Speccie reader Raymond has asked me to explain the meaning of the compound noun ‘common sense.’ It was Aristotle who first used the expression ‘common sense’, although he meant something different. We have, said Aristotle, five senses (sight, sound, touch, taste and smell) so he postulated that there might be a ‘common’ sense that drew these five sources together to give a complete sense of reality. Today, we use ‘common sense’ somewhat differently. As the Oxford puts it, ‘common sense’ means, ‘That which is reasonable or sensible; that which appeals to or is in accord with instinctive understanding or sound judgement.’ The expression has been used in the way we understand it now since at least the 1600s. The Oxford Companion to Philosophy has an entry by a distinguished Australian philosopher Tony Coady who says that, ‘It seems likely that common sense defies definition….’ Which doesn’t mean that we can’t say anything about it. He adds that the founder of Scottish Common-Sense Philosophy Thomas Reid regarded common sense as including an appeal to what is self-evident and to the general consensus of the community. Part of the idea found in the first half of the expression, in the word ‘common’, which means ‘part of a community’. We are all part of a community, giving us a network of concepts that are pinned to that community (and the species at large). The real evidence for common sense is our shared language and our community consensus over what words mean, and how they can be used. Often when we insist, ‘Well, that’s just common sense’ what we really means is, ‘Well, that’s just what the words mean’. In fact, the Oxford says that part of the meaning of ‘common sense’ is, ‘The commonly received meaning of a word or expression’. And that’s really the heart of it. Common sense breaks down when community breaks down. Which is the kind of divisiveness that wokeness can provoke. Once words are banned, or odd expressions are insisted on without any critical analysis (‘white privilege’, ‘toxic masculinity’, etc) it is common sense that dies, because those expressions are an attack on the community; an insistence that there is no such thing as community, only various ‘identities.’ This is why it is worthwhile fighting a battle for the meanings of words; we are actually fighting for a coherent community, which is the source of ‘common sense’.