Common-Sense and Scientific Interpretation of Human Action

Abstract

“Neither common sense nor science can proceed without departing from the strict consideration of what is actual in experience.” This statement by A. N. Whitehead is at the foundation of his analysis of the Organization of Thought.¹ Even the thing perceived in everyday life is more than a simple sense presentation.² It is a thought object, a construct of a highly complicated nature, involving not only particular forms of time-successions in order to constitute it as an object of one single sense, say of sight,³ and of space relations in order to constitute it as a sense-object of several senses, say of sight and touch,⁴ but also a contribution of imagination of hypothetical sense presentations in order to complete it.⁵ According to Whitehead, it is precisely the last-named factor, the imagination of hypothetical sense presentation, “which is the rock upon which the whole structure of common-sense thought is erected” ⁶ and it is the effort of reflective criticism “to construe our sense presentation as actual realization of the hypothetical thought object of perceptions.” ⁷ In other words, the so-called concrete facts of common-sense perception are not so concrete as it seems.