22 COMMON SENSE (aND SCIENCE) 



relation— even a specialized one— could handle perfectly. We say 

 "The burned child dreads the fire," but some children who have 

 suflFered a burn do not shun fires. Neither humans nor animals always 

 shun the thing or situation of which they have had disagreeable ex- 

 perience. "It all depends"— on how disagreeable the experience, on 

 the balance of estimated possibility of pleasure against estimated 

 risk of pain, on the psychic state and background of the subject, and 

 so forth. Even specifying all these, the predicted behavior would still 

 sometimes fail to occur. Perfect predictability being unobtainable, 

 we forego the clumsy ( and, in the issue, not readily verifiable ) speci- 

 fications in favor of the brief and unadorned general statement— 

 admittedly crude but perhaps statistically valid as a guide to action. 

 Earlier I suggested that colligative relations could be reduced to 

 the form: "If A, then B." I was not altogether correct. The more ac- 

 curate form is: "If A, then probably approximately B." Due to uncer- 

 tainties in the conceptual denotations, we may err even in routine 

 applications of a given maxim; and in atypical situations even the 

 choice of the approximate maxim may become doubtful. The child 

 who has learned a maxim of common sense has not thereby ac- 

 quired the ability to use it successfully. Knowing it only as an ab- 

 straction, he must still acquire a "feel" for the concrete situations in 

 which it can be used. Polanyi argues that: 



... in all applications of a formalism to experience there is an in- 

 determinacy involved, which must be resolved by the observer on 

 the ground of unspecifiable criteria. Now we may say further that the 

 process of applying language to things is also necessarily unformal- 

 ized: that it is inarticulate. Denotation, then, is an art, . . . 



Experience helps here; indeed, it is indispensable. The child fails to 

 discriminate the situation in which he should look before he leaps 

 from that in which he who hesitates is lost. The experienced battle 

 commander shows his competence in just such discrimination. 



A FOURTH STAGE IN THE ORGANIZATION OF EXPERIENCE 



Through three mutually interacting stages we have passed from 

 stimuli to constructs, from constructs to concepts, and from concepts 

 to colligative relations. A multitude of such relations represents the 

 achievement of common sense— a major achievement making pos- 



