In academic jargon it is often mentioned that science provides knowledge of reality, this assumption infers that science leads to the overcoming of our vision of the world given by common sense, in other words, scientific research provides us with a vision based on experience, while common sense provides us with perceptive and reflective judgments of our daily life.

The judgments we make as a result of our common sense, belong to a series of codes that have been fixed throughout history in our everyday language, even form part of the reflections that we use daily to judge certain situations that at first glance are considered irrational, misleading, foolish, i.e. are opposed to good judgment.

This implies that, although science can lead to the overcoming of deeply rooted beliefs, common sense reflects a more basic and lasting level of experience in time, an element that, from a philosophical point of view, common sense constitutes a kind of observational intelligence that is the zero degree of all intelligence, which has led to the deduction that common sense is the structural basis of thought.

In this order of ideas, it should be emphasized that the philosophy of meaning interpreted from a vision of perceptive and reflective judgments, reveals that this is not a basic knowledge as it has been labeled throughout history, nor the sum of pre-judgments, but an accumulation of collective wisdom of understandings about something that is known because it has already been observed and has the foundations and background to assume that it is true.

In closing, it is necessary to point out that while scientific realism infers that common sense only leads to perceptual and reflective judgments of our daily lives through basic assumptions, it is worth mentioning that scientists frequently appeal to common sense to justify their hypotheses, which reinforces that the philosophy of common sense is a transcendental part of all knowledge.

[1] Reeves A Perceptual Categories Derived from Reid's "Common Sense" Philosophy. Article: Online access

[2] Poggiani F Critical Reflection and Common-Sense Beliefs. Article: Online access