ABSTRACT
On the level of common sense, G. E. Moore insists that propositions about the world are not only easily understood, they are also immediately recognizable as true or false without always the need of conducting a tedious investigation. Moore believes that a major reason why philosophers contradict common sense is that they question premises which are unquestionable. In allowing that empirical commonsense statements can be known with certainty to be true, Moore makes a very important and justified concession. It seems to be confusion between logical possibility and empirical possibility which has led philosophers to assert that no empirical statement can ever be known with certainty to be true. An important difference between the two senses of the expressions ‘it is possible’ and ‘it is impossible’ is that empirical possibility admits of both degree and tense. A. E. Murphy goes on to say that Moore’s defense of common sense is a model of what such a defense ought to be.
