As (Dutilh Novaes and Geerdink 2017) have shown, the analytic tradition, from its origins, is divided between methodologies that give an important role to common sense (Moore, Strawson) and more revisionist methodologies (Russell, Carnap). To the present day, there is no consensus about the methodological role of common sense in philosophical knowledge.

Part of the problem is that “common sense” is itself an ambiguous expression, that can correspond to different “delineations” (Van Woudenberg 2020). It can refer to (at least):

(A) beliefs in the pre-theoretical cognitive system of the enquirer.

(B) beliefs that have a high or maximal degree of certainty.

(C) beliefs that are shared by (almost) all human beings, in virtue of being part of the natural cognition of our species.

These three (orthogonal) categories of belief can give rise to three very different arguments in favour of some special epistemological privilege of “common sense”. Although such arguments could be developed independently from each other, my purpose in this presentation is to defenda “common-sense epistemology” that combines the three (as three stages, ordered from the least controversial to the more controversial).

Stage 1: pre-theoretical beliefs (A) have a default (though defeasible) epistemic status, because any modification of one's epistemic system requires a motivation to change one's views (see Lewis' conservatism in Lewis 1986, 2.8).

Stage 2: even though stage 1 allows for the revision of anything, there are in fact limits to what you can revise, because it will never be justified to revise the most certain (A&B) on the basis of premises less certain (Lycan 2001; Kelly 2005).

Stage 3: the epistemic situation of pre-theoretical certainties that are common to human nature (A&B&C) is even more privileged, because their certainty is not going to be (immediately) diminished by a peer-disagreement defeater.

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Dutilh Novaes, Catarina, and Leon Geerdink. 2017. “The Dissonant Origins of Analytic Philosophy: Common Sense in Philosophical Methodology.” In Innovations in the History of Analytical Philosophy, edited by Sandra Lapointe and Christopher Pincock, 69–102. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-40808-2_3.

Kelly, Thomas. 2005. “Moorean Facts and Belief Revision, or Can the Skeptic Win?” Philosophical Perspectives 19 (1): 179–209. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1520-8583.2005.00059.x.

Lewis, David. 1986. On the Plurality of Worlds. Oxford, UK; New York, NY, USA: B. Blackwell.

Lycan, William G. 2001. “Moore against the New Skeptics.” Philosophical Studies: An International Journal for Philosophy in the Analytic Tradition 103 (1): 35–53.

Van Woudenberg, René. 2020. “The Delineation of Common Sense.” The Cambridge Companion to Common-Sense Philosophy, 161.