Common sense is defined as sound and prudent judgment based on a simple perception of the situation or facts. It involves basic problem solving and reasoning skills that most people are expected to have. The question of whether common sense is something we are born with or something we develop through life experiences has been debated for centuries by philosophers, psychologists and scientists. While a definitive answer remains elusive, research suggests that common sense likely involves both innate and learned components.
What is common sense?
Common sense encompasses a variety of basic cognitive skills and abilities that allow us to function effectively on a day-to-day basis. This includes being able to:
- Make reasonable judgments and inferences
- Recognize patterns and relationships
- Apply basic logic
- Draw on background knowledge and previous experiences
- Anticipate potential outcomes and consequences
- Solve routine problems
- Interpret social cues and behaviors
- Adapt to different contexts and situations
Common sense allows us to complete simple tasks, navigate social interactions, assess risks and benefits, and meet the demands of daily life without needing explicit instructions or extraordinary effort. It provides a foundation for more advanced thinking and reasoning skills to build upon.
Innate aspects of common sense
There is evidence that some core elements of common sense are innate rather than learned through experience. Some key arguments in favor of an innate component include:
- Basic sensory abilities – We are born with innate sensations and perceptions that allow us to see, hear, taste, touch and smell. Theseprimitives senses provide the basic information needed for common sense judgments.
- Core cognition – Even newborn babies display very basic cognitive abilities likepattern recognitionand making simple inferences. This suggests certain core cognitive processes relevant to common sense are present at birth.
- Universal development – All normally developing children ultimately acquire certain basiccommon sense abilities regardless of their experiences and culture. This points to an innate guiding framework.
- Rapid childhood development – Common sense develops rapidly in early childhood across cultures, seemingly too fast to be entirely learned from experience. This hints at innate preprocessing.
- Evolutionary adaptiveness – The universality of basic common sense suggests it has an evolutionary origin as it confers survival advantages.
Overall, certain rudimentary building blocks of common sense like sensory processing, pattern recognition, and basic inference making appear to be innate human traits that emerge in infancy and provide a foundation for further learning.
Learned aspects of common sense
However, common sense also depends heavily on learning from experiences and social/cultural contexts. Key arguments for the learned aspects include:
- Variable capabilities – There is considerable variation in common sense abilities between individuals, implying learning and experience play a key role.
- Cultural differences – What is considered “common sense” differs across cultures, suggesting it is shaped by societal norms and values.
- Domain dependence – Common sense is highly context-specific, with different expectations for social, mechanical, medical, financial, etc. domains.
- Reliance on knowledge – Common sense depends heavily on accumulated world knowledge and comprehension that must be learned.
- Prolonged development – Many common sense skills continue improving well into adolescence and adulthood as knowledge and experience grow.
Overall, the sophistication, contextual applicability, and knowledge-dependence of common sense implies that learning, cultural factors, education, and life experiences are critical in shaping its development beyond infancy.
Integrated perspective
The modern consensus among psychologists and neuroscientists is that common sense arises from an integration of innate and learned factors. Some key insights of the integrated perspective include:
- Core cognitive processes like pattern recognition and inference making are likely innate, while accumulated knowledge is learned.
- Neural structures that support common sense abilities mature rapidly in infancy but continue developing slowly into adulthood.
- Early-emerging basic common sense provides a scaffolding that more advanced common sense skills build upon through learning.
- Cultural values and norms shape the contextual application and social aspects of common sense.
- Educational experiences can enhance domain-specific and general knowledge relevant to common sense.
In summary, the integrated view holds that core information processing abilities are innate, but full maturation of common sense depends on learning and experience built atop this early emerging cognitive foundation.
Challenges in dissecting the roles of innate vs learned factors
Disentangling the relative contributions of innate versus learned facets presents challenges:
- It is difficult to fully isolate infants from environmental influences to assess innate abilities.
- Measuring cognitive skills of pre-verbal infants is methodologically difficult.
- Determining if early skills reflect innate cognition versus rapid learned adaptation is tricky.
- Teasing apart which later abilities build directly upon early basic skills is not straightforward.
- The interconnectedness of neurocognitive systems makes parsing contributions tough.
Advanced study designs and analytical approaches are needed to meet these challenges. Longitudinal studies tracking development from infancy coupled with cross-cultural comparisons and computational models can provide further insights into the complex interplay between innate and learned facets of common sense.
Implications for child development and education
Understanding the origins of common sense has important implications for child development and education:
- Caregivers can nurture infant cognitive development by providing enriched environments.
- Educators can design curricula targeting different developmental stages as basic common sense skills mature.
- Interventions can aim to boost domain-general common sense faculties or target domain-specific knowledge.
- Training programs can leverage mature innate capacities to scaffold the learning of more advanced skills.
- Knowledge of innate limitations can temper expectations for common sense capabilities at certain ages.
Overall, recognizing both the innate and learned aspects of common sense allows cultivating it optimally throughout development.
Practical applications
Understanding the nature of common sense also has applications in fields like medicine, law, technology and business:
- Medical diagnoses rely on doctor’s common sense just as much as specialized medical knowledge.
- Laws are interpreted using common sense inferences about people’s actions and motivations.
- Artificial intelligence systems need to be designed to replicate both learned knowledge and human common sense.
- Entrepreneurs depend on common sense judgment for complex business decisions and predictions.
Enhancing common sense in these applied domains could have broad benefits. This may involve training programs focused on the knowledge aspects of common sense or user-centric design drawing on innate mental capacities.
Conclusion
In conclusion, common sense appears to emerge from an integration of certain innate cognitive faculties present from infancy and learned knowledge acquired through experiences, education and socio-cultural contexts. While debates continue, the consensus view recognizes both the biological foundations and developmental shaping of common sense. Understanding the interplay between its innate and learned components has important implications for child development, education, cognitive science, and human reasoning in everyday life.