Presentations in the Comparing Practices of Knowledge Workshop Series range across historical and disciplinary boundaries, and provide a major component of IFK's inquiry into the process of knowledge formation and transmittal from antiquity to present day. Research-in-progress is welcomed and will receive constructive feedback.
When we discuss the formation and circulation of knowledge, we rarely analyse common sense. A prevalent notion is that, to do the history, philosophy, or social studies of knowledge formation, we must first begin with what is generally understood as `epistemic,' and then proceed to analyse that phenomenon from a historical, philosophical, or socio-political point of view. This is in fact to reify a distinction between science and society that our field has so relentlessly attempted to deconstruct. Common sense is an epistemic faculty and body of truths that structure our engagements with the world around us. As a collective epistemic resource, it is also imbued with ethical qualities. Any resource that is shared gives rise to questions as to how the resource is distributed and by whom, and who has the ability to influence, maintain, or change it. Common sense therefore provides a perfect case study of the interconnection of epistemics and ethics. How should a society solve the problem of errors in its collective epistemic resources? Towards the end of this chapter, I argue that one method---aesthetic media and engagement of aesthetic qualities of experience---has been overlooked due to biases in conceptualisations of processes of epistemic-cognitive change. I employ Dewey's aesthetic theory to make a case for the suitability of art as a method for correcting collective epistemic flaws in (aspiring) democratic societies.