Chapter 2 focuses on the emergence of the modern concept of the reasonable person in nineteenth-century Britain. It argues that this development resulted from the legal and economic needs of the industrial revolution and was informed by the metaphysics of the Scottish sentimental Enlightenment. The chapter’s point of departure is the case known as Blyth v The Company of Proprietors of the Birmingham Waterworks, one of the first cases to discuss explicitly modern law’s reasonable person. Distinguishing between a rational Enlightenment and a sentimental Enlightenment, the chapter then shows that the underlying rationale of the reasonable person relies heavily on the sentimental Enlightenment, namely on David Hume’s and Adam Smith’s thought on the importance of empathy, judgement making in relation to the feelings of others, the incomplete understanding of morality that can be gained from objective reason, and the importance of a human common sense. The third section explains how the industrial revolution and the sentimental Enlightenment influenced the life of Baron Alderson, the judge who oversaw Mr Blyth’s case against the Birmingham Waterworks.

‘Contested Concepts: Plutarch’s On Common Conceptions’ by Thomas Bénatouïl addresses the question of how ordinary concepts, for instance a layman’s concept of a spider, intersect with a zoologist’s concept of that insect. While from the epistemological point of view the latter’s concept should be allowed to prevail, from the point of view of semantics and the philosophy of mind it is not at all obvious that the scientific concept of spider should be allowed to rule over the corresponding lay concept, nor is it obvious that there is only one concept of spider whose content can be fixed for every context. Clearly, the Academics and the Stoics were aware of the importance of this and related problems. Plutarch’s dialogue On Common Conceptions, subtitled Against the Stoics, is a representative text of these schools’ respective stances, and its study by Thomas Bénatouïl aims to bring out both its historical significance and systematic interest.

This letter comments on the affinities between prudence and moderation. It starts from the definition of prudence given by the sixteenth-century Spanish writer Baltasar Gracián in his classic book, The Pocket Oracle and the Art of Prudence (1647), and then examines the different faces of prudence as illustrated by Titian’s famous Allegory of Prudence.

This chapter highlights the affinities between moderation, modesty, and humility. It uses the example of the Swedish term lagom, which connotes a certain form of humility and respect for limits.

7. In daily life, common sense refers to established uniformities of a physical, biological, and social nature, and it is usually assumed to be self-evident. Humans sense such uniformities as constancies passed on over generations, and common sense is an implicit and normative guidance for daily acting.

In this chapter, I have shown that the relations between common sense and social representations are complex and manifold, and one cannot substitute one phenomenon for the other. I insisted that relations between common sense and social representations are different in the broad and narrow perspectives of social representations.

In the broad perspective, Moscovici distinguished between two forms of common-sense knowledge: historically, first-hand common-sense knowledge generates scientific knowledge. It is based on traditions and consensus, comprising daily thinking and language, images, and metaphors. Second-hand common-sense knowledge results from the transformation of scientific knowledge into daily knowledge.

In the narrow perspective, I suggest that Moscovici was not primarily concerned with rationality of common sense but with reversals of unconscious into conscious beliefs and knowledge, and vice versa, in the formation and transformation of social representations of specific phenomena. I identify two sources of such reversals: the unconscious (and non-conscious) and themata.

In a striking passage from the last book of his Tusculan Disputations, Cicero claims to live from day to day (nos in diem vivimus; 5.33). He always opts for what he deems probable, and this, he argues, also constitutes his freedom. This remarkable statement, which is obviously rooted in Cicero’s Academic philosophy, is far from unproblematic. This contribution aims at a better understanding of Cicero’s claim, through an analysis of his argumentative strategies in Tusculan Disputations. More precisely, attention is given to Cicero’s use of (1) the argument from common sense, (2) the argument from dignitas and decorum, (3) illustrative examples, and (4) to his approach in introducing the philosophical topics of the conversation. Finally, I deal with the complicated question as to whether Cicero’s sophisticated attitude of in diem vivere can be reconciled with the therapeutic goal of Tusculan Disputations.

The relative freedom and political stability of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain produced an intellectual milieu amenable to advances in the natural sciences and philosophy. The major theme of British psychological thought was empirical, emphasizing knowledge acquired through sensation. The mechanism of this acquisition process was association. Founded by Hobbes but fully articulated by Locke, British empiricism retained the necessity of the mind construct while underlining the importance of sensations. Berkeley, Hume, and Hartley evolved skeptical positions concerning the reality of matter and mind that could have left the British movement in the same sterile position as French sensationalism. In addition, James Mill, although he was somewhat salvaged by the utilitarian influence, reduced associations to mental compounding. However, the Scottish common sense writers succeeded in restoring empiricism to a more flexible and open-ended position that recognized complex and integrative psychological phenomena. Thus, the later empiricism of John Stuart Mill, while adhering to scientific inductive methods, adopted a broadly based model of psychology that viewed mental operations and physiological processes as complementary and necessary dimensions of psychological inquiry. By the nineteenth century British philosophy was providing strong support for the study of psychology.

While the idea of the scientific method has wide currency, in this chapter we point to the difficulties inherent in deciding exactly what that method is. We note some of the key features of the scientific method while also identifying some of the key choices we have made in writing this book.

My concern here is with articulating what Law as a discipline or the subject matters that it studies may have to offer to a distinct and semi-autonomous multi-disciplinary field. However, it is worth emphasising that throughout history, and especially in the twentieth century, our discipline has been quite open to outside influences in respect of evidence. I am personally interested in finding practical ways forward, although this paper addresses a more intellectual question: What might we as jurists, and our heritage of both theory and practical decision-making, contribute to an enterprise devoted to stimulating cross-fertilisation, co-operation and the search for a reasonably common core or family of cross-disciplinary relations for Evidence as a recognised multi-disciplinary field?

Chapter 5 argues that the feeling of harmony expressed by pure aesthetic judgments is to be understood as the promissory feeling that a sensible manifold can be brought under concepts. The manifold which evokes in us this particular feeling of cognitive purposiveness makes us subconsciously identify it as an object exemplary of a natural kind, even before we have found concepts under which to subsume it and its kind. Furthermore, it is only on the assumption that the same manifolds will bring about this feeling in all of us that we will be able to make cognitive judgments about the same objects. Pure aesthetic judgments underwrite our pre-conceptual identification of spatial forms as exemplary of objective natural kinds. It is a necessary condition of cognition that we carve up the manifold given to us in intuition into objects exemplary of natural kinds in the same manner. The assumption of a common sense is a necessary condition of objective empirical experience and knowledge. It grounds the appeal to universal assent, which aesthetic judgments express. The Critique of the Aesthetic Power of Judgment is an essential part of the transcendental account of the conditions of empirical experience and knowledge.

The phenomenon of reflective awareness, i.e., perceiving that we perceive, has often been at the center of Aristotelian scholarship, whereas that of perceptual attention, i.e., focusing on something we perceive, has been much less studied. I examine in parallel the textual evidence for these phenomena and offer a concurrent analysis of them in order to understand better how Aristotle conceives them. I argue that the Aristotelian notion of the common sense lies at the basis of the explanation of perceptual attention as much as of that of reflective awareness. In the former case, the common sense perceives the special or common perceptible that it pays attention to in its own right, whereas in the latter case it perceives the act of perceiving coincidentally along with the respective special or common perceptible. Following Aristotle, the Peripatetics defended the view that the phenomenon of reflective awareness is due to the common sense, but paid no heed to perceptual attention. On the other hand, the Neoplatonic commentators conflated the two phenomena and explained both of them by postulating either a rational character of the senses or an attentive part in the rational soul.

Common sense is fundamental to humanity in two different but related ways. First, it is a basic capability essential to human flourishing. It helps us effectively engage with each other and our complex world. Second, it is social knowledge, often situational and contextual. Though easily taken for granted, common sense functions as critical social infrastructure that shapes and enables various social systems, including markets. This chapter examines this special type of social infrastructure, exploring common sense in general and focusing on the subset of common sense that also constitutes social norms.

This chapter discusses four more accounts of interpretation. First, the notion of a holistic textual act is introduced, which is an act performed by an author through the production of an entire text. It is argued that there is a kind of interpretation that aims to grasp an author's holistic textual act (which is, or is part of, the author's meaning), and the epistemological aspects of it are discussed. Next, externalist interpretations are discussed, the hallmark of which is that they don't aim to specify author's meanings but rather indicative or expressive meanings. Such interpretations, it is argued, may perhaps never reach the exalted status of knowledge. I then criticize Stanley Fish’s reader-response theory of interpretation because it flies in the face of a number of commonsense assumptions about texts, authors, and meanings. Finally, it is argued that reading and interpretation (on any of the accounts discussed) are distinct and different acts, and that there can be reading without interpretation, even if in actual fact the two usually go together.

This chapter turns to the question of how the judgment of taste is related to cognition and to the larger conception of judgment discussed in Chapter 2. It offers a new reading and contextualization of the argument of §21, in the Fourth Moment of the Analytic of the Beautiful, which establishes a “common sense” as a necessary condition of the universal communicability of cognition. On my reading, Kant does not provide, or seek to provide, a deduction of the judgment of taste avant la lettre. His point, instead, is to show that cognition involves its own form of reflective judgment. Cognitive judgment considered from the perspective of the third Critique – actual, situated judgment – depends on a norm beyond that of correctness: of aptness or appropriateness; of what calls for judgment. My reading is an alternative not only to the widespread “aesthetic” construal of Kant’s argument, on which it is meant to establish an aesthetic common sense, but also to the “epistemic” construal proposed by Henry Allison, on which it is meant to establish an epistemic common sense.

Chapter 8 offers a development of thinking about social influence by considering the role of modern mass mediation. The chapter starts by looking at the role of communication in cultivating social representations of the world, both in formal and informal ways. It proceeds by reviewing several hypotheses concerning mass media effects, including diffusion, knowledge gap, cultivation, diegetic prototyping and serial reproduction. The chapter further considers the extended role of mass mediation in agenda setting, priming and framing issues for public consumption. The idea of a 'spiral of silence' best illustrates how mass media effect analysis adds a second level of analysis to the phenomena of social influence: the theory explicitly elaborates the notion of conformity in the context of modern mass mediation. Hence, the chapter asks a question rather than offering the answer: how do media effect theories elaborate social influence simultaneously on two levels, that of interaction and that of mass mediation. For example, how does this tie in with the rediscovery of crowds as 'internet bubbles' and 'echo chambers dominated by conformity bias and motivated reasoning'?

Chapter 4 examines the modality of norm formation, the processes of establishing a common frame of reference for future collective behaviour. It revisits classical studies in social psychology that have demonstrated how social conditions guide perceptual judgment and decision making. Sherif’s autokinetic experiments and Lewin’s group experiments are reviewed in light of an appraisal of necessary conditions for group processes that foster the emergence of social norms for the coordination of individual conduct. The chapter expands these notions to concepts of intersubjectivity and inter-objectivity. The former requires an interpenetration of views by which individuals are able to consider claims and propositions from the vantage point of another’s perspective. This ability enables the establishment of norms that are objective entities, frame social interactions and make social organisation possible. This process is also illustrated by the stabilisation of a scientific-technical facts of 'objectification'. Symmetrically, the framing of social interaction happens via inter-objectivity, the shared usage of designed hardware and infrastructure of society.

We explore the problem of the criterion as formulated by Roderick Chisholm and his defense of common-sense particularism. We examine various criticisms of this approach.