You may find that parts of my work argue against common sense views of reality. This is because common sense is nothing more than a person’s or a society’s accumulated biases and preconceptions. It tells us nothing about the world, beyond perhaps being a way to learn about a society.

When phenomena and rules discovered by science seem to conflict with common sense, it is well understood that common sense is wrong. When common sense—look out the window! Look down a road, look at the ocean’s horizon! Water flows down, why doesn’t it fall off?—tells you that the Earth is flat, but rigorous scientific examination says otherwise, your duty is to reject common sense.

It is common sense that women are not as smart as men, so you don’t need to bother teaching them math. That black people don’t feel as much pain, so you don’t need to give them as much anesthesia.

Common sense is a near-worthless epistemological stopgap. If there is anything besides common sense that answers a question, anything ought to be believed over it.

And yet, you’ll find many philosophical critiques that make appeals to it. It is, as best I know, a fairly mainstream position that a philosophical argument going against common sense casts some amount of doubt on its correctness.

I reject this. And I implore you to do so as well.