I remember a conversation with one of my PhD colleagues from the finance stream. He was struggling to understand what methodology for my PhD thesis I was using after I told him I wasn't going to be using Econometrics, or any kind of statistics for that matter. I jokingly said that my methodology was 'common sense'. He said ,"Yes, sure seems like it" and he didn't mean it as a compliment.
That got me thinking about the role of common sense in academic effort. Academics, who see themselves as specialists, obviously have a problem with the "common" in 'common sense'. And, this is not just them being snooty. Many of their inferences either contradict common sense or are blindingly obvious to someone endowed with common sense. How does one distinguish between robust intellectual effort which deploys scientific methods to reach a inference, either obvious or not, from pointless mental gymnastics which reach ludicrous conclusions? That is a difficult one.
I again got thinking about the role of common sense in academic effort while reading Schumpeter this week. He defines science as "refined common sense" and "tooled knowledge". Both phrases make a lot of (common) sense. Science is not just about accumulating knowledge but using knowledge as a tool to say something about the world. Similarly, science attempts to go beyond common sense without abandoning common sense. But, then Schumpeter went on to say something even more interesting (and true): " ... common-sense knowledge goes in this field (economics) much further relatively to such scientific knowledge as we have been able to achieve, than does common-sense knowledge in almost any field". Touche! Complex-looking mathematical equations are often used to obscure and obfuscate. Push back the curtain of maths and what you often find is unrefined common sense or a ludicrous proposition. Economics could surely do with more unvarnished common sense.
That got me thinking about the role of common sense in academic effort. Academics, who see themselves as specialists, obviously have a problem with the "common" in 'common sense'. And, this is not just them being snooty. Many of their inferences either contradict common sense or are blindingly obvious to someone endowed with common sense. How does one distinguish between robust intellectual effort which deploys scientific methods to reach a inference, either obvious or not, from pointless mental gymnastics which reach ludicrous conclusions? That is a difficult one.
I again got thinking about the role of common sense in academic effort while reading Schumpeter this week. He defines science as "refined common sense" and "tooled knowledge". Both phrases make a lot of (common) sense. Science is not just about accumulating knowledge but using knowledge as a tool to say something about the world. Similarly, science attempts to go beyond common sense without abandoning common sense. But, then Schumpeter went on to say something even more interesting (and true): " ... common-sense knowledge goes in this field (economics) much further relatively to such scientific knowledge as we have been able to achieve, than does common-sense knowledge in almost any field". Touche! Complex-looking mathematical equations are often used to obscure and obfuscate. Push back the curtain of maths and what you often find is unrefined common sense or a ludicrous proposition. Economics could surely do with more unvarnished common sense.
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