The Battle for Common Sense in the 21st Century: Is Humanity's Last Bastion Falling?

Abstract The concept of "common sense", understood as the body of self-evident and shared beliefs by which people navigate everyday life without the need for explicit reasoning, has entered a new crisis in the twenty-first century. This article argues that, contrary to the philosophical tradition, the question today is no longer what common sense is or how long it will survive. The question is who constructs it, at what scale it is distributed, and whether its nature remains human.

The article's theoretical framework holds that common sense has never been an intrinsic property of the individual mind, but always a social technology: a tool that societies have developed to reduce cognitive costs and enable collective coordination. Like any technology, it can be designed, dismantled, or rebuilt.

The article first examines four intellectual currents of the past quarter-century: the analytic epistemological defence of basic beliefs; attempts to model and artificially reproduce common sense; the diagnosis of the collapse of the shared social infrastructure of reality; and nascent efforts to reconstruct that infrastructure through information ethics and digital governance.

It then shows that these currents are engaged in three fields of struggle: the battle over ownership (the transfer of common sense from the human mind to corporations, states, and machines); the battle over territory (the tension between global algorithmic homogenisation and the need for planetary thinking); and the battle over identity (whether common sense remains human or becomes algorithmic).

The article's central argument is that, faced with "thinking machines" capable of justifying any claim through apparently logical reasoning, human common sense remains the last line of defence against false and unwarranted beliefs. This is due to its rootedness in shared experience and its capacity for self-correction in the face of new conditions and concrete evidence. Defending it is not merely an epistemological matter but an ethical one, in which commitment to truth as method must guide human endeavour.

AI Disclosure and Translation Statement: The original manuscript of this work was authored in Farsi (Persian) by the researcher. The English version was produced through AI-assisted translation and linguistic refinement, utilizing Google Translate and Large Language Models. The author has meticulously reviewed, edited, and verified the final English text to ensure that all theoretical nuances, philosophical arguments, and conceptual frameworks accurately reflect the original Persian content. The author remains fully responsible for the integrity and accuracy of the translation. The original Persian manuscript is available from the author upon reasonable request.