Brain Fertilizer

Hard on the heels of the two related discussions going on at Zomby's is this brief article on the efficacy of common sense. He doesn't go into it nearly deeply enough, I think, but it does make this extremely, well, sensible assertion:

With such a large amount of information being accumulated by so many people, there is a good chance that many truths will be found. Naturally, some of these will be difficult to prove in strictly logical terms, because so much information and reasoning is necessary to the formation of an explicit logical argument for each of them. We know these truths through experience and intuition, as our brains work faster than even the brightest among us can explicitly reason. Thus these are perfectly legitimate ways of obtaining knowledge.

Hence, before discarding any proposition that involves no clear contradictions of known facts or internal logic, it is important that we first try to find some explanation of why the principle is believed to be true. Of course, we should always be willing to test all things, and must be quick to discard those that prove untrue. That is only common sense.