Several things can be learned about common sense from Dr. Johnson's attempt to refute George Berkeley by kicking the stone. Its philosophical incompetence is not one of them. Dr. Johnson of course misunderstood Berkeley, and his misunderstanding was not a collapse of common sense. He thought that if stones had, as Berkeley said, no "material substance" and were collections of "ideas," a boot ought to go through them without resistance. And if Berkeley had been maintaining that solid objects were only apparently solid and were really collections of what we would ordinarily call ideas, the refutation would have been an appropriate reaction of common sense.

The Notion of Common Sense

Whatever other aspects of meaning the word sense may retain in the compound "common sense," it has prominently the force of sense as opposed to nonsense. In what is contrary to common sense there is always...