COMMON SENSE (aND SCIENCE) 23 



sible purposive and generally successful behavior in everyday affairs. 

 But simply as an organization of experience this is still an incom- 

 plete achievement. Command of the bewildering multitude of col- 

 ligative relations— apparently intrinsicalhj individual, discrete, frag- 

 mentary—presents a superficially insoluble problem. To master such 

 relations there seems no alternative to brute-force memorization, an 

 expedient wasteful of time and effort and fundamentally limited by 

 the memory's capacity. The problem is further exacerbated in diat 

 we must memorize not only relations but also the limits in range 

 and reliability pertaining to each, and, beyond that, the manifold 

 denotations that im^est its conceptual terms with experiential rele- 

 vance. The child requires years to master the relations of common 

 sense; the apprentice requires years to master the relations of an 

 empirical craft. 



We observed earlier that concepts ( words ) mean nothing without 

 relations (sentences), but Wittgenstein adds that "understanding a 

 sentence means understanding a language." Why so? Whitehead has 

 the answer: 



There is not a sentence which adequately states its own meaning. 

 There is always a background of presupposition which defies analysis 

 by reason of its infinitude. 



In common sense the major part of the background of presupposi- 

 tion is simply the world-view necessarily implicit in any language of 

 common sense which, for example, takes entirely for granted certain 

 "accredited" concepts of things, and the classes and qualities thereof. 

 Gradually acquiring command of that theory, the child learns, and 

 learns to use, the concepts and relations of common sense precisely 

 as he comes to grasp the "nature" of the world of common sense. 

 Similarly, the apprentice comes to be a master carpenter not simply 

 by memorization and the acquisition of physical dexterity, but when 

 he has grasped the "nature" of wood. With this insight he can pass 

 beyond memorization (of the relations describing the working and 

 structural employments of wood) to something approaching com- 

 prehension of how the various relations arise. 



We find two major genera in the concepts of common sense ( as in 

 those of science). The first and larger group contains the indicative 

 concepts, with relatively clear denotations, which figure prominently 



