Commonsense Concepts Research Articles

POSTSOCIALISM AS A DIAGNOSTIC TOOL Common-Sense Concepts of Power and State in Southern Poland

Are the common-sense concepts of power and state, used in the rural regions of Poland, manifestations of postcommunist or postsocialist mentality? Several fieldwork seasons spent in the Polish countryside let me to conclude that local concepts of power and authority used by my local informants should rather be called “postpeasant” or “posttraditional” than “postsocialist”. The opinions concerning different forms of authority, as well as the state itself, shaped within the local discourse and shared by the contemporary inhabitants of rural areas of Poland, proved difficult to follow without profound understanding of traditional peasant culture, mentality and value system. Therefore, I suggest the term “postpeasant” to be applied in reference to rural communities of contemporary Poland as more accurate than the widely used term “postsocialist”.

Belief integration in action: A defense of extended beliefs

Daniel Weiskopf has recently raised an apparently powerful objection against the so-called “extended mind thesis” with regard to beliefs. His argument is that since alleged cases of “extended beliefs” lack a characteristic feature of beliefs properly so called (newly acquired beliefs are usually integrated with already existing beliefs rapidly, automatically and unconsciously), they do not count as genuine beliefs properly so called. We defend the extended mind thesis by arguing that Weiskopf is wrong. First, we suggest an alternative account of informational integration that is compatible with externally stored beliefs’ being beliefs properly so called, emphasizes the crucial role action plays for cognition, and stresses the embodied and situationally embedded nature of human cognizers. Second, we argue that even if informational integration were usually rapid, automatic, and unconscious, this would not be an essential feature of beliefs. Third, we argue that even if rapid, automatic, and unconscious informational integration were characteristic of our commonsense conception of beliefs, externally stored “beliefs” would still be sufficiently similar to beliefs properly so called for them to be grouped together for all practical and scientific purposes.

Gramsci's concept of common sense: a useful concept for anthropologists?

The article begins with a brief look at the anthropological notion of culture and some of its ghosts, contrasting this with Gramsci's very different approach. It goes on to look in detail at Gramsci's concept of ‘common sense’, arguing that common sense as theorized by Gramsci provides anthropologists (whose discipline is so concerned with the quotidian) and others, with a useful theoretical tool with which to map everyday life. Gramsci's understanding of common sense encompasses its givenness – how it is both constitutive of our subjectivity and confronts us as an external reality – but also stresses its contradictions, fluidity and potential for change. To help clarify the specific character of the Gramscian notion of common sense, the article compares it with another concept that has been widely embraced within anthropology and elsewhere: Pierre Bourdieu's notion of habitus – a notion, I argue, that remains in many ways tethered to its anthropological origins.

Comer, alimentar e nutrir: categorias analíticas instrumentais no campo da pesquisa científica

Eating, nourishment or nutrition circulate in our culture as synonyms and thus do not account for the changes that occur in nourishment, which intended or unintended, have a hybridization pattern that represents a change of rules and food preferences. This paper aims to take these common sense conceptions as analytic categories for analyzing and interpreting research for the Humanities and Health Sciences in a theoretical perspective, through conceptualization. The food is associated with a natural function (biological), a concept in which nature is opposed to culture, and nourishment takes cultural meanings (symbolic), expressing the division of labor, wealth, and a historical and cultural creation through which one can study a society. One attributes to Nutrition a sense of rational action, derived from the constitution of this science in modernity, inserted in a historical process of scientific rationalization of eating and nourishing. We believe that through the practice of conceptualization in interdisciplinary research, which involves a shared space of knowledge, we can be less constrained by a unified theoretical model of learning and be freer to think about life issues.

Scepticism about Meaning and Reference: Three Arguments by Quine, Putnam and Kripke

Twentieth-century philosophy of language saw a number of related but interestingly distinct arguments that independently challenge the objectivity and determinacy of traditional semantic notions like reference, denotation or extension. Collectively, they can be called ‘semantic scepticism’. This essay will examine three of these arguments due to Quine (1960, 1969), Putnam (1978, 1980, 1981, 1985) and Kripke (1982), noting the increasing pressure they bring to bear on our common sense conceptions of meaning and reference. I will begin by identifying that conception independently.

Common Sense for Your Network

Modern IT managers need to focus on commonsense network security concepts. A primary goal of information security is to limit data access to only authorized individuals.To control network access and properly assign workstations to the proper domain, each port in the enterprise need to be controlled. Another commonsense security concept that organizations have tried to adopt is a password policy. Good password policies can dramatically slow down attackers and their ability to use stolen credentials.

현대패션에 나타난 Trompe l'oeil 표현에 관한 연구 - 2000년 이후를 중심으로 -

This study is about the expression types and characteristics of Trompe l`oeil in modern fashion. The study defines the concept of Trompe l`oeil, examines the Trompe l`oeil in the surrealist works from which the Trompe l`oeil derives from, and analyzes the works that have emerged since 2000. The study used a collection of magazines such as Vogue, Gap, Fashion News, and the Internet. According to the findings, the expression types of Trompe l`oeil in modern fashion were seen in the human body, the wearing style, the details, and accessory effects of clothes. The modern fashion design using the Trompe l`oeil based on such external expressions was characterized by the following: first, the fashion design destroyed the concept of common sense and expressed the purity of the human spirit by revealing the human body hidden in clothes from the combination of clothes and the human body with surrealism. Second, the details or accessories of clothes were printed or painted as if they existed. Pleasure was expressed by applying Trompe l`oeil to the wearing methods and forms of clothes through the optical illusion of materials or colors. Third, the effects of an optical illusion were displayed by transforming and distorting the wearing style and reversing the front, back, exterior and interior of clothes; this optical illusion characterized the deconstruction expressed through the transformation of ideas.

Moral Responsibility and Mental Illness: A Case Study

Various authors have argued that progress in the neurocognitive and neuropsychiatric sciences might threaten the commonsense understanding of how the mind generates behavior, and, as a consequence, it might also threaten the commonsense ways of attributing moral responsibility, if not the very notion of moral responsibility. In the case of actions that result in undesirable outcomes (e.g., someone being harmed), the commonsense conception—which is reflected in sophisticated ways in the legal conception—tells us that there are circumstances in which the agent is entirely and fully responsible for the bad outcome (and deserves to be punished accordingly) and circumstances in which the agent is not at all responsible for the bad outcome (and thereby the agent does not deserve to be punished).

Concept commun et concept analogique de compromis : « un air de famille »

Ne doit-on admettre l’idée de compromis que lorsqu’il existe des partenaires et que ces derniers procèdent à des négociations et acceptent de faire de concessions mutuelles pour aboutir à une forme d’accord ? Est-il inapproprié d’utiliser le terme de compromis pour parler d’entités abstraites ou de catégories de pensées opposées ? Cet article pose la question de savoir quel serait le lien à établir entre les deux acceptions du terme compromis, commun et analogique. Son ambition est de construire deux concepts opératoires visant à rendre intelligibles les réalités multiples du compromis. Partant du champ lexical du mot compromis, il envisage la construction d’un concept théorique opératoire. Le compromis est appréhendé dans son sens commun et dans ses usages variés selon les contextes, afin d’en déterminer les principales caractéristiques spécifiques. Enfin, la notion de grammaire est reprise pour déceler ce qui est commun aux deux concepts et pour poser les bases d’une réflexion ayant pour enjeu la construction sociale du compromis.

Administrators’ Descriptions of Their Leadership Roles in a Precollege Program

The purpose of this work is to describe how leaders of the Upward Bound (UB) program at a university in the western United States described their leadership roles in the program. It is a qualitative study based on data drawn from interviews, observations, written material, and field observations conducted over two years. Participants described their leadership roles as helper, guide, and protector. These roles highlighted the nurturing part they felt they played in their students’ and program’s success. Participants varied widely in their understanding of leadership and their roles. Most relied on ad hoc or common sense conceptions to guide them in describing their roles. This work suggests that UB leaders and others who often come from non-leadership backgrounds may benefit from formal and informal leadership training.

An extraction technique of place-related words based on an association mechanism

We are conducting research on the development of an intelligent robot that can converse naturally with people. Humans manipulate smooth communications by retrieving, understanding and judging several common sense concepts from conversations consciously or unconsciously. In this paper, we focus on the expression of the place from such common sense concepts. We propose a technique which is able to associate the person and thing existing in the place and the event done on the place from the word expressing the place based on an association mechanism. F-measure of the place subject and place object was 88.0% and 84.3% respectively. The average F-measure of both was 86.2%. Moreover, result of proposed technique was 37.7% better than result of a traditional technique which used case frame dictionary. These results show that proposed technique was effective and the place judgement system has achieved a judgement similar to human's sense.

Common Beliefs and Common Sense in Educational Policy and Practice

F. Tony Carusi’s thoughtful commentary about the conceptions of “common sense” in contemporary educational theorizing is a welcome and important contribution to the conversation about the current tides in educational reform and society generally. Carusi helpfully points out that Frederick Hess and Kevin Kumashiro, two educational thinkers who agree about very little in terms of educational reform, each hold relatively simplistic notions of “common sense.” Carusi finds that Michael Apple offers a more nuanced conception of common sense as something culturally and historically situated, but he argues that Giambattista Vico fills out the picture and provides educators with model for both disrupting common sense and producing alternative worldviews in it. In my response essay, I will revisit Hess’s and Kumashiro’s conceptions of common sense to offer a friendly critique of the Carusi–Vichian model of the commonsense educator.

Commonsense concepts of phenomenal consciousness: Does anyone care about functional zombies?

It would be a mistake to deny commonsense intuitions a role in developing a theory of consciousness. However, philosophers have traditionally failed to probe commonsense in a way that allows these commonsense intuitions to make a robust contribution to a theory of consciousness. In this paper, I report the results of two experiments on purportedly phenomenal states and I argue that many disputes over the philosophical notion of ‘phenomenal consciousness’ are misguided—they fail to capture the interesting connection between commonsense ascriptions of pain and emotion. With this data in hand, I argue that our capacity to distinguish between ‘mere things’ and ‘subjects of moral concern’ rests, to a significant extent, on the sorts of mental states that we take a system to have.

Making sense of common sense for change management buy‐in

PurposeThe concept of common sense has not received much attention in the organization literature. In this paper, I propose a model that links a change agent's self‐awareness and reflexivity, his or her sensemaking of common sense perspectives related to planned change, and buy‐in among organization stakeholders. The case is made for change agents to pay close attention to common sense perspectives because they can become the basis for particular problematic ambivalence and diminished change buy‐in among stakeholders in the organization. This paper aims to address these issues.Design/methodology/approachConceptual and theoretical rationales for the model are offered. Examples from the psychological and organizational theory literatures provide support for the various elements of the model.FindingsCommon sense perspectives should be factored into the diagnosis of the organization. Self‐awareness, reflexivity, and sensemaking are all forms of social awareness that are necessary to engage stakeholders on matters of common sense.Research implicationsFour research areas are identified. First, social and cultural contextual influences on common sense require clarification. Second, if resistance is multidimensional, how are dimensions influenced by common sense? Third, what group level of the organization (e.g., individual, group, organization) do common sense perspectives represent? Fourth, how may change agents work out incommensurate common sense perspectives?Practical implicationsCommon sense cannot be mandated. Change agents must maintain self‐awareness and reflexivity as they work with stakeholders in a sensemaking process. Increased buy‐in emerges through minimizing ambivalence towards change.Originality/valueLittle, if anything, has been written on the use of common sense in organizational change management.

MORAL AND EPISTEMIC OPEN‐QUESTION ARGUMENTS

MORAL AND EPISTEMIC OPEN‐QUESTION ARGUMENTS

Representation of Principled Connections: A Window Onto the Formal Aspect of Common Sense Conception

Nominal concepts represent things as tokens of types. Recent research suggests that we represent principled connections between the type of thing something is (e.g., DOG) and some of its properties (k-properties; e.g., having four legs for dogs) but not other properties (t-properties; e.g., being brown for dogs). Principled connections differ from logical, statistical, and causal connections. Principled connections license (i) the expectation that tokens of the type will generally possess their k-properties, (ii) formal explanations (i.e., explanation of the presence of k-properties in tokens of a type by reference to the type of thing it is), and (iii) normative expectations concerning the presence of k-properties in tokens of the type. The present paper investigates the hypothesis that representing principled connections requires representing properties as aspects of being the relevant kind of thing (Aspect Hypothesis). Experiment 1 provides a direct test of the Aspect Hypothesis. Experiments 2 and 3 provide indirect tests of the Aspect Hypothesis. All three experiments provide support for the Aspect Hypothesis. Experiment 4 investigates a prediction of the Aspect Hypothesis concerning the manner in which formal explanations are licensed by principled connections. Finally, Experiment 5 investigates a prediction of the Aspect Hypothesis concerning the nature of the normative expectations licensed by principled connections. Together these results provide strong evidence for the idea that representing principled connections involves representing a property as being an aspect of being a given kind of thing. The results also help clarify the manner in which formal explanation differs from other modes of explanation. Finally, the results of the experiments are used to motivate a proposal concerning the formal structure of the conceptual representations implicated by principled connections. This structure provides a domain-general way of structuring our concepts and embodies the perspective we take when we think and talk of things as being instances of a kind.

Brain Science and Free Will

Brain sciences can show that our acts are caused by deterministic processes in our brain and that our acts are often influenced by unconscious brain processes, but these facts alone cannot deny free will. Brain sciences are important rather because they, along with other biological and behavioral sciences, offer the data that seem troublesome for compatibilists. The problem of free will cannot be solved either by conceptual analysis alone or by empirical research alone. Whether we endorse reductionism or non-reductionism, it is necessary to revise our commonsense concept of free will to establish compatibilism.

Blackless Fantasy

This article focuses on questioning and theorizing the visual and discursive disappearance of blackness from virtual fantasy worlds. Using EverQuest, EverQuest II, and World of Warcraft as illustrative of a timeline of character creation design trends, this article argues that the disappearance of blackness is a gradual erasure facilitated by multicultural design strategies and regressive racial logics. Contemporary fantasy massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) privilege whiteness and contextualize it as the default selection, rendering any alterations in coloration or racial selection exotic stylistic deviations. Given the Eurocentrism inherent in the fantasy genre and embraced by MMORPGs, in conjunction with commonsense conceptions of Blacks as hyper-masculine and ghettoized in the gamer imaginary, players and designers do not see blackness as appropriate for the discourse of heroic fantasy. As a result, reductive racial stereotypes and representations proliferate while productive and politically disruptive racial differences are ejected or neutralized through fantastical proxies.

Forms of emergent interaction in General Process Theory

General Process Theory (GPT) is a new (non-Whiteheadian) process ontology. According to GPT the domains of scientific inquiry and everyday practice consist of configurations of ‘goings-on’ or ‘dynamics’ that can be technically defined as concrete, dynamic, non-particular individuals called general processes. The paper offers a brief introduction to GPT in order to provide ontological foundations for research programs such as interactivism that centrally rely on the notions of ‘process,’ ‘interaction,’ and ‘emergence.’ I begin with an analysis of our common sense concept of activities, which plays a crucial heuristic role in the development of the notion of a general process. General processes are not individuated in terms of their location but in terms of ‘what they do,’ i.e., in terms of their dynamic relationships in the basic sense of one process being part of another. The formal framework of GPT is thus an extensional mereology, albeit a non-classical theory with a non-transitive part-relation. After a brief sketch of basic notions and strategies of the GPT-framework I show how the latter may be applied to distinguish between causal, mechanistic, functional, self-maintaining, and recursively self-maintaining interactions, all of which involve ‘emergent phenomena’ in various senses of the term.

Pragmatique linguistique et normativité : Remarques sur les modalités discursives du sens commun

Linguistics must set for task a theory of common sense, able to describe the mechanisms of semantic obviousness. From this point of view, the philosophical concept of common sense is redefined here in terms of semiotic process of the norms of the praxis. The detailed analysis of these norms shows that they operate simultaneously in various registers. But the concept of common sense is also specified compared to discursive dynamics, starting from three types of variations (canon, vulgate, doxa). To these typical variations of common sense correspond of functional criteria applicable to the analysis of corpus. The study outlines moreover a praxeologic and pragmatic model of the concept of “genre” and proposes to revalue the role of the speaker starting from the concept of “pluriphonie”. It is a question of specifying, step by step, the idea of community of language.