Common Sense and Ordinary Knowledge
摘要
Once Karl Popper remarked that science is an extension of ordinary knowledge. This only makes sense if we think, like Sellars, that the scientific image epistemically presupposes the manifest image, because science often ontologically contradicts and then alters our ordinary view of reality. Yet, ordinary knowledge eventually adopts scientific beliefs into its body of knowledge. In this chapter, I delineate to what extent science builds on shared sensory experience, on an elaborate everyday methodology, and on some common-sense principles, such as the same object not being at two places at the same time and two indistinguishable objects separated in space are different things, etc. If we consider only classical physics and other non-physical sciences, they seem to follow the basic methods by which we also gain ordinary knowledge. These sciences respect all the common-sense principles in the formation of their theory. The problem is that modern physics, especially quantum mechanics, provides us with a different ontology that denies that our ordinary experience and common-sense principles are valid. Nevertheless, Niels Bohr famously argued that any understanding of quantum phenomena requires the use of the concepts of classical physics that are adapted to our sensory experience as well as the use of the ordinary language. The reason Bohr gave was very similar to the one Sellars later provided in his defense of the epistemic priority of the manifest image: Using classical concepts supplemented with ordinary language are the only means by which a physicist can rationally communicate to others what they have learned and done.