Abstract

The pragmatist use of common sense phi-

losophy has not only been a source for
first-order philosophical work but also for
metaphilosophical orientation. The primary
motive for both of these lines of thought
has been that of anti-skepticism. This essay Pragmatism,
shows, using William James and G.E.
Moore as primary examples, that skeptical Common
challenges may be posed from within the
common sense and pragmatist common Sense, and
sense programs. From this result, a case for
skeptical pragmatism, one that manages the Metaphilo-
contraries arising from common sense and
the programs that critique it, is made. sophy: A
Keywords: William James, G.E. Moore,
Pragmatism, Common Sense, Skepticism,
Skeptical
Metaphilosophy. Rejoinder
1. Scott Aikin
Pragmatism is brass tacks philosophy. In
fact, it’s more than just that, as the pragma-
tist also holds the view that philosophy ought
to be brass tacks philosophy. Pragmatisms
are not simply aligned in terms of what
solutions they propose for philosophical
problems, but they are aligned in terms of
how they view philosophical problems and
what solutions would be in the first place.
In many ways, this metaphilosophical view
is the prime mover for pragmatist first-­
order philosophizing. The pragmatist may
enjoin that there is no first philosophy, but
for most pragmatists, their metaphilosophy
functions as one.1
The founding documents of prag-
matism, Peirce’s “Consequences of Four
Incapacities,” James’s “The Sentiment of
Rationality,” and Dewey’s “Reconstruction
in Philosophy,” are all, at their core, reac-
tionary documents, posed to put philosophy

TRANSACTIONS OF THE CHARLES S. PEIRCE SOCIETY

Vol. 54, No. 2 (2018)  •  doi: 10.2979/trancharpeirsoc.54.2.06
Copyright © Charles S. Peirce Society
231
T R A N S A C T I O N S Volume 54 Number 2 on a proper practical path. Pragmatism is a contrastive philosophical
program, one that is posited on yearning for a return to a world of
doing, of action, of practice. And the contrast is always with a theoret-
ical program that is pathological in some sense. Either the conclusions
impede practice, or the debates forestall resolution, or the doubts stand
in the way of decisive action. Philosophy done poorly not only yields
false conclusions, but positively perverse behavior.
The Common Sense tradition is best understood in a similar reac-
tionary vein. Thomas Reid’s program is explicitly devoted to answering
the Humean skeptical challenge. And the answer is to avert skeptical
challenge by casting the doubts about our first principles (such as that
perception is veridical) as unnatural and even laughable.

We may observe, that opinions which contradict first principles are

distinguished from other errors by this; they are not only false but
absurd: and, to discountenance absurdity, nature has given us a par-
ticular emotion, to wit, that of ridicule, which seems intended for this
very purpose of putting out of countenance what is absurd, either in
opinion or practice (1969: 175)

The objective is to return our intellects to the real challenges that face us,
not ones that are figments of our imagination or chimeras of our intel-
lects. In this regard, Erik Lundestadt’s observation that commonsense
philosophy is a kind of “proto-pragmatism” (2008: 175) seems accurate.
The primary target of reaction with both pragmatists and common-
sensists is that of the skepticism/anti-skepticism debates. The skeptic
seems to have been bewitched by a terrible thought and the head-on
argument against the terrible thought gives it too much credit. And
so the external world skeptics doubt that they are where they are, and
those who try to argue them back to reality are stuck with an absurd
and thankless task.
The key is to break the spell. The commonsensist move is to note
that we are constituted by nature to have particular judgments, that we
are under a kind of psychological necessity of assenting to them.2 Reid
captures the thought:

If there are certain principles, as I think there are, which the con-
stitutions of our nature leads us to believe, and which we are under
necessity to take for granted in the common concerns of life, without
being able to give a reason for them; these are what we call the prin-
ciples of common sense; and what is manifestly contrary to them we
call absurd (1997: 33)

The upshot is that the search for a theoretical justification for our trust
in our senses or memory is contrary to our natures, a kind of unintelli-
gible and unnatural task.
232
 Peirce was a great admirer of Reid, and though his naturalist defense

Pragmatism, Common Sense, and Metaphilosophy  •  Scott Aikin

of common sense was distinct from Reid’s background theological pro-
gram, the pragmatist tradition inherits this timbre of thought.3 Peirce
articulates the commonsensist perspective when speaking of nature’s
influence on belief:

It is somehow more than a figure of speech to say that nature fecun-

dates the mind of men with ideas which, when those ideas grow up,
will resemble their father (CP 5.591)

Common Sense is the product of evolution and cultural history

blindly and sometimes fortuitously yielding stable and productive
belief-defaults.4 It isn’t perfect, and it’s often been messy, but it has
resulted in reasonably reliable outputs. The problem is that this history
has also produced speculative habits of mind that, when restrained
to first-order inquiry, are virtuous and salutary, but when curiosity
draws them over the bounds, it yields the skepticisms and abstruse
metaphysical systems erected to answer them. And of these, Peirce
comments that:

We cannot begin with complete doubt. We must begin with all the
prejudices we actually have when we enter upon the study of philoso-
phy. These prejudices are not to be dispelled by a maxim, for they are
things which it does not occur to us can be questioned. . . . Let us not
pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts.
(CP 5.265)

Common sense in the hands of Peirce is a check on the excesses that

may arise from incautiously following the first rule of reason, that one
not block the road of inquiry. Common sense and its conservative bent
mitigates and guides the trajectory of our doubts and systems, not only
so that we do not make theoretical errors, but epistometric ones, invest-
ing time and energy in hopeless intellectual projects.5
The point, again, is to highlight how both the commonsense and
the pragmatist traditions are first-order philosophically and metaphilo-
sophically reactionary traditions. They are to be understood in the first
instance as contrasts with grand system-building and anti-­skepticism
of the early and late modern philosophical periods. They are as much
approaches to philosophical problems as they are approaches to the
problem of philosophy itself. Consequently, what unites them in the
second instance is that they are of a kind in their anti-rationalism, or
de-intellectualization (or anti-hyper-intellectualism) of knowledge,
ethics, reality, and life.
The question I wish to pose is: once one has enough familiarity with
the traditions that pragmatism and common sense philosophy are reactions
to, is the program of returning to common sense the answer? If we are in
233
T R A N S A C T I O N S Volume 54 Number 2 a position where the call to common sense would be relevant for us,
would such a call be effective? That is, once we have had the tincture
of skeptical philosophy, once we’ve felt the pull of Kant’s lament that it
is a scandal of philosophy that no proof of the external world has been
successful, once we’ve witnessed all the intricate idealisms constructed
or dogmatic realisms articulated, isn’t it just too late for common sense?
Isn’t pragmatism in this commonsense vein an instance of the wisdom
of hindsight come too late? Moreover, even were we to follow this
advice, wouldn’t skepticism return?
My answer to these questions is that common sense philosophy and
it pragmatist appropriations arrive too late. At best, commonsensism
is a restatement of skeptical challenges, and at worst, common sense
is a source of them. This, I hold, is the case with the commonsensists
such as Reid and Moore as with the pragmatist commonsensists such
as Peirce and James. The Reid-Peirce connection is well-worn, and I
will not rehearse it here. Rather, I will focus on Moore’s and James’s
commonsensist programs and show how the skeptical challenges are
yet stateable from within their accounts. Focusing on James and Moore
in particular is of significance, since they both are inheritors of the
common sense tradition that explicitly take common sense to play both
first-order and metaphilosophical roles. They both take common sense
to set the bounds for successful answers to philosophical questions and
to provide the tools for answering them. And they both take it that this
dual role for common sense yields stable anti-skeptical conclusions. My
objective is to show that this conclusion is unfounded. I will then close
with some thoughts on generalizing these conclusions not just to com-
monsense anti-skepticism überhaupt, but to the wider reconstructive
pragmatist program in epistemology.

2.
As Charlene Haddock Seigfried notes, common sense is for James “first
among equals” (1983: 273). James, continuing the Peircian naturalistic
view, casts common sense as something to be seen in a Darwinian light,
as something gradually evolved in the minds of human beings over gen-
erations. It is an inter-generational inheritance, again in contrast to the
Reidian view that it is a feature of our species as such. Common sense
is a product of thoughts and actions over many lives, and it yields a
general continuity of practice and wide agreement in judgment. James
characterizes common sense as:

[O]ur fundamental ways of thinking about things are discoveries of

exceedingly remote ancestors, which have been able to preserve themselves
throughout the experience of all subsequent time. They form one great
stage of equilibrium in the human mind’s development, the stage of
common sense. (1991: 75; emphasis in original)
234
Common sense, then, not only provides us in our lives with a place

Pragmatism, Common Sense, and Metaphilosophy  •  Scott Aikin

from which to start with each other and to begin our inquiries, but it
also provides a check on our theoretical impulses. It is with common
sense that James identifies the “crabbed artificiality” of an over-wrought
philosophical system and the “shallowness of rationalist philosophiz-
ing” in the face of the problem of evil (1991: 16 and 20).
James identifies three elements to the pragmatist notion of common
sense: First, “our knowledge grows in spurts” (1991: 74). Second, new
information comes in against a background of “presuppositions” of
competence and reliability (ibid). And so we naturally rely on our expe-
riences to tell us about our environment, our memories to accurately
report the past, and for our fellows to responsibly report the things they
know. The outcome is the third feature, namely that:

New truths are the results of new experiences and old truths com-
bined and mutually modifying each other. (1991: 75)

Common sense provides a background by way of which we may take

things in, weigh and synthesize new information. Cognitive conserva-
tism is a primary consequence of this commonsense viewpoint. Change
of view is primarily a matter of minimal mutilation to the broader set
of commitments. As James characterizes the program, thinkers must
“save as much of it as [they] can, for it is a matter of belief we are all
conservatives” (1991: 29).
A secondary consequence of the commonsense program, given the
conservatism in the first, is how critical reflection appraises common
sense. The pragmatist, James holds, does not proceed as the Aristotelian,
who “eternalizes” common sense’s contents as a set of categories for all
time (1991: 81). Instead, the pragmatist must view common sense as a
kind of heuristic and practical tool:

Common sense appears thus as a perfectly definite stage in our

understanding of things, a stage that satisfies in an extraordinarily
successful way the purposes for which we think (1991: 80)

But it, still, is only a kind of tool, and for other purposes in thought,
other heuristics are better suited for the task.

Common sense is better for one sphere of life, science for another,
philosophic criticism for the third; but whether either be truer abso-
lutely, heaven only knows. (1991: 84)

Common sense is what we might see as our “consolidated stage” of

thought—we manage many goals, avoid many errors, and try as best
as we can to be satisfactory at the whole.6 But with the other stages of
thought that James identifies, the scientific and philosophical, we are
235
T R A N S A C T I O N S Volume 54 Number 2 focusing our attention on one thing, an empirical truth or a concept’s
boundaries.
The trouble with this pluralism is that common sense is undercut
by the other two stages. The primary-secondary quality distinction, for
example, is a scientific cum philosophical product, and it yields neg-
ative consequences for secondary qualities, such as color or warmth.
This is starkly contrary to common sense. “Science and critical philos-
ophy burst the bounds of common sense,” and the consequence, James
holds, is that “havoc is made of everything” (1991: 82).7
But what has happened to the check that common sense was to
play? What happened to the great deflater of philosophical ambi-
tion? Does common sense, from this perspective, yet play such a
role? To this, James turns to managing the meaning of the terms of
the debate:

It is evident that the conflict of these so widely differing systems

obliges us to overhaul the very idea of truth, for at present we have no
definite notion of what the word may mean. (1991: 85)

It is this conflict of domains that leads James later in the Pragmatism

lectures to turn to formulating the instrumentalism behind the prag-
matist theory of truth. And so, order is restored, but at the cost of
revision of what the dictates of common sense mean or what they, in
fact, are.
But how is commonsense philosophy, thus reconstructed, an answer
to skeptical challenges? How is common sense a check on philosophical
programs? It may proclaim that from the common sense perspective this
theory or that doubt is bloodless, abstract, or empty. But from the phil-
osophical skeptic’s perspective, this is no better than raising one’s voice
or name-calling. Common sense is little more here than the rhetorical
strategy of brow-beating when it is in one’s intellectual interests. Of
course, when it is counter to one’s interests and performed on us, we
call it by another name. Dogmatism.
Notice that I have instrumentalized all these lines of reasoning so as
to show that even internal to the Jamesian program, we should still be
flummoxed by the contraries produced by our various cognitive heuris-
tics. Indexing the judgments and reasons to perspectives or values does
not mitigate these tensions, but instead draws them in high definition.
Charlene Haddock Seigfried concedes that after James’s reconstruction
of common sense, he “disproves its literal one-to-one correspondence
with reality” (1983: 277). But in the reconstruction of meanings and
claims that are to be coordinated, it is clear that the divisions between
viewpoints are only restated so they may be used only within their spec-
ified domains. But how could philosophers be critical with their philos-
ophy, unless it targeted our ordinary commonsense beliefs? How could
236
science be informative to us and salient to our best practices, unless it

Pragmatism, Common Sense, and Metaphilosophy  •  Scott Aikin

bore on what we believe and do? Common Sense must, then, be at best
the place from which our theoretical paths start, but it cannot be a check
on our theoretical programs if they are themselves to be critical in the
ways we take them to be. Insofar as that is the case, then common sense
cannot play the antiskeptical role it is touted to play. It will be at most
a complaint about the skeptical position we find ourselves in, but not a
rebuttal to the skeptic’s arguments.

3.
The Moorean program with common sense begins with the observation
that we know a good many things. Moore calls the list of these things
List (1), and it is comprised of a “whole long list of propositions . . .
obvious truisms . . . a set of propositions, every one of which (in my
own opinion) I know, with certainty, to be true” (1925: 32). Moore
holds that this list’s contents are that he has a body, that it has a history
of being born on Earth. Further, that there other bodies with similar
histories, all of which move and sometimes come into contact with
each other and his body. It continues: that the Earth existed before him,
and that he has experiences of his own body and his environment. Call
this a list of Moorean Facts; they purport to be, as David Armstrong
notes, “facts which even philosophers should not deny” (1980: 441).
These Moorean facts, then, serve as a kind of philosophical common-
sense bedrock for intellectual exercise.
Moore adds to List (1) a second list, call it List (2). It has but one
proposition, one about List (1). It has various expressions. Here are two:

Many of the human beings belonging to this class . . . each has fre-
quently . . . known, which regard to himself or his body . . . a proposi-
tion corresponding to each of the propositions in [List] (1). (1925: 34)
[E]ach of us  . . . has frequently known, which regard to himself or
his own body and the time at which he knew it, everything which
in writing down my list of propositions in (1), I was claiming to
know. . . .” (1925: 34)

List (2), then, is a variety of ways to capture the “simple truism” that List
(1) is widespread and manifestly so. List (2) is, then, a special instance
of (1), since it seems that, as David Lewis has noted, “it is a Moorean
fact that we know a lot” (1996: 549).
Once we have these two lists in place, Moore has a useful schema for
addressing skeptical challenges. The skeptic’s challenge, given the lists,
can be restated in one of two ways: either List (1) is not a list of things
known, or none of (1) is known with certainty. In both cases, skepticism
then amounts to a rejection of (2). In many ways, Moore’s distinction
between the two grounds for denying (2) is beside the point, since his
237
T R A N S A C T I O N S Volume 54 Number 2 reply to both forms of skepticism is the same: skepticism from within this
framework cannot be consistently held. He argues:

The proposition that some propositions belonging to each of these

classes are true is a proposition which has the peculiarity that if a
philosopher denied it; that he must have been wrong in denying it
(1925:40)

Moore’s reasoning can be captured with a self-regarding thought plausi-

bly attributable to skeptics—namely, that they think they are perform-
ing some corrective program, either for themselves or others. Once we
have this datum, we have the skeptic in a trap. Moore’s self-refutation
argument proceeds as follows:

(P1) If a skeptic (S) denies List (1)’s contents, then S denies there
have been human beings (or S denies that S knows there are
human beings)
(P2) If S denies that there have been human beings, then S denies
there have been philosophers.
(C)  S’s commitments can be true only if “no philosopher has ever
held such a view” (1925: 40).

Moore starts by noting that he himself knows S’s view must be self-­
refuting, since Moore is “certain that they (the skeptics) have existed
and held some view.” He then argues that this point can be appreciated
from the skeptic’s own position, since surely any skeptic must say some-
thing along the following lines:

There have been many other human beings beside myself, and none
of them (including myself ) has ever known of the existence of human
beings (1925: 43)

This sort of thought, Moore takes it, “seems . . . to be self-contradictory”

(1925: 43).
With this self-refutation challenge to the skepticisms that tar-
get List (1) in place, Moore turns to those who doubt (2)’s variety of
expressions. Moore notes that (2) is the “Common Sense View of the
World” (1925: 44), and that since we know that the denial of List (1)
is self-contradictory, “it follows that they are true” (44). List (2), then,
is vindicated, since we know that the denial of List (1) is the “height of
absurdity” (1925: 45).
So far, what Moore has produced is a view about the skeptical oppo-
sition, and then by comparison, a view of Common Sense. This is an
indirect vindication. But the direct vindication of the commonsense
view of the world is not within our power. As Moore notes,
238
 We are all . . . in this strange position that we know many things . . .

Pragmatism, Common Sense, and Metaphilosophy  •  Scott Aikin

and yet do not know how we know them, if, we do not know what
the evidence was. (1925: 44)

Alan Hazlett terms this the “non-argumentative conception of knowl-

edge” (2014: 114). Elsewhere, in his proof of the external world, Moore
has the following reasoning:

If I have hands, there is an external world.

Here is a hand (and another!)
Therefore, there is an external world.

He calls this a proof; in fact he boasts, “the proof I gave was a perfectly
rigorous one; and . . . it is impossible to give a more rigorous proof of
anything whatsoever” (1939: 144). But the skeptic who demurs and
challenges whether Moore knows the second premise asks for another
argument. However, Moore holds that his criteria for successful proof—
that the premises are not identical to the conclusion, that the conclu-
sion follows from them, and that they are known (1939:144)—are met.
The skeptic’s challenge for another argument for the second premise is
what Moore takes as out of bounds.
I can know things I cannot prove: and among these things which I
certainly did know, even if . . . I could not prove them, were premises
of my two proofs (1939: 148)

And when the skeptic challenges these sorts of second-order claims,

Moore has only to offer reassertion with exclamation points.

I knew that there was one hand in the place indicated by combining
a certain gesture with my first utterance of ‘here’. . . . How absurd it
would be to suggest that I did not know it but only believed it, and
perhaps it was not the case! You might as well suggest that I do not
know that I am now standing up and talking—that perhaps after all
I’m not and it’s not quite certain that I am!(1939: 145)

This program of what one might call reassertion with attitude is con-
tinuous with the Reidian endorsement of expressions of ridicule in
the face of skeptical and other theoretical divergences from common
sense’s dictates.8 But the question is: how does ridicule and the use of
exclamation points distinguish knowledge from sheer dogmatism? We
have all had the ignorant guffaw in our faces, we have all received the
ALLCAPS email or social media message from the misinformed. And
we have all seen the most manifestly false views draped in the mantle
of common sense. There is a reason, really, why ad populum is the
name of a fallacy, and I hasten to add that this observation is itself a
product of common sense.
239
T R A N S A C T I O N S Volume 54 Number 2 The import of the observation that the rationally critical thoughts
undercutting the commonsense defense of common sense anti-­
skepticism are themselves derived from common sense itself should
not be underestimated. The metaphilosophical lesson is that skeptical
challenges are not external impositions, but arise from our messy cogni-
tive heuristics and rules of thumb for critical thinking. They arise from
the appearance-reality distinction, the difference between de jure and
de facto accounts, the relevance of the observation that people all too
readily believe their own bullshit. These, too, are Moorean facts, and
skeptical challenges are only ones that set these Moorean facts along-
side others to yield a series of, for lack of a better term (and to channel
Sextus Empiricus) Moorean equipollences.

4.
My line of internal criticism of Jamesian and Moorean commonsense
epistemology is distinct from the traditional strategies of challenging
the common sense tradition. The going two arguments against the
commonsensists are (1) that commonsensism just begs the question
against the skeptic (and other revisionary philosophical programs), and
(2) that commonsensism is an incomplete program, since it requires
more to rebut another view or challenge than to show that it conflicts
with common sense—one must show in some substantive way that
common sense outperforms the alternatives.9 However, I think that
both James and Moore work very hard to answer the second of these
challenges, since both make overt use of contrasts between, for James,
the artificiality, and for Moore, the self-refutation, of the controversies.
And both, I believe, are willing to accept the point that their programs
are argumentatively unsatisfying to the full-blooded skeptic, since
both hold a theory of argument that abjures having a full dialectical
reply to the skeptic. There’s a real sense that these standard objections,
ultimately, are mere restatements of commonsensism with a tone of
complaint. If restatement with attitude isn’t a successful defense, surely
restatement with complaint isn’t a successful objection.10
So much for external critique of common sense anti-skepticism.
Those devoted to common sense will see such critique as refusal of ther-
apeutic help at best, pathological cathexis with one’s symptoms at worst.
Rather, my line of argument here has been internal, that both James’s
and Moore’s common sense programs have the seeds of skeptical challenge
within them. Skepticism is alive and well, even within the common-
sense program. This is, in fact, not a new thought, as Sextus Empiricus’s
Pyrrhonism is touted as one derived from the principles of the dogma-
tists (PH 2.146), and Cicero reports the same of the Academics (AC
2.59). And evidence for the skeptical thought being continuous with
common sense is easy to garner, since it is not after taking a philosophy
course that movie viewers understood the premise of the Matrix, Vanilla
240
Sky, or Inception (all ‘are you in an illusory ­reality?’ premise movies).

Pragmatism, Common Sense, and Metaphilosophy  •  Scott Aikin

Rather, they were easy ways for people to start ­thinking ­philosophical
thoughts.
Here is a way to make sense of this line of thought. I am the Director
of Undergraduate Studies at my home university, and I regularly must
speak with parents who have worries that majoring in philosophy will,
to quote one particularly frank mother, “make my daughter weird.”
My question in reply is: What does it takes to make someone coming
back from college weird? Would being a vegetarian be weird? Or being a
Democrat, Marxist, libertarian, or anarchist? Or more likely to disagree
with parents about religion? Or just not believing that she has justifi-
cation to say she has hands? Having skeptical thoughts about personal
identity over time? Or viewing herself as having obligations to those
suffering on the other side of the world? Or thinking that gender roles
are not written by nature? The problem with commonsensism is that
you don’t get to pick and choose what common sense commitment
one likes to use against the philosophers and which not. Because if you
do that, you’ve gone beyond the common sense program. You’ve got a
theory, and ‘common sense’ is just a rhetorical mantle. And so when
commonsense philosophers, in anti-skeptical fashion, invoke the folk
and their commonsense beliefs, they are, if honest, with the folk about
the rest. No matter how good the arguments against the right to eat
meat, all one needs is common sense dietary habits and a hearty laugh
about rabbit food. The Euthyphro problem is impotent in the face of
those who hold that one cannot be morally good without knowing and
following God’s commands. If the commonsense philosopher says that
the other views don’t survive theoretical scrutiny, then we’ve got the
problem, again. Commonsense is no longer playing the limiting role
in these cases, but the theoretical programs limit and critique common
sense. Again, insofar as we take the theoretical programs to be critical
or normative, then they’ve got to have bite when it comes to common
sense. But when we do that, we’ve broken with the common sense tra-
dition as one that constrains theoretical reflection.
The reply from the pragmatist tradition is that they have formu-
lated, as Peirce terms it, a critical commonsenseism (CP 6.497). The
core thoughts behind the program are:
a) One must begin critical thought somewhere, but there is no sin-
gular starting place.
b) Our fundamental beliefs come as large, interconnected packages
that have a kind of default justification for us—they are inno-
cent until proven guilty.11

Notice that these beliefs, again given the broader pragmatist program,
may change over time, be revised by new information, and can each
241
T R A N S A C T I O N S Volume 54 Number 2 singularly be doubted and changed. Further, we can see the ­consequence
of (B) being a ground for the broader Moorean background of a non-­
argumentative theory of knowledge and (A) being the List (1) for
Moore and for James’s list of basic categories (1991: 76).
The anti-skeptical upshot of (A) and (B) is that skeptical challenges
break the psychological limits of doubt and inquiry in (A) and they do
not respect the default justification afforded them by (B). So not only
does the skeptic attempt to do something, by hypothesis, psychologi-
cally impossible, but also something that is an epistemic error.12
The skeptic, however, must ask in what does the default justification
in (B) consist? What provides our starting points, our common sense
first principles, with this cognitive status? That we defer to these claims,
perhaps, is true about us. But what does that natural deference have
for its rationality? That is, (A) is a descriptive claim about how we,
given the minds and culture we have, inquire and thereby must make
assumptions, and particular ones. But (B) is not merely descriptive, as
it identifies the set of claims in (A) as being rationally justified. That we
treat them as justified, I think, the skeptic can concede. The skeptic, in
many ways, isn’t asking whether we rely on common sense, but whether we
have any reason to do so, especially given the fact that it itself has so many
commitments that do not pass scrutiny.
There are three grades of strength of reply for the pragmatists here,
each increasing in the epistemic normativity it purports to achieve. The
first is the deflationary reply. In a sense, it is the claim that there is no
more to this justification than that we confer it. Richard Rorty’s episte-
mological behaviorism is exemplary:

Explaining rationality and epistemic authority by reference to what

society lets you say, rather than the latter by the former, is the essence
of behaviorism when applied to human knowledge (1985: 95)

Of course, the deflationary program, in defending the de jure claim in

(B), renders it yet another de facto claim. Common sense, of course,
would recoil from such a defense of itself. In a sense, we do it because
it’s right, not it’s right because we do it. Some anti-skeptical programs
are yet not so different from the skepticisms they purported to oppose.13
The second, pragmatic justification, is that the justification for
default status for those commitments we call common sense is prac-
tical. As Peter Baumann holds, an argument for the tenets of com-
mon sense as epistemically normative would defeat the purpose of
common sense, and so; “the search for a theoretical justification of
the principles of common sense does not even make sense” (1999:
53). The principles are justified, because they allow us to have “the-
ories which guide our actions and let us attain our goals” (1999:
242
53). However, pragmatic justification is not an epistemic answer to
the skeptical challenge. Moreover, in noting that a theoretical reply

Pragmatism, Common Sense, and Metaphilosophy  •  Scott Aikin

to skeptical challenges is impossible is precisely the thesis held by
the skeptic. Again, the defense of common sense against the skeptic
results in something indistinguishable from the skeptical challenge.
And, again, that there is a difference between practical and theoretical
justification is itself a component of common sense—otherwise the
notion of inconvenient truths and useful fictions would be nonsense.14
The pragmatic defense of common sense, then, must fail on its own
terms, because the common sense program maintains the difference
between verity and utility.
The third, and most revisionary, pragmatist defense of common
sense, is the reconstructive program. With the reconstructive program,
the semantics of the target propositions of common sense (Moore’s
List (1), what propositions are denoted by (A), and what comprises
the grouping called ‘the dictates of common sense’) is clarified by way
of the broader pragmatist program with meaning. Once the terms are
properly reconstructed within the pragmatist purview (and not just the
object-language terms, but the terms of self-regard and assessment we
see with Moore’s List (2) and (B) in the critical commonsense view),
the epistemic program is then reformed so that we now do have evidence
in the form of the practical payoff for using common sense. As Nate
Jackson frames the revisionary move yielding support:

The fact that a principle [of common sense] is necessary for reason-
ing and we cannot bring ourselves to doubt that principle is a piece
of information about that principle. Moreover, given our epistemic
situation, this sort of support gives rational support to that belief
(2014: 174)

And so, with this reconstructive program, indispensability is a kind of

evidence that makes a commitment rational.15
The skeptical reply to the reconstructive program is in two parts.
The first is to challenge whether the pragmatist reconstruction of our
object language and our theoretical metalanguages is a way to preserve
common sense. Consider this on analogy with the idealists, since their
reconstructions preserve the terms, but they mean something different
from what they were taken to mean when used non-philosophically.
Moore’s argument in favor of common sense requires that “the ordi-
nary and popular meanings of such expressions” be left alone by theory
(1925: 36). Moore’s reasoning was that if we need a theory of meaning
to clarify what we were supposed to have unproblematic knowledge of
in the first place, then we didn’t have unproblematic knowledge at all.
Theory to the rescue is the wrong way to save common sense, and thus
the reconstructive program (insofar as it is reconstructive) must fail on
this front.
243
T R A N S A C T I O N S Volume 54 Number 2 The second reply is that there is yet still a difference between (a)
showing that knowing many things in the set of unproblematic dictates
of common sense is indispensable for maintaining our self-conception
as knowers and (b) showing that these commitments are rational. In
this regard, it is important to distinguish between justificatory stories
that explain the positive epistemic status of a propositional attitude and
exculpatory stories that explain why that attitude is not optional.16 With
justificatory accounts, we show the rationality of the attitude, that there
is evidence manifestly connected to the target truths; however, with
exculpatory accounts, we show why the attitude is understandable, isn’t
blameworthy, is explained as the product of events one cannot control.
The problem, though, is that the psychological forces behind common
sense at most yield the exculpatory story, not the justificatory story.
The result of the two skeptical replies is a dilemma for pragmatist
reconstruction. If the pragmatist has reconstructed the terms at the
heart of the common sense reply to skepticism (those in the object
language and in the meta-language of epistemic assessment), there may
be a successful reply to skepticism, but it no longer is a form of common
sense reply. It will function as a form of revisionary idealism. If the prag-
matist does not reconstruct the terms, there is evidence about the dic-
tates of common sense, but evidence that does not offer justification for
them, but exculpation for our natural and non-optional use of them.

5.
It is time to take stock. From a brief overview of two representative cases
of common sense philosophy, I have identified what I called the inter-
nal skeptical critique of the common sense reply to skepticism (and in
­particular, the pragmatist version of it). In essence, my internal argument
is that the tools for skeptical critique are those that arise within the dic-
tates of common sense, and so the common sense defense against skep-
ticism will always be incomplete. With Moore, the non-­argumentative
model for knowledge makes common sense indistinguishable from
unthinking dogmatism (and so costs us knowledge on reflection), and
within James’s program, the products of critical reflection (with philos-
ophy and science) return to common sense with negative assessments.
Pragmatism’s use of common sense as a metaphilosophical check on
broader theoretical excesses compounds this problem, since pragmatist
programs either revise or reconstruct common sense (and so defeat the
point of common sense) or in their critical deployments recapitulate the
skeptical challenges.17
A Humean might identify these common sense pragmatist pro-
grams as better cast as skeptical solutions to the doubts (as he casts his
own in the Enquiry—1993: 26–7). A Pyrrhonian might say that such
strategies are extensions of the old skeptical fourfold of being guided by
our natures, consenting to the constraint of the passions, deferring to
244
tradition and custom, and submitting to training in the arts (PH 1.24).

Pragmatism, Common Sense, and Metaphilosophy  •  Scott Aikin

An Academic skeptic may accede to the common sense strategy as that
of following, as Carneades would say, the believable (to pithanon) or
the truth-like (verisimile) as Cicero put it (Ac 2.99). Mitigated forms
of skeptical assent (and even the idea that there are nevertheless better
and worse cognitive management methods even under skeptical con-
ditions) are within theoretical view. And so, as I take it, this is the best
way to take the pragmatist-cum-commonsensist program—to be one of
managing the first-order and meta-epistemic inconsistencies that arise
when we not only deliberate about what tomorrow holds for us, but
also about what (if anything) makes such knowledge possible.18
Skepticism comes with the territory of being a reflective human
being. Whether it is the five-year-old who has an early grasp on the
regress of Why? questions, the average movie-goer’s understanding of
external world skepticism as a Hollywood movie trope, or the easy
skeptical induction made by every sophomore in Introduction to
Philosophy, skepticism stalks our dreams of knowledge, because it, too,
is part of where we begin inquiry. The objective of a proper reply to
the skeptic is to concede that knowledge may be beyond our powers,
understanding beyond our ken, but argue that we nevertheless find
ways to forge on a little better than in the ways that caused us to pause
and question ourselves in the first place. In this regard, pragmatism and
the common sense tradition are strategies of cognitive management in
light of skeptical challenges, not replies to or corrections of them. And
so we can maintain the pragmatist metaphilosophical orientation with-
out the pretense that the other programs of theoretical work are refuted
or shown groundless. This skeptical pragmatism, of course, is exactly
what we should expect of those philosophizing as fallibilists.
Vanderbilt University
scott.f.aikin@vanderbilt.edu

REFERENCES
Aikin, Scott and Dabay, Thomas (forthcoming) “Pragmatist Anti-Skepticism:
Worth the Price?” In K. McCain and T. Poston (eds.) The Mystery of Skepticism.
Brill.
Aikin, Scott (2017) “Modest, but not Self-Effacing, Transcendental Arguments.”
The Philosophical Forum. 48:3.287–306.
Aikin, Scott and Talisse, Robert (2017) “Pragmatism and Metaphilosophy”. In
S. Pihlstrom (ed.) Pragmatism and Objectivity. New York: Routledge. 31–44.
Aikin, Scott and Robert Talisse (2008) “Modus Tonens.” Argumentation. 22:
521–529.
Armstrong, D.M. (1980) “Against Ostrich Nominalism.” Pacific Philosophical
Quarterly. 61. 440–9.
Baumann, Peter (1999) “The Scottish Pragmatist? The Dilemma of Common
Sense and the Pragmatist Way Out.” Reid Studies. 2. 47–57.
245
T R A N S A C T I O N S Volume 54 Number 2 Boyd, Kenneth and Heney, Diana (2017) “Peirce on Intuition, Instinct, and
Common Sense.” European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy.
9:2.1–24.
Brandom, Robert (1994) Making it Explicit. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Brueckner, Anthony. 1996. “Modest Transcendental Arguments.” Philosophical
Perspectives. 16. 265–80.
Cicero, Marcus Tullius (2006) On Academic Skepticism. Trans. Charles Brittain.
Indianapolis: Hackett. Cited as AC.
Daniel-Hughes, Brandon (2017) “Peirce’s Conservatism and Critical Common
Sense: Insights Toward a More Nuanced Theory of Inquiry.” Southwest
Philosophy Review. 33. 205–214.
Gautier, Claude (2017) “Attitudes of Knowledge and Common Sense.” European
Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy. 9:2.1–23.
Gava, Gabriele (2014) Peirce’s Account of Purposefulness: A Kantian Perspective.
London and New York: Routledge.
Grant, Brian (2001) “The Virtues of Common Sense.” Philosophy. 76: 191–209.
Hazlett, Alan (2014) A Critical Introduction to Skepticism. London: Bloomsbury.
Heney, Diana (2017) Toward a Pragmatist Metaethics. New York: Routledge.
Hume, David (1993) An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Indianapolis:
Hackett.
Jackson, Nate (2014) “Common Sense and Pragmatism.” The Journal of Scottish
Philosophy. 12. 163–179.
James, William (1991) Pragmatism. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.
Lewis, David (1996) “Elusive Knowledge.” Australasian Journal of Philosophy. 74.
549–67.
Lundestad, Erik (2008) “The Necessity of Pragmatism: Overcoming the Stalemate
of Common Sense.” The Scottish Journal of Philosophy. 6. 175–187.
McDowell, John (1994) Mind and World. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Moore, G.E. (1925) “A Defence of Common Sense.” In Philosophical Papers
(1962). New York: Collier Books.
Moore, G.E. (1939) “Proof of an External World” In Philosophical Papers (1962).
New York: Collier Books.
Olen, Peter (2015) “The Realist Challenge to Conceptual Pragmatism.” European
Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy. 7. 152–167.
Peirce, Charles Sanders (1965) Collected Papers. C. Hartshorne and P. Weiss (eds.)
Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Cited as CP.
Poggiani, Francesco (2017) “Critical Reflection and Common Sense Beliefs.”
European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy. 9:2.1–22.
Poston, Ted (2014) Reason and Explanation. New York: Palgrave.
Proops, Ian (2006) “Soames on the Metaphysics and Epistemology of Moore and
Russell.” Philosophical Studies. 129. 627–635.
Reid, Thomas (1969 [1785]) Essays on the Intellectual Powers. Cambridge: MIT
Press.
Reid, Thomas (1997 [1764]) An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles
of Common Sense. D. R. Brooks (ed.) University Park: The Pennsylvania State
University Press.
Rorty, Richard (1985) “Epistemological Behaviorism and the
De-Transcendentalization of Analytic Philosophy.” In R. Hollinger (ed.)
246 Hermeneutics and Praxis. Notre Dame University Press. 89–121.
Rorty, Richard (1998) “Anti-Skeptical Weapons: Michael Williams versus Donald

Pragmatism, Common Sense, and Metaphilosophy  •  Scott Aikin

Davidson.” In Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Volume 3. Cambridge
University Press. 153–63.
Rescher, Nicholas (1994) Philosophical Standardism. Pittsburgh: University of
Pittsburgh Press.
Rescher, Nicholas (2015) Cognitive Complications: Epistemology in Pragmatic
Perspective. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
Seigfried, Charlene (1983) “The Philosopher’s ‘License’: William James and
Common Sense.” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society. 19. 273–290.
Sextus Empiricus (1990) Outlines of Pyrrhonism. Trans R.G. Bury. Amherst:
Prometheus Books. Cited as PH.
Soames, Scott (2003) Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century. Princeton:
Princeton University Press.
Stern, Robert. 2007. “Transcendental Arguments: A Plea for Modesty.” Grazer
Philosophische Studien. 74. 143–61.
Stroud, Barry. 2000. Understanding Human Knowledge. Oxford University Press.
Thébert, Angélique (2017) “A Permissivist Ethics of Belief.” European Journal of
Pragmatism and American Philosophy. 9:2.1–23.
Williams, Michael (2003) “The Agrippan Argument and Two Forms of
Skepticism.” In Walter Sinnott-Armstrong (ed.) Pyrrhonian Skepticism. Oxford
University Press. 121–145.

NOTES
1. See Aikin and Talisse (2017) for a defense of the view that pragmatism is
centrally a metaphilosophical program and an argument that metaphilosophical
skeptical consequences are formidable within it.
2. Reid 1977: 130. Baumann calls this the constitutive thesis, that we have an
impulse or instinct to accept a particular class of propositions (1999: 49).
3. CP 5:444. See Daniel-Huges (2017: 207) for an account of the parallel
paths to critical commonsensism.
4. See Gava (2014: 198), who emphasizes Peirce’s historicized and fallibilist
view of common sense. Further, consult Boyd and Heney (2017) for an account
of how Peirce’s view is an extension of his work in the sciences.
5. See Daniel-Huges for the thought that Peircian conservatism is a “shepherd
to human progress, not its antithesis” (2017: 205). Further, for models of the
epistometric approach to philosophical questioning integrating common sense,
see Rescher (2015: 103–5 and 1994: 35). Poggiani (2017) defends Peirce’s view as
one bridging this divide.
6. In this regard, James’s theory of common sense is continuous with Peirce’s
view, which Gava identifies as historicist and fallibilist (2014: 195).
7. It is for this reason Peter Olen recommends that Sellarsian scientific realism
is likely an antagonist to the pragmatist tradition (2015).
8. The scholarly difference of opinion on whether Moore’s proof is “ironic,”
so as to show that “there is in fact no need for a proof in the first place” (Soames
2003:22) or direct, showing that “we can prove (the existence of the external
world) in a variety of ways” (Proops 2006:634) is beside the point for our pur-
poses. This is because the anti-skeptical program in either case depends on the
non-argumentative epistemology in the background. 247
T R A N S A C T I O N S Volume 54 Number 2   9. Compare Baumann (1999), Grant (2001), and Jackson (2014) who
address this challenge as a dilemma between dogmatism and skepticism for com-
monsensists. Their pragmatist solutions will be addressed below.
10. See Aikin and Talisse (2008) on “modus tonens,” the rhetorical strategy of
restatement of an interlocutor’s view with surprise, contempt, or derision.
11. Compare Grant’s (2001:193) review of the core elements of the common
sense case for the first principles. Others who endorse the broadly conservative or
‘default and challenge’ epistemic program are Brandom (1994: 222), Williams
(2003: 130), and Poston (2014: 33). Angélique Thébert (2017) identifies the pro-
gram as a “permissivist” ethics of belief.
12. Grant comments that “the acceptance of what the skeptic claims to be
subject to doubt is characteristic of all normal adult human beings, and is conse-
quently “rational folly” (2001: 200 and 201).
13. It could be objected that thought it is right that the Rortian program
deflates the normativity of epistemic assessment, it does not follow that worries
of relativism or proximity to skepticism follow. Rorty’s deflationary program
amounts not only to anti-skepticism, but also anti-anti-skepticism, too. He crit-
icizes Michael Williams for being “bewitched by epistemology, . . . the idea that
there is something interesting to be said about human knowledge” (1998: 162).
But for skeptics who hold that knowledge may be beyond our capacities, such a
view is more close cousin to their description of our predicament than refusal of
skeptical lines of thought.
14. It is worth noting, with Gava (2014: 182) there is a tension in pragma-
tism between the transcendental philosophical ambitions and commonsense
inclinations.
15. Claude Gautier (2017) makes the case that these pragmatic reconstruc-
tions are wide-ranging; not only practical, but ethical and political. This is espe-
cially so for pragmatists, Gautier argues, in the Deweyan vein.
16. See McDowell (1994: 8) for a parallel usage of this distinction. With
regard to the broader strategy of using indispensability-transcendental arguments
in the face of skeptics, and their limits, see Brueckner (1996: 272), Stroud (2000:
116), Stern (2007: 150), and Aikin (2017).
17. To generalize from these findings would be hasty, but I believe there is a
plausible general challenge to commonsense epistemology, both in the pragmatic
vein and beyond. It takes the form of a dilemma. Either the dictates of common
sense can be defended or not. If not, they are not distinct from thoughtless dog-
matism. If they are, then they rely on something other than their being common
sense to identify them as acceptable. Either way, common sense is better thought
as a philosophical and epistemological heuristic than theory or intellectual program.
Further, it’s anti-skeptical and critically limiting programs are significantly over-
stated in light of this result.
18. See Aikin and Dabay (forthcoming) for the development of the manage-
ment model for inconsistencies that arise for pragmatist anti-skepticism.

248
Copyright of Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society is the property of Indiana
University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a
listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print,
download, or email articles for individual use.