The Illustrated Oxford Dictionary defines common sense as “sound practical sense, especially in everyday matters.” Wikipedia defines it as “knowledge, judgment, and taste which is more or less universal, and which is held more or less without reflection or argument.” In modern English, it defines “plain, self-evident truths or conventional wisdom that one needed no sophistication to grasp and no proof to accept precisely because they accorded so well with the basic (common sense) intellectual capacities and experiences of the whole social body.” In his 1776 pamphlet Common Sense, author Thomas Paine used common sense as a tool in his argument in favor of the American colonies’ independence from the British Empire.
