common sense

[mirthtones36]

Out of all the assignments I've ever been asked to complete, this paper has been one of the most intellectually challenging, and by far my favorite. After reading Clifford Geertz's "Common Sense as a Culture System" and realizing that common sense is NOT a universal like we assume it to be, I was asked to choose one concept that I hold to be common

Comments

Interesting attempt

[_rck_]

Some thoughts on your wrestling with the problem of truth and knowledge:

• 
  I think that the sentence Simply put, all knowledge is useful and therefore all knowledge is true. is clearly false, because it ignores strategems, propaganda and deception. Misdirection or sleight of hand only work because you know that the other holds knowledge that is false. (As a joke: Columbus usefully discovered America with a false knowledge about the distance between China and Spain.) More seriously, teachers use false knowledge to lead their students to true knowledge all the time - Socrates for example.
  


• 
  There seems to be some oscillation in the semantics of the word "truth". The Book of Mormon is trying to be a revelation, according to its translator; the Lord of the Rings trilogy is an exercise in artificial language construction (according to its author, who was a devout Catholic and would have rejected any notions that he was authoring a book on par with the Qur'an even, a "doctrine" in your diction). So what do you mean by truth now? Do you

Post-Scriptum to "Interesting attempt"

[_rck_]

PS: I was ver sorry to hear about your lack of popularity and your tumultous religious past. Both MWife and I had spells of unpopularity in school and we both went through a phase of Christian fundamentalism. What got me out of Christian fundamentalism, at any rate, is that I could not believe that their derogatory treatment of women was what God wanted me to do. From that position I began to question the other tenants and eventually learned enough Church history to know that Christian fundamentalism is a 19th century reaction to the Enlightenment and about as ahistorical as they come.

Re: Post-Scriptum to "Interesting attempt"

[avatar_squadron]

Depends which Domination you follow... some are trying to reconcile the degradation of women by explaining the biblical texts in context. And do keep in mind, most of the old testatment is really only laws made by the Hebrews and old stories passed from mouth to mouth while the new testament is largely PERSONAL letters never intended to be seen by anyone save who they were written to, not some holy text commissioned by god

Re: Post-Scriptum to "Interesting attempt"

[_rck_]

I am always for socio-historical contextualization, so no need to convince me there.

really only laws made by the Hebrews and old stories passed from mouth to mouth

Naw, they are not. That's 19th century scholarship, what you are talking about. They are documents of an organized effort of identity finding by elite members of the Jewish communities who are trying to deal with their politically changing landscape around them, primarily the renewed expansion of the Assyrian Empire in the 6th century. Current scholarship is pretty certain that Deuteronomy was never a law anybody could have actually lived by, but was an ideal toward which the community returned from Babylon was supposed to aspire to. Sure, there are parts in there that were opinio communis of the whole Ancient Near East, and so presumably someone tried to live by them, but those were clearly not made up by the Hebrews.

while the new testament is largely PERSONAL letters never intended to be seen by anyone save who they were written to

Not true either - there is

Re: Post-Scriptum to "Interesting attempt"

[mirthtones36]

I really appreciate your responses to this. I had already considered not all, but many of your points. Also, since writing this paper, I've done some research on relativism (I have a feeling my prof assigned that research in response to my stance) and read many of the arguments for and against it. I understand the arguments, I see the logic in them, I see the dents they put in my idealistic notion. But I think one of the points of this assignment was to force me to see that what we understand to be common sense is not always logical--on the contrary it is sometimes quite the opposite--we still believe it. And because we believe it, it becomes "true" to a point that no argument can invalidate it for us. A valuable lesson indeed, in my opinion.

This defining of truth is just another of the probably unanswerable questions that I have only begun to find in abundance. The more I read, the more I deduce, the more questions I find. It's what makes this field so exciting!