Now if common sense is defined as primary theory, what then is its philosophical significance? Far less, I would argue, than is often claimed for “common sense.” The problems with primary theory are twofold: first, it is relatively limited in scope; and second, it is often wrong. Both of these problems can already be seen from the demarcation I laid out in the previous post – the point that common sense (thus defined) does not include the hard-won conclusions of natural science. Common sense can tell us that people who eat raspberries will be healthy and those who eat mistletoe berries will sicken; it doesn’t tell us why this is the case. That requires an accumulation of specialized knowledge gained through more systematic investigation. Similarly, common sense tells us that the sun goes up and goes down, as does a baseball – moving in the sky around a fixed earth – when in fact this is not the case at all, we are the ones who are moving.

Likewise, contra Thill’s comment, common sense does nothing to prevent racism, and historically has done much to support it. Thill claims “Common sense tells us that all humans have the same biology, i.e., a Jew is subject to the same biological processes an ‘Aryan’ or an Arab is subject to.” But to the extent that primary theory tells us this, it tells us the same about other primates, which are killed and nourished by more or less the same things that humans are. Humans outside our in-group, by contrast, can look just as alien as chimpanzees do, with their unintelligible languages and their strange tools or dress. And so indeed many tribes call themselves by a name that translates as “the people” – the common sense of everyday experience has told them that others were something not quite human. A more advanced secondary theory, a departure from common sense, was required to teach people the truth that we share a common humanity.

And so it is no strike against a philosophy that it denies common sense, in either sense of the term. I explained before why our understanding should be able to depart from prevalent ordinary beliefs. But if we aim at truth, we should also be ready to depart from primary theory. It is far removed from common sense to say that the earth revolves around the sun, or that apparently solid pieces of matter are mere collections of atoms; yet these claims are nevertheless true. And, to take us back to earlier discussions, the same can be said of Madhyamaka philosophies like Nāgārjuna’s that claim the world as we experience it is ultimately unreal. If one’s secondary theory did not at times and on some level contradict the primary theory, one could probably just stick with the primary theory and call it a day. But if one seeks genuine truth, one needs to do better than that.

Now it is reasonable to demand, as Aristotle does, that philosophy “save the appearances” to some extent: if one says that common sense – in either sense – is wrong, one must then go on to explain why it’s so common. One needs a theory of error. Some counterintuitive philosophies have a hard time providing this. Śaṅkara tries to tell us that truth is really one, indivisible; he grants that we perceive plurality, and argues that this perception is ignorance and error. But if everything is one and indivisible, how can there be ignorance? In order to be ignorance, wouldn’t it have to be a second thing, divisible from truth? One might argue Śaṅkara has ways of answering such an objection, but there’s no denying that it’s a thorny problem for him, comparable to the Abrahamic problem of suffering. If a philosophical system cannot adequately explain the existence and prevalence commonsense views (again, either in the sense of prevalent ordinary beliefs or the sense of primary theory), then that is a genuine strike against it. But the bare fact that it diverges from common sense is not in itself a problem.

According to Thill’s quote, common sense is better defined in terms of:

the stock of Truths pertaining to the world naturally accessible to normal human beings anywhere on this planet and the faculties of the ordinary human mind employed in gaining access to those truths, e.g., that there is a world independent of our thoughts and desires, that there are other human beings, animals, and trees, the observable regularities of nature, human nature, and animal nature, basic uniform facts of human biology, etc.

Thill’s definition runs the risk of conflating two very different kinds of knowledge: those available to most human beings in the everyday course of their experience, and those which build on an accumulated body of knowledge derived from long, rigorous and systematic testing of hypotheses. The former can reasonably be called common sense. The latter – which of course is close to what we might normally call “science” – cannot.

It is a gross exaggeration to call the truths of science “naturally accessible.” Given the weight of scientific evidence that has accumulated over the past 200 years (or more), and the cost of equipment for scientific research, it is no longer possible even in principle for anyone to learn all the truths of science. They must instead be accepted on faith, on trust in scientific authorities. (I have previously claimed that this faith is not different in kind from faith in the Buddha or the Bible, but such a claim is not essential to the point at hand here; let us assume for the sake of the present argument that there is some sort of significant difference in kind between the two.) Long and sustained observation has told most human beings that the sun goes up and comes down in the sky, in a manner similar to a baseball being launched and landing. The claim that the sun does this is of course completely wrong; but it is naturally accessible to every human being with eyesight, it is what empirical observation tells the vast majority of us, to the point that we still speak of the sun “rising” and “setting” even when we know very well that the earth revolves around the sun and not vice versa. If one says “it is true that the earth is round and the sun revolves around it,” one is entirely correct and justified. If one says “it is common sense that the earth is round and the sun revolves around it,” one is either using “common sense” in the relativist sense that I advanced in the previous post – according to which “common sense” just means “the presuppositions of our society” – or one is being willfully blind.

But if we set aside the accumulated wisdom of modern natural science thus, Thill has still made a good point that there is a large body of knowledge available to human beings everywhere in their daily experience. One can cite many examples: that rocks fall when dropped, that human beings die when stabbed with a knife, that wet wood produces more smoke than dry wood, and so on. (I am particularly fond of the last example; thanks to it, reading Sanskrit philosophy made me better at barbecuing.)

This body of knowledge is real, and important. How shall we think about it? To my mind the most helpful way to classify it comes from the underrated anthropologist Robin Horton, in the concluding essay of his Patterns of Thought in Africa and the West. Horton began with a division between “commonsense” and “theoretical” thought, which he refined (respectively) into “primary” and “secondary theory.” Even with his anthropologically informed understanding, Horton notes that “primary theory really does not differ very much from community to community or from culture to culture.” (321) The entities it describes are the basic inhabitants of everyday experience: “people, animals, sticks, stones, rocks, rivers and so on.” (11) It does not speak of what these things are at a more level invisible to the naked eye (atoms, cells, illusions, ideas in the mind of God); rather, it describes relatively simple spatial, temporal and causal relationships among them. When we speak of things hidden to the naked eye, such as particles and waves or gods and spirits, then we have moved to the level of secondary theory, which is vastly alien from culture to culture. (Horton notes that his Nigerian undergraduates are as incredulous that anyone could disbelieve in spirits as New York undergraduates might be that anyone could believe in them.)

Horton moved from “common sense” to “primary theory” because he wanted to stress the commonalities between primary and secondary theory; but even to him, “common sense” had long seemed adequate as a way of speaking of primary theory. I don’t have a significant problem with using “common sense” to mean “primary theory,” in Horton’s sense; this is quite a different usage of “common sense” from the previous one, but quite defensible. The next question is: what then is the significance of this common sense for philosophical reflection? I will take up that topic next time.

This sort of pattern provides great fodder for the social constructionists in the Western humanities. When one is immersed in the humanities today it’s easy to assume that the default position is a cultural relativism that assumes the absence of cultural universals. But cross the quad to the psychology building, and one can discover a startlingly naïve cultural universalism that confines everything outside Western white experience to a brief appendix.

There are many lessons to be taken from Watters’s article, and I can’t begin to address them all here. The one that stands out for me is Robin Horton’s point that non-Western cultures have a great deal to teach us about psychology and sociology, and not only in the long-literate “great traditions” of South and East Asia. Especially, their supernatural explanations of (what we usually call) mental illness can be far more humane than our medical models. Anthropologist Juli McGruder noted in her studies of Zanzibar: behaviours that the DSM would easily classify as schizophrenia, are classified in Zanzibar as examples of spirit possession, and treated accordingly; and while Zanzibari rituals don’t return the individual to a “normal” state, they nevertheless allow the individual to remain within a caring social environment, and allow a kind of “calmness and acquiescence” (patient endurance, I might call it) in the face of the unusual behaviour.

It’s not hard, then, to see that there’s something very wrong with psychological diagnosis in the West – which becomes psychological diagnosis everywhere, as it gets exported. On the other hand, it’s also worth asking what’s right with it. While the Zanzibaris might have a more effective way of dealing with the behaviours in question, those behaviours do still seem to have something in common with schizophrenia. The case of anorexia is still more intriguing. The behaviour of starving oneself to death is common to thin-obsessed Manhattanites, Hong Kongers complaining of stomach bloat, and the philosopher Simone Weil, who starved herself as an ascetic attempt to transcend the world. Could there not be something these differently interpreted behaviours have in common? If Manhattanites have something to learn from Zanzibaris, surely the reverse can be true as well.

This refusal to make judgements seems to me to underlie the currently fashionable “performance theory” in studies of ritual, and religious studies more generally. The approach here (usually drawing on the speech-act theory of J.L. Austin) is to remove attention from ideas and truth claims and direct it instead toward social functions: don’t look at what people’s claims say, look at what the claims do in their social context. (As a former sociologist it’s curious to me that the hot and trendy methodology in religious studies – look at functions rather than ideas – looks very similar to the sociological functionalism of Talcott Parsons, an approach that sociologists now discuss only to explain how discredited it is.) One former colleague of mine, describing his studies of Vedic texts, explained his approach as follows: “What do these texts mean when they say ‘gold causes jaundice’? They can’t really believe that gold causes jaundice! There must be something else going on here, something that it does to say such a thing.” As far as I understand it, much of this performance theory is motivated by a desire to respect other cultures. Surely people can’t be so stupid as to mean these bizarrely unscientific things they say; they must be saying it for another reason.

It seems to me, though, that this view gets it exactly backwards. We truly show a disrespect for another culture when we refuse to take their claims seriously, as claims to truth. If we don’t air our disagreements, we effectively treat the members of other cultures like children. If a child tells us “I just saw a purple dragon,” we might reply “Oh! Was it a friendly dragon? Or a scary dragon?” If an adult tells us “I just saw a purple dragon,” we reply with some variant of “Are you on crack?” We do this because we respect the adult, in a way that we do not respect the child. Because we believe that the adult has mature intellectual ability, we are ready to tell the the adult that she is wrong. We don’t tell the child she’s wrong, because she’s a child; we don’t expect her to be right.

Similarly, I think, we give other cultures the greatest respect when we treat their views seriously, believe that their members could actually mean the things they say, take those views as candidates for truth – and for falsehood. The community organizer Saul Alinsky put the point very well a while ago, quoting and describing a conversation with some First Nations Canadians he wished to work with (warning, profanity):

Indians: Well, you see, … that would mean that we would be corrupted by the white man’s culture and lose our own values.
Me: What are those values that you would lose?
Indians: Well, there are all kinds of values.
Me: Like what?
Indians: Well, there’s creative fishing.
Me: What do you mean, creative fishing? …
Indians: Well, to begin with, when we go out fishing, we get away from everything. We get way out in the woods.
Me: Well, we whites don’t exactly go fishing in Times Square, you know.
Indians: Yes, but it’s different with us. When we go out, we’re out on the water and you can hear the lap of the waves on the bottom of the canoe, and the birds in the trees and the leaves rustling, and—you know what I mean?
Me: No, I don’t know what you mean. Furthermore, I think that that’s just a pile of shit. Do you believe it yourself?
This brought shocked silence. It should be noted that I was not being profane purely for the sake of being profane, I was doing this purposefully. If I had responded in a tactful way, saying, “Well, I don’t quite understand what you mean,” we would have been off for a ride around the rhetorical ranch for the next thirty days. …
[The conversation was filmed, and when they showed it to some white Canadians in the company of the Indians, the whites looked awfully sheepish.] After it was over, one of the Indians stood up and said, “When Mr. Alinsky told us we were full of shit, that was the first time a white man has really talked to us as equals—you would never say that to us. You would always say, ‘Well, I can see your point of view but I’m a little confused,’ and stuff like that. In other words, you treat us like children.” (109–112)

Likewise, it’s perfectly respectful to say that, based on their experience of the world, the composers of the Vedas found it the best available hypothesis to think that gold causes jaundice. I’m quite ready to believe that without access to the wide array of experimental evidence that we have now, people far smarter than me might have sincerely thought that the most convincing explanation for the particular natural phenomenon of jaundice. It is no disrespect to them to say that they did the best they could and a few centuries of experimentation has allowed us to do better. Moreover, as Robin Horton acutely notes, when it comes to psychology and sociology (let alone ethics), our knowledge in the West is still quite rudimentary; there may yet turn out to be many cases when the weird ideas we find in other cultures might actually be right, and ours wrong. But if we only look for functions and not for the content of ideas, we’re not going to find them. The study of Asian traditions would do well with more Conzes, ready to evaluate the truth and falsity of the ideas they study.