Arabic-L:TRANS:more on 'common sense'

[Dilworth Parkinson]

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Arabic-L: Mon 12 Apr 2010
Moderator: Dilworth Parkinson <dilworth_parkinson at byu.edu>
[To post messages to the list, send them to arabic-l at byu.edu]
[To unsubscribe, send message from same address you subscribed from to
listserv at byu.edu with first line reading:
            unsubscribe arabic-l                                      ]

-------------------------Directory------------------------------------

1) Subject:more on 'common sense'
2) Subject:more on 'common sense'

-------------------------Messages-----------------------------------
1)
Date: 12 Apr 2010
From:Benjamin Geer <benjamin.geer at gmail.com>
Subject:more on 'common sense'


Many suggest بديهي and its cognates as a translation for commonsensical and commonsense.  But doesn’t بديهي denote that which is intuitive or axiomatic, i.e. goes without saying?  Isn’t this, then, a little bit different from commonsense?
 


I think the issue here is that academic discourse often critiques common sense; thus the phrase "common sense" often connotes scepticism about what is commonly believed (much like the phrase "folk theory").  It seems to me that بديهي is not compatible with this connotation.  While بديهي could be fine to translate an everyday sentence like (a), it won't work for (b):

(a) Of course, my son, you can't succeed if you don't try; that's just common sense.
(b) Common sense tells us that we have free will, but philosophers have disputed this belief.

Hence in contexts like (b), we find translations like الفهم الشائع or الحس المشترك.

Ben


--------------------------------------------------------------------------
2)
Date: 12 Apr 2010
From:Gunvor Mejdell <gunvor.mejdell at ikos.uio.no>
Subject:more on 'common sense'



It occurs to me that  /musallam, musallama:t/ may be used in this  
sense, with the connotation something uncritically taken over,  
generally assumed, ?

Gunvor Mejdell


--------------------------------------------------------------------------
End of Arabic-L:  12 Apr 2010


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/arabic-l/attachments/20100412/5cf49766/attachment.htm>