contact with common sense and become abstract and disconnected from life. Using this distinction, a critique of the common-sense notion of meritocracy follows, since the educational disconnect between Labour politicians and their working-class supporters is one of its malign results. This critique builds from the evidence of working-class rejection of meritocracy - the healthy nucleus that recognises the inadequacy of its justifying principle of equality of opportunity. To this is counterposed a good-sense notion of equality - one that embraces equal access to the means for achieving a flourishing life. This notion of equality is then used to explore a number of currently circulating political ideas concerned with equality, both their relationship to common sense and their potential to meet good sense criteria. These ideas include universal basic income, the Conservatives' proposed 'levelling up' agenda, and the demands of Black Lives Matter for racial justice, including the demand to 'defund the police'. A second thread is focused on the relationship between these discourses of common or good sense and the social forces with which they can be connected.

Intuitions About Free Will and the Failure to Comprehend Determinism

Theories of free will are often measured against how well they capture everyday intuitions about free will. But what are these everyday intuitions, and what theoretical commitments do they express? Empirical methods have delivered mixed messages. In response, some free will theorists have developed error theories to undermine the credentials of countervailing intuitions. These efforts are predicated on the idea that people might misunderstand determinism in any of several ways. This paper sheds light on the comprehension problem. We first discuss recent efforts to explain systematic errors in how people interpret determinism. Then, we present the alarming results of two new preregistered studies exploring three types of comprehension failure: (a) epiphenomenal bypassing, (b) fatalistic bypassing, and (c) indeterministic intrusion. Our findings suggest that misunderstanding runs deeper than others have supposed. This casts doubt on existing models of commonsense thinking about free will. Unless and until researchers properly control for the kinds of misunderstandings we identify, research on free will intuitions cannot shed light on whether ordinary thinking reflects commitments to compatibilism or incompatibilism.

Race, racialisation and colour-caste

Since race categories do not pick out biologically significant divisions of humanity, their use can be misleading and offensive. Yet racialisation – society’s viewing and treating South Africans as though they comprised different races – has generated real societal groups which are significant from the perspectives of justice and identity. In the philosophy of race, these facts make for a conceptual conundrum. Is common-sense race thinking right that races, if they exist, are human groups differing in significant, inherent and heritable ways, in which case there are no races? Or has common-sense race thinking failed to grasp races’ socially constructed nature, and should we say races are the really existing groups generated by racialisation? The same facts confronted the Non-European Unity Movement (NEUM) – a mid-20th-century South African liberation movement – with an organisational and theoretical challenge. Given its uncompromising non-racialism, how could it justify a federal structure which effectively divided its membership into African, Coloured, and Indian sections? If this was not race-based division, what was it? A former NEUM member, Neville Alexander, provided the Unity Movement with the conceptual resources to answer this challenge. I argue that his major work, One Azania, One Nation, is also a contribution to the philosophy of race. Alexander first contends that social constructionists cannot, without equivocation, claim that common-sense thinking about race in one sense has created races in a quite different sense. He then shows that introducing a second concept, ‘colour-caste’, can preserve the insights of the constructionist approach. While races are unreal, colour-castes are real social identities which need to be overcome.

Truth, Half-Truth, and Post-Truth: Lessons from William James

According to many authors, we live in a post-truth era, to the extent that truth has become subordinated to politics. This has implications not only to political debates, but also to science, technology, and common sense thinking. In this paper, I claim that William James’s conception of truth may shed new light on the contemporary post-truth debate. First, I will present the essential elements of James’s initial position. Then, I will discuss some of his amendments to clarify and improve his theory to avoid misunderstandings. Finally, I will address his potential contributions to the contemporary post-truth debate, and consider whether there are special implications for psychology.

Alojzego Felińskiego stosunek do pieniędzy i dóbr materialnych

Materiał badawczy stanowią wybrane fragmenty epistolografii Alojzego Felińskiego, poety tworzącego na przełomie XVIII i XIX wieku. Do analizy wybrano korespondencję, którą poeta prowadził z Michałem Wyszkowskim, Adamem Jerzym Czartoryskim oraz Janem i Walerią Tarnowskimi, a także Franciszkiem Rudzkim. Celem artykułu jest zwrócenie uwagi na wartość dóbr materialnych w życiu Felińskiego; w badaniu poddano obserwacji poetycki rodzaj argumentowania, z jednej strony charakterystyczny dla prezentowanego twórcy, z drugiej zaś – często pośrednio – ujawniający stosunek poety wobec pieniędzy. Autorka, biorąc pod uwagę kontekst historyczny oraz biograficzny, a także perswazyjność wypowiedzi wołyńskiego poety, próbuje wyjaśnić, na czym polega zdroworozsądkowe myślenie Felińskiego zarówno o pieniądzach, jak i materialnych dobrach.

Responsibility Without Freedom? Folk Judgements About Deliberate Actions.

A long-standing position in philosophy, law, and theology is that a person can be held morally responsible for an action only if they had the freedom to choose and to act otherwise. Thus, many philosophers consider freedom to be a necessary condition for moral responsibility. However, empirical findings suggest that this assumption might not be in line with common sense thinking. For example, in a recent study we used surveys to show that – counter to positions held by many philosophers – lay people consider actions to be free when they are spontaneous rather than being based on reasons. In contrast, responsibility is often considered to require that someone has thought about the alternative options. In this study we used an online survey to directly test the degree to which lay judgements of freedom and responsibility match. Specifically, we tested whether manipulations of deliberation affect freedom and responsibility judgements in the same way. Furthermore, we also tested the dependency of these judgements on a person’s belief that their decision had consequences for their personal life. We found that deliberation had an opposite effect on freedom and responsibility judgements. People were considered more free when they acted spontaneously, whereas they were considered more responsible when they deliberated about their actions. These results seem to suggest that deliberating about reasons is crucially important for the lay concept of responsibility, while for the lay notion of freedom it is perceived to be detrimental. One way of interpreting our findings for the interdisciplinary debate on free will and responsibility could be to suggest that lay beliefs match the philosophical position of semi-compatibilism. Semi-compatibilists insist that the metaphysical debate on the nature of free will can be separated from the debate on conditions of responsible agency. According to our findings the beliefs of lay people are in line with views held by semi-compatibilists, even though we did not test whether they endorse that position explicitly.

Investigating the pre-service science teachers' conceptions about scientific inquiry research

The following study presents the analysis of the conceptions of 40 future teachers when they are presented with a practical case related to the thermal properties of materials. This case is proposed as an experimental activity in which students must develop and reflect on the strategies of scientific research processes. For this, they are induced to explain: 1. The hypothesis from which they start to respond to the predetermined problem, 2. The experimental design to address it, 3. The results and 4. The conclusions obtained. The results indicate the existence of two tendencies, a majority related to a common sense thinking and another more counter-intuitive and scientific to explain natural phenomena.

Examining grounded theory through the lens of rationalist epistemology

The objective of scientific, or more broadly, academic knowledge is to provide an understanding of the social and natural world that lies beyond common sense and everyday thinking. Academics use an array of techniques, methods and conceptual apparatuses to achieve this goal. The question we explore in this essay is the following: Does the grounded theory approach, in the constructivist version developed by Kathy Charmaz, provide the necessary methodological tools for the creation of knowledge and theories beyond everyday thinking? To conduct our analysis, we have drawn on the rationalist epistemology originally developed by Gaston Bachelard and taken up a few decades later by Pierre Bourdieu and colleagues to look at the epistemological foundation of the CGT methods as defined by Charmaz. We focussed on two distinctive epistemological features characterising constructivist grounded theory (CGT): the use of inductive reasoning to generate interpretative theory; and the primacy of subjectivity over objectivity as the preferred path to knowledge making. While the usefulness of CGT for conducting qualitative research and understanding the perspective of social actors has been acknowledged by scholars in health professions education research and other research areas, the inductivist logic on which it draws raises questions concerning the nature of the knowledge yielded by this approach. As we argue in this article, it is still unclear in what way the interpretative theory generated by CGT is not a duplication of everyday thinking expressed through meta-narratives. It is also unclear how the understanding of social phenomena can be refined if the use of inductive procedures logically implies the creation of a new theory each time a study is conducted. We engage with these questions to broaden the epistemological conversation within the health professions education research community. It is our hope that scholars in the field will engage in this epistemological conversation and advance it in new directions.

Categories and orthodoxies in studies on culture and femicide

This article is a methodological discussion, in which I argue that to study complex phenomena such as culture and femicide calls for other approaches other than the dominant interview and survey studies. By their focus on the contextual, the interactional and the process itself, and by rejecting language as referential and transparent, ethno-informed approaches better recognize and capture this complexity. To see the interview as a social interactional event grounded in a world of common-sense thinking makes members of a society share a common stock of knowledge, or a social world and communicative understanding. This is particularly relevant in cross-cultural studies, in which we can no longer assume that members share such common-sense thinking. This makes activities such as asking questions and filling answers into categories problematic. We need to see how a phenomenon such as femicide, telling stories about it and our representations reflect the diversity of cultural forms. I will draw on secondary data to illustrate my arguments and their relevance.

Evidence on the coherence–pieces debate from the force concept inventory

We use force concept inventory (FCI) data to probe the consistency of commonsense physics as a knowledge system. The source of this data is the administration of the FCI to first-year science university students. Data quality was checked using item response theory and studying answer distributions for each question. We find apparently paradoxical results: depending on how the data is analysed, answers seem highly systematic or almost random-like. These results are compatible with others found in the literature and can be construed as arising either from a coherent knowledge system or from knowledge in pieces. We hypothesise as a possible source of this apparent contradiction that predictions and explanations use different resources: the former would use reflex, low-cost cognitive resources while the latter would involve conceptualisations. We show that the articulation of both resources may be crucial for expert thinking productivity (the ability to apply a theory to novel situations). We sketch some consequences of the proposed structure of commonsense thinking for teaching and further research.

Themata in science and in common sense

Abstract Human thinking is heterogeneous, and among its different forms, thinking in dyadic oppositions is associated with the concept of themata. Gerald Holton characterises themata as elements that lie beneath the structure and development of physical theories as well as of non-scientific thinking. Themata have different uses, such as a thematic concept, or a thematic component of the concept; a methodological (or epistemological) thema; and a propositional thema. Serge Moscovici has placed the concept of themata in the heart of his theory of social representations which is based on ‘natural thinking’ and on forms of daily knowing, including common sense. In this article I shall explore some features of thematic concepts and of methodological themata in scientific theories and in common sense. More specifically, I shall refer to the significance of the methodological (or epistemological) thema the Self and Other(s) in common-sense thinking and in social practices.

Artificial Minds with Consciousness and Common sense Aspects

The research work presented in this article investigates and explains the conceptual mechanisms of consciousness and common-sense thinking of animates. These mechanisms are computationally simulated on artificial agents as strategic rules to analyze and compare the performance of agents in critical and dynamic environments. Awareness and attention to specific parameters that affect the performance of agents specify the consciousness level in agents. Common sense is a set of beliefs that are accepted to be true among a group of agents that are engaged in a common purpose, with or without self-experience. The common sense agents are a kind of conscious agents that are given with few common sense assumptions. The so-created environment has attackers with dependency on agents in the survival-food chain. These attackers create a threat mental state in agents that can affect their conscious and common sense behaviors. The agents are built with a multi-layer cognitive architecture COCOCA (Consciousness and Common sense Cognitive Architecture) with five columns and six layers of cognitive processing of each precept of an agent. The conscious agents self-learn strategies for threat management and energy level maintenance. Experimentation conducted in this research work demonstrates animate-level intelligence in their problem-solving capabilities, decision making and reasoning in critical situations.

Considerations on Relation between Philosophy of Sport and Common Sense Thinking

Abstract The purpose of this presentation is not to elaborate on the meaning of the common sense thinking and common sense in relation to cognition sensu stricto that is, in relation to scientific cognition. This topic has already been sufficiently covered in a concise and synchronous way. The focus of this presentation is mainly on selective manifestations of common sense thinking and their penetration of the philosophy in general, as well as the philosophy of sport in particular.

Core Blighty? How Journalists Define Themselves Through Metaphor

Journalism has long relied on certain core metaphors in order to express its claims to social and political usefulness. The deployment of metaphors to describe a practice that in contrast asserts its truth-telling and plain prose style is in itself interesting. Since metaphor acts as a powerful indicator of presuppositions it can be used to reify complex public discourses, reducing them to common-sense thinking. This paper explores what metaphors have been used in association with journalism in the pages of the British Journalism Review since the closure of the News of the World. Do metaphorical articulations of the current role and image of journalism demonstrate an awareness among journalists of changes in its values or do they rather tend to reinforce more traditional attitudes to a practice under threat? Post-Leveson what can the patterning of such figurative language across articles by a wide range of prominent journalists in the United Kingdom tell us about the values and aspirations of journalists in a time when journalism is under intense scrutiny?

The Transformative Power of Travel? Four Social Studies Teachers Reflect on Their International Professional Development

Common sense thinking on international professional development suggests that the rewards for teachers are automatic. One of the most frequently advertised gains teachers are expected to see from participation includes the likelihood that they will have a transformative experience, whereby aspects of their personal or professional attributes are fundamentally modified in some productive way. This qualitative inquiry is an examination of the stories four teachers told after participating in one international professional development program. Employing interviews and observations while drawing on postcolonial theory, it investigates if and to what degree travel to and study in China constituted a transformative experience. Specifically, this study is concerned with the influence of 1 study tour on the perceptual understandings of 4 in-service social studies teachers, and if their travel alters the way they interpret often underrepresented and misrepresented content of their curricula.

Men’s Emotions

This article focuses on the underresearched topic of how masculinity relates to emotional forms of caring within heterosexual relationships. Both scholarly and common sense thinking, often present heterosexual male partners as unable and/or unwilling to do emotion work, leaving women burdened with this task. However, contemporary relational complexity increasingly requires emotional reflexivity. Such reflexivity entails interpretations of one’s own and others’ emotions, and acting in light of those interpretations. The question here is to what extent and how that emotional reflexivity might effect a reshaping of heteromasculinity toward more caring forms of emotionality? Drawing on interviews with heterosexual couples in distance relationships, it is argued that emotional reflexivity may produce a variety of ways of relationally gendering emotions. Those who seem to adhere to ideas of men as emotionally restricted may claim tactile forms of emotional expression. However, there may be limitations to these forms in certain circumstances, and this may prompt a reflexive reorientation of heteromasculine emotionalities toward more verbal forms of support. The point of seeking to illustrate that masculinity and emotionality are open to such reflexive shifts is to debunk essentialist views of gendered emotionality which undermine efforts to achieve greater gender equality in intimate life.

Social Sciences and Common Perceptions of Sport

Abstract This paper provides a discussion on various aspects and features of the concept of the social sciences of sport. The concept originated recently and was formulated in 2007 during the preparations for the establishment of the International Society for the Social Sciences of Sport. The Society, however, was not formed until the beginning of 2009. Among other things, the concept includes such academic disciplines and fields as sport sociology, sport philosophy, sport psychology, sport pedagogy, the history of physical fitness, sport and Olympism, sport politics and the international conditions of sport, sport economics, sport organizations and management, the social and cultural foundations of tourism and recreation, the social relations regarding training and sport tactics, as well as the humanistic theory of martial arts. The author presents a growth in interest of different social aspects and issues of sport at the beginning of the twentieth century. He indicates the significant development of sport during the second half of the last century, especially towards its end and at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The social sciences of sport was also underlined as the reason for the creation of a new, dynamically developing cognitive paradigm. According to the Author, it is mainly connected with the institutional and functional, organizational and methodological conditions of the social science of sport which specifically complemented the educational and research standards for the academic community around the globe. The Author emphasizes the social sciences of sport’s distinctive and autonomous part in sport science due to its specific and detailed merit-related issues and methodological foundations. He also stresses that not only does natural science (particularly biological science) play an important role in sport science, but also that the social science of sport has a vital and fundamental value in it. In his opinion, natural (biological) science in relation to sport refers mainly to one person’s organism, whereas social science refers, for the most part, to the axiological, cultural, symbolical, esthetic, ethical perception of physical exertion. Moreover, research conducted in this field encompasses the professional, pragmatic, utilitarian, cathartic, escapist, ludic, hedonistic, epistemological and recreational aspects of differently perceived professional sports or sport for all. The Author points out that the amount of available courses - lectures, classes, seminars - in the field of social sciences themselves, as well as in the social science of sport, is being gradually reduced, which undoubtedly lowers not only the knowledge, but also the perception, interpretation, explanation and comprehension of sport in the context of the humanistic approach. Furthermore, he indicates this trend’s influential role in the development of common-sense thinking, which makes opinion-forming and valuable comments on the subject of sport undergo cognitive deformations. He points out its negative influence on the listeners, audience and fans’ consciousness, opinion and attitude, as well as on the interpretative context of the observed events - not only ones associated with sport, but also those happening beyond it, for instance in social, family, peer, professional, political and religious life.

Colonial Ambition, Common Sense Thinking, and the Making of Takoradi Harbor, Gold Coast

AbstractThroughout the 1920s, British officials in London and Accra dedicated considerable time and bureaucratic energy to the planning and construction of Takoradi harbor, an ambitious project that, they expected, would revolutionize the Gold Coast’s economic prospects. But by 1930, their efforts had created a structure beset with constructional defects, considerable flaws, and financial shortcomings. This article seeks to explain the sizeable gap separating Takoradi-envisioned from Takoradi-realized by examining the massive paper record compiled during the harbor’s planning and construction. Demonstrating that the structure was born largely from illusion, affect, and a particular version of “common sense” thinking, it encourages historians to not only give further attention to the detailed, and often overwhelming, corpus of blueprints, reports, and correspondence that such projects engendered, but to use them to reflect upon the ways in which colonial statecraft actually sought to limit, rather than expand, the knowledge it had at its disposal.