What We All Know: Community in Moore's "A Defence of Common Sense"

1. introduction

in the first part of his notorious 1925 article "A Defence of Common Sense,"¹ G. E. Moore aims to show that idealist (and skeptical²) views can be dismissed by appealing to a core set of propositions that we all know to be true, which he calls "Common Sense beliefs" ("Defence," 119).³ For instance, idealism entails that there are no material objects. But we all have human bodies, and bodies are material objects. Therefore, idealism is false. Ever since its publication, Moore's article has generated much discussion in a somewhat peculiar way. Peculiar, because Moore's appeal to Common Sense has appeared to many to be overly naive and thereby philosophically impotent. At the same time, however, it is precisely this apparent naivety that has prompted philosophers to revisit it repeatedly.⁴ Such discussions often have two interrelated motivations. The first is to get clear about exactly how Moore's appeal to Common Sense is supposed to work.⁵ Because Moore was not an idiot, it would be desirable to develop a more sophisticated account of what he is trying to do.⁶ The second motivation is to let Moore's provocative article stimulate discussion of certain philosophical issues in their own right.⁷

In this paper, I start from the first motivation. I provide an account of Moore's conception of Common Sense—as it figures in "Defence"—that, to my mind, better captures Moore's position than existing interpretations. Usually, Moore's invocation of Common Sense is seen as operating in dialectical opposition to the idealist: Moore knows to be true certain Common Sense beliefs that the idealist takes to be false. But this is not what Moore is doing. He insists that the idealists themselves also know the Common Sense beliefs to be true. Only, they have lost sight of this. Common Sense, then, really is common sense, shared by all members of the community, including the idealist. This point—which is often overlooked⁸—is crucial to understanding Moore's position. Idealists, as Moore sees it, are philosophers who have lost touch with their own position as members of the community of human beings.

I start by laying bare the communal nature of Moore's conception of Common Sense against Malcolm's critique in his paper "Defending Common...