Common sense & other issues

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it has nothing to do with your words, or you, nor am i saying that you instill a sense of stupidity in me, frankly you are reacting to something that isnt there.

but the replies "everybody knows that" "duh" "no s**t sherlock" and all the variations thereof are derogatory in nature, they are made by humans to bring an error into focus and emphasize that oneself or a group would never do such a thing, it is a way of maintaining or gaining superiority over another person and or group, sometimes only in alimited area and sometimes in general.

they are not automatically a way to argue for common sense since they are fairly far removed from that by their very nature.

also "you" can mean many things, in this case you != jaden, you == person in general

"when you go outside you should remember x"
plenty of ways of using that in a non specific way.

1. I never said you thought that either, i repeated that you can't respect me based on your false observation that I was "instilling a sense of stupidity in people when talking like that", as in for anybody, not necessarily you. So it is in fact you who are reacting to something that isn't there.

2. Of course no-one is actually going to SAY those things, but that doesn't mean people don't think them when asked a question that pertains to obvious answers, that's what I was talking about.

and sadly the woman who sued McDonalds after burning herself on a cup of coffee without a 'this is hot' warning on was seriously lacking in common sense!

I have terrible common sense! I am the sort of person who will touch a hot pan then almost immediately do it again! One of my friends' children has a problem with common sense as well as he decided to wash his 3DS under the tap!

I always hear that one getting brought up as a frivolous lawsuit and that she had no common sense. That wasn't the case. It wasn't just a simple burn where her skin got a bit red and she said ouch. She was seriously burned requiring hospitalization and skin grafting. Their coffee was excessively hot and dangerous.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald%27s_Restaurants#Burn_incident

Right, the McDonalds thing is actually what came to mind first. I almost brought it up actually. But you see what I mean, it's that sort of thing that is common sense.

Yeah sometimes everybody has a bad moment with common sense, I'm no exception to that, nor do I (or ever have) claim such lol. I once almost burned myself on boiling water, had my mother not been there at the time to remind me that it's still hot, I likely would have lol.

Yes, that is correct, however, had the woman (at the time) took more care in preventing the incident to begin with (knowing that coffee was bound to be hot regardless of severity of hotness), she wouldn't have needed those skin grafts. But her lack in doing so is still considered a lack of common sense because she didn't take the time to prevent possible harm to herself (as the dictionary states that common sense is also taking steps to preventing harm to oneself).

I'm not really sure what she could have done to prevent it. I would think that she just expected to take the lid off and put in her cream and sugar and drink it. She didn't expect it to spill all over her.

If I recall, she was in her car at the time, which probably means she was holding the cup with both hands, above her lap with one hand above the lid and the other holding the side of the cup. It would likely be considered common sense as well, that opening a sealed container in that manner is very difficult and highly unstable. And since the coffee burned her to such a degree as to need skin grafts, one may also assume that she could feel even slight heat on the cup's side (as when this happened they didn't have heat protective coffee cups, let alone labels), and in such a case, her lack of assuming that it could spill is still a lack in common sense because to assume that it couldn't spill in that situation is fairly neglegent and one may say an almost rushed conclusion with little thought or care to the situation.

I think what that case brings up is a small but meaningful difference between "common sense" and "common knowledge" (also brought up by Jaden in reference to driving). In colloquial use, "common sense" means rational inference and "common knowledge" means things known by the majority which may or may not be possible to infer (so it can also include cultural knowledge).

From your wiki link:



Using common sense, she would know that the coffee is hot. That's a rational inference from the fact that it is made with boiling water and needs a certain amount of time to cool until it is safe to the touch. But common knowledge would tell her (falsely, in this case), that it had already cooled slightly because that was how it was served in several other restaurants.

McDonalds had apparently served their coffee this hot for 10 years (and had settled claims that never got famous) and apparently still do serve it that hot, but the fame of this case has shifted the common knolwedge towards the assumption that the coffee is served hot enough to cause scald injuries. It has also become common knolwedge that she put the cup between her knees, so I think people are far less likely to do that since the case has enetered common knowledge. But before the case, the common knowledge was that coffee was served hot enough to burn just a little (to be momentarily painful but not require hospitalization) since it had cooled off some from its initial boiling.

So common sense and common knowledge do overlap but aren't the same thing. But I think people get so used to common knowledge that they start to think it is common sense (a rational inference) and bring out the "duh!" insults when somebody doesn't have common knolwedge even though they have common sense.

Precisely. That's what I indeed was talking about.