Common Sense Epistemology as a generativist Meta-Philosophy
Jean-Baptiste Guillon  1@  
1 : Collège de France - chaire de Métaphysique et Philosophie de la Connaissance  (CDF)  -  Site web
Collège de France
11 place Marcelin Berthelot F-75231 Paris Cedex 05 -  France

The tradition of Common Sense epistemology contains a variety of epistemological arguments, some of which are more represented in the contemporary literature. Here, I want to develop one of Reid's arguments, which is little represented in contemporary debates, namely, the chronological conception of common sense as the starting point of philosophy (i.e. the original system of belief from which all subsequent philosophical system must come). Reid uses this notion of common sense in support of the view that all views that are not themselves commonsensical must be ultimately derived from common sense, through a series of epistemologically motivated belief revisions. In order to develop this line of argument, I will use the conceptual tools of contemporary "dynamic epistemology" (in particular Isaac Levi's and Gilbert Harman's works), which focuses on the dynamic notion of the justification of belief revisions (as opposed to the synchronic notion of the justification of epistemic states). In the proposed framework, every philosophical system must be conceived as (ultimately) "generated" from the principles of an original (common sense) system, through a series of justified revisions. This strategy opens the way for a new meta-philosophy of common sense which (unlike Richard Double's or Steven Boulter's understanding of common sense meta-philosophy) has the important characteristic of not being conservative, because any revision of common sense is possible in principle, as long as the revision is derived from common sense.


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