As there are theoretical fields like physics, chemistry, and biology, there is also the practical field of human events and relationships that Lonergan calls common sense.275 This distinction in fields is the product of a more basic distinction within human intelligence, for the latter can be both speculative and practical.276 I will discuss common sense intelligence first and then briefly compare and contrast it with theoretical intelligence.
Lonergan bluntly writes, “Common sense is practical.”277 It is practical in the sense that it “seeks knowledge, not for the sake of the pleasure of contemplation, but to use knowledge in making and doing.”278 Common sense intelligence is a specialization of intelligence in the particular and concrete, as opposed to the universal and abstract.279 Lonergan maintains that it is “the vague name given to the unknown source of a large and floating population of elementary judgments which everyone makes, everyone relies on, and almost everyone regards as obvious and indisputable.”280 Its business is daily life,281 the familiar world of what Lonergan calls “things for us,”282 and its terms are derived from everyday experience.283 These terms are constant and include descriptions such as
“visible shapes and spectrum of colors, the volume, pitch, and tone of sounds, the hot and cold, wet and dry, hard and soft, slow and swift.”284
275 Insight, 234-235. 276 Ibid., 621. 277 Ibid., 232. 278 Ibid. 279 Ibid., 198-199. 280 Ibid., 314. 281 Ibid., 255. 282 Ibid., 201. 283 Ibid., 321. 284 Ibid.
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Common sense’s “apparently secure and modest undertaking” 285 is to understand
things in terms of describing their relations to us, which is tantamount to understanding things as they “enter into the concerns of man.”286 This domain of ordinary description, as Longeran calls it, has as an object what is to be known by concrete judgments of fact.287 Similar to other objects of knowledge, it is reached by the self-correcting process of learning.288 The proper domain of common sense is precisely this descriptive field of concrete, particular matters of fact, which is “divided up and parceled out among the men and women familiar with its several parts.”289 Common sense does not entirely reside in the mind of any one individual.290 It has to be acquired and for this reason it is not possessed equally by all.291
To shed light on the nature of common sense, Lonergan contrasts it with scientific theoretical intelligence.292 Unlike common sense, science has theoretical aspirations, which embrace an advance “from description to explanation, from things as related to our senses, through measurements, to things as related to one another.”293 Scientific inquiry departs “from the familiar to the unfamiliar, from the obvious to the recondite.”294 Science’s heuristic assumptions “anticipate the determination of natures that always act in the same fashion under similar circumstances, and as well the determination of ideal
285 Ibid., 232. Italics mine. It is interesting that Lonergan adds the word “apparently” to his description of common sense’s enterprise. As I will discuss below, common sense’s undertaking can actually end up being alarmingly immodest and insecure, for it is subject to bias.
286 Ibid., 317. 287 Ibid. 288 Ibid. 289 Ibid., 444. 290 Ibid., 236-237. 291 Ibid., 322.
292 He also contrasts common sense knowing with mathematical knowing, but for the sake of simplicity, I will only mention science. Please see: Understanding and Being, 84-88; Insight, 196-204.
293 Ibid., 201. 294 Ibid., 202.
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norms of probability from which events diverge only in a nonsystematic manner.”295 Science is typified by both utilizing a technical language with unambiguously defined terms and aiming to arrive at generalizations that “offer a premise from which correct deductions can be drawn.”296 These generalizations express the scientist’s “rounded set of insights that holds in every instance or none at all.”297
Lonergan argues that both science and common sense’s generalizations are arrived at through a process of collaboration.298 Focusing on the common sense form of collaboration, which is fundamentally a communal collaboration in the self-correcting process of learning,299 Lonergan notes that human beings are “born into a community that possesses a common fund of tested answers.”300 Insights that were generated by previous generations accumulate and are then handed down to later generations. The common sense generalizations that have emerged from past generations can take the form of proverbs, which “communicate pointers that ordinarily it is well to bear in mind.”301 They admit of numerous exceptions, but do not lose their validity in virtue of that fact,302 for they are a “more or less invariant element in variable relations.”303 Each fresh, concrete situation demands that an individual call upon the available accumulated storehouse of previous insights and add complementary insights of his own that will meet the situation’s precise requirements.304
295 Ibid., 199. 296 Ibid. 297 Ibid. 298 Ibid., 202. 299 Ibid., 323. 300 Ibid., 198. 301 Ibid., 199. 302 Ibid. 303 Ibid., 598. 304 Ibid., 322.
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What is common in common sense is “not some list of general truths about which all men can agree.”305 Nor is it “some list of particular truths about which all men can agree.”306 Instead, the common element is “a collaboration in the erection of a basic structure by which, with appropriate adjustments, each individual is enabled to fill out his individual list of particular truths.”307 Lonergan classifies common sense as a “multiple- purpose and multiple-adjustable tool that can be employed in all sorts of ways but never is actually to be employed without the appropriate adjustment being made.”308 As a result, common sense is a remarkably flexible type of intelligence that allows one to have the capacity to adapt to and successfully meet the immediate challenges posed in a given concrete situation.
Common sense, then, is inherently incomplete since it needs those appropriate adjustments.309 Lonergan affirms that common sense “consists in a basic nucleus of insights that never is utilized without the addition of at least one further insight into the situation at hand.”310 The generalizations of common sense consist of an incomplete set of insights that the individual draws upon in every concrete situation, but the generalizations become “proximately relevant only after a good look around has resulted in the needed additional insights.”311 Exactly which insight or insights an individual chooses to draw from this accumulated common fund in a given situation is shaped by
305 Ibid., 324. 306 Ibid. 307 Ibid.
308 Bernard Lonergan, “Merging Horizons: System, Common Sense, Scholarship,” Philosophical and Theological Papers 1965-1980, Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, Vol. 17, Ed. Robert C. Croken and Robert M. Doran (Toronto, University of Toronto, 2004), 52.
309 Insight, 199. 310 Ibid., 598. 311 Ibid., 199.
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“his capacity, his interests and his energy.”312 For these reasons, common sense is endlessly variable.313
Another important feature of common sense that differentiates it from science is that it varies according to one’s occupation, social group, place, and time.314 Differentiations within science are due to theoretical differences within different departments.315 With respect to common sense, Lonergan observes, “At a given place, in a given job, among a given group of people, a man can be at intelligent ease in every situation in which he is called upon to speak or act.”316 However, that man’s achievement “is relevant only to its environment.”317 If you remove that man from the milieu to which he has become accustomed and place him instead “among others in another place or at another job,” awkwardness and hesitancy will unavoidably ensue until “he has accumulated a fresh set of insights.”318 This is why Lonergan argues that common sense’s methodological precepts do not consist of generalizing or arguing from analogy, but at building up and retaining a core of habitual understanding that is to be adjusted by further learning in each new situation that arises.”319 One should note that, in contrast to common sense knowers, if one removed the scientist or another theoretical knower from his environment, his explanatory insights would still remain universally valid.
Perhaps the starkest difference between science and common sense is one of attitude. What one considers to be the criterion of the relevance of further pertinent questions marks what Lonergan calls “the great divide between a scientific attitude and a
312 Ibid., 198.
313 Lonergan, “Merging Horizons: System, Common Sense, Scholarship,” 52. 314 Insight, 598. 315 Ibid., 204. 316 Ibid., 203. 317 Ibid. 318 Ibid. 319 Ibid., 322.
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commonsense attitude.”320 Due to the fact that the scientist “aims at ultimate explanation,” he persistently asks why “until the ultimate explanation is reached.”321 The man of common sense, however, cuts off his questioning as soon as “further inquiry would lead to no immediate appreciable difference in the daily life of man.”322 Lonergan underscores how the man of common sense’s inquiry is intensely interested and restricted by noting, “Descriptively, what does a man of common sense do when you start raising theoretical problems? He’ll either excuse himself, or he’ll ask you, ‘What’s the good of it?’”323 A common sense knower pursues knowledge motivated by a desire to live,324 or to develop more intelligent and successful ways of living.325
The man of common sense’s inquiry, then, is informed by a pragmatic criterion of success.326 The pertinence of the further questions in a common sense inquiry is constrained by whether the questions are directed at answers that make an immediate, palpable difference.327 Lonergan calls this “the supreme canon of common sense,” which is that further questions are restricted to “the realm of the concrete and particular, the immediate and the practical.”328 The further pertinent questions that the man of common sense raises and the subsequent insights that emerge from those questions “are bounded by the interests and concerns of human living, by the successful performance of daily
320 Ibid., 320. 321 Ibid.
322 Ibid., 320-321.
323 Understanding and Being, 311. 324 Ibid., 86.
325 Joseph Flanagan, Quest for Self-Knowledge, 70. 326 Insight, 318.
327 Ibid., 201. 328 Ibid.
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tasks, by the discovery of immediate solutions that will work.”329 Stated simply, common sense understanding does not seek “strict universality, but general utility.”330
Despite the differences between science and common sense, there is an innate, intimate complementarity between them. The two types of knowing are “the functionally related parts within a single knowledge of a single world.”331 Lonergan claims that science and common sense are essentially “partners.”332 Science comprehensively grasps the intelligibility of the concrete that common sense deals with effectively.333 It is the successful cooperation between science and common sense “that constitutes applied science and technology, that adds inventions to scientific discoveries, that supplements inventions with organizations, knowhow, and specialized skills.”334 The rational choice is not between science and common sense, rather “it is a choice of both, of science to master the universal, and of common sense to deal with the particular.”335