Common sense philosopher

Was this your answer Using only logic and reason, it is difficult to conclude that mass is conserved in a chemical reaction. In most reactions, the total amount of mass appears to change because some of the products of the reaction are invisible atmospheric gases.Thus the law of mass conservation would have likely escaped Lavoisier s notice had he relied on the common-sense logic and reason used by Greek philosophers rather than on precise measurements and experimentation. 

Should the principle which is therein adopted be applied to the common events of life, it will be found that it is simply absurd. Suppose that some one were to systematize the formation of letters into words that formed the contents of a book. Were he to begin by saying that he had discovered a certain word which would serve as a type and from which by substitution and double decomposition all the others are to be derived—thst he by this means not only could form new words, but new books, and books almost ad infinitum —that this word also formed an admirable point of comparison with all the others,— that in all this there were only a few difficulties, but that th e might be ingeniously overcome,— he would state certainly an empirical truth. At the same time, however, his method would, judged by the light of common sense, be an absurdity. But a principle which common sense brands with absurdity, is philosophically false and a scientific blunder. 

Many discussions of natural kinds in the philosophical literature treat the macroscopic as the domain of common sense and the microscopic as the domain of science. Johnson (1997), for example, makes this claim in his distinction between chemical kinds and manifest kinds. Although I will not be saying much about chemical treatments of the macroscopic properties of water, these are very important. While there may be such a thing as a manifest kind, it is important to see that chemical kinds can also be individuated at the macroscopic level in virtue of the ensemble structures of substances. 

In chapter 1 we noted the probable influence of the Common-Sense school on Couper s fellow Scots/English chemists Williamson and Graham. In reference to the 1826-27 atomistic formulas of the Glaswegian chemist Thomas Clark, W. V. Farrar has seen "a climate of thought in Scotland favourable to naive structuralism," and argued for a culmination of this trend in the formulas of Couper and Alexander Crum Brown. More broadly, Richard Olson has explored the influence of Scottish Common-Sense philosophy on British physics. This philosophical school arose in Thomas Reid s opposition to the skeptical writings... 

Moore, C. E. (1959). A defence of common sense. In Philosophical Papers. Collier Books, pp. 32-59. 

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