zippy256 wrote:
"Common sense" to me - in the expression "use your common sense" at least - means "I want something done my way but I'm not about to explain what my way is."
Jono wrote:
I think what they mean when they say Aspies (actually it's autistic people in general) is that we don't use past experience the way other people do. I'm not sure whether this is necessarily negative. It can be positive and negative. It can be viewed as just a different way of thinking but that's my view.
I'm not sure what you mean by "the way other people do." I definitely make use of past experiences, especially social experiences, to try and analyse where I went wrong in a particular situation and avoid doing the same in the future.
I've also done that to learn the unwritten rules of social interaction. That's not exactly what I meant though. I may worded it a bit badly. I was thinking more in terms of experience that is "common" or what most people supposedly have. To put it another way, by definition it's experience or knowledge that most people would share as a common natural understanding. In terms of social interactions, NT's mostly seem to have an intuitive understanding of the unwritten rules whereas we have to learn them. This is could be because of missing out on non-verbal cues. In any case, those unwritten rules may seem like common sense to NT's but not to us. So when we falter on some of these, that may be one of the things they refer to when they say we lack common sense. I think when people use the phrase you mentioned "use your common sense" they referring to something that they see as obvious or self-evident.
03 Feb 2010, 9:38 pm
