Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: common sense; Vernachlässigung

Kurzinhalt: 3 Gründe für das Nicht-Beachten (Übersehen) des common sense Musters

Textausschnitt: 6. Summary
72/3 Although the first three chapters invite you, the reader, to appropriate your own activity of understanding, there is a significant difference between the first two chapters and this third chapter. The examples of insight presented in the first two chapters were taken from theoretical patterns of knowing which are oriented by a disinterested and detached desire to know universal objectives, while the acts of understanding examined in this chapter are oriented by an interested desire to know limited, pragmatic objectives. While these pragmatic objectives are symbolically motivated, in this chapter our concern is, not primarily with personal motives for seeking such goals, but with the broader interests that orient this pattern of knowing, and the fact that these motives direct a person's understanding toward concrete particular courses of action requiring specific skills to achieve particular tasks. (89; Fs)
73/3 Economists or social scientists are interested in more universal courses of human actions, whereas people using common-sense patterns of knowing operate in much narrower and more specialized modes of knowing since their concern is to know how to perform concrete particular tasks. If you are interested in getting along with your neighbor, you are interested not in neighbors generally, but in neighbors who live in a particular place and time, who have particular temperaments, traits, and characters. General advice is helpful, but to be concretely helpful that general knowledge will have to be particularized through insights into concrete situations. And if you move to a different neighborhood, the concrete differences of that new situation will have to be understood in their particularity. To know how to live intelligently in any concrete social situation, you must operate in the common-sense pattern of knowing. You may bring more universal knowledge to bear on that situation, but such general knowledge must be particularized through common-sense insights into the concrete, here-and-now human situations. (89f; Fs)
74/3 If the continually shifting common-sense patterns of knowing are so central to the history of concrete human living, why has this pattern of knowing been so neglected by scholars? There are three reasons. (90; Fs)
75/3 First, it was the dramatic success of theoretical, explanatory knowing in the seventeenth century that precipitated the epistemological crisis and turned philosophers' attention to the problem of the objectivity of knowing. As we have seen, the key step in that revolution was the shift from knowing things in a descriptive context to knowing things in an explanatory pattern where things are no longer related to the knowing subject, but are related to one another in recurring patterns. There was a tendency then among scholars to denigrate any method of knowing that did not operate in the explanatory context. Thus, descriptive knowing that relates things to the subject was criticized and invalidated as subjective and limited to surface appearances, as opposed to the theoretical pattern of knowing that disclosed the real inner structures of things. (90; Fs)
76/3 This mistake was followed by the second oversight of failing to recognize that while theoretical knowing, as practiced by classical scientists such as Galileo and Newton, was valid, it was nevertheless an abstract and universal pattern of knowing. Although the universal laws of mechanics were thought to be verified in concrete instances, they were not verified in every past, present, and future concrete instance. The basic error was to assume that all past and future concrete instances were given and would be given in the same continuous fashion that classical scientists had assumed but had not actually verified. Or, to put it negatively, classical scientists did not assume that the present planetary cycles were operating in a field of statistically given conditions. Unlike contemporary meteorologists, who assume that weather cycles operate under statistically given conditions, classical scientists assumed that the present given conditions would continue to remain the same. (90; Fs)
77/3 Common-sense knowers, on the other hand, realize that situations and people change, and they do so, if not all the time, then at least some of the time. And occasionally these changes can be quite significant and surprising. Common-sense knowledge, then, is always incomplete and can only be completed by paying attention to the concrete tasks and particular people with whom you are working at any given time. To scientists who are attempting to understand the universe in a completely comprehensive way, the common-sense mode of understanding may seem to be rather superficial knowledge, but it is the mode of knowledge that scientists themselves use in dealing with the practical affairs of their own day-to-day living. Moreover, there is no other way of knowing the concrete, particular aspects of things. (90f; Fs)
78/3 A further reason why common-sense modes of knowing have been overlooked or degraded is because knowing concrete particular persons, places, and times is assumed to require no more than ordinary attentive sensing. To know that water, steam, and ice are different modes of behavior of one and the same operating substance (H2O) requires 'looking' underneath the surface of things in order to reveal their hidden structures, whereas common-sense knowers observe only the outward sensible appearances of things and know only the shadows and surfaces of these things. To know the real substance of things we must put on the geometer's or the chemist's glasses and 'see' the inner constituents of these things. Behind this type of assertion is a basic epistemological assumption about what constitutes real objective knowing. I will address this epistemological issue in the fifth chapter, but here I would like to stress the crucial role that insights or understandings play in any pattern of knowing, and especially in the ordinary, familiar, but unthematized mode of common-sense knowing. (91; Fs)
79/3 Let us take as an example the problem of knowing how to read. Before children learn how to read they can see the written or printed letters but cannot see words, phrases, sentences, and paragraphs. Children have an immediate sensible awareness of the letters, but it will take them a year or more to mediate and transform those immediate sensible experiences into readable experiences of different types of meaning. We cannot see meanings. Children must learn to read the invisible meanings within the visible marks. People who know how to read are so used to interpreting letters as words and phrases that they forget that such words and phrases cannot be seen. Words, then, are not immediate experiences but mediated, interpreted experiences, and without such mediating insights, the visible marks will have no meaning. (91; Fs) (notabene)