Argue that the theory of common sense structures provides an important and hitherto unappreciated link between early Gestalt psychology on the one hand and contemporary developments in philosophy and in artificial intelligence research on the other.

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Introduction

In the works of Aristotle or of the medievals, as also in the writings of later common-sense philosophers such as Thomas Reid or G. E. Moore, we find a family of different attempts to come to grips with the structures of common sense and of the common-sense world that is given to us in normal, pre-theoretical experience. We shall argue in what follows that the theory of such structures provides an important and hitherto unappreciated link between early Gestalt psychology on the one hand and contemporary developments in philosophy and in artificial intelligence research on the other.

The notion of providing an adequate theory of the common-sense world has been taken seriously of late above all by those, such as Patrick Hayes or Kenneth Forbus, who see in such a theory of what they call `naive' or `qualitative physics' the foundations of future practical successes in robotics.(2) This naive physics is, however, like cognitive science in general, in a state of flux, and a serious philosophical investigation of its presuppositions and achievements has hardly been attempted. Yet it is already at this stage possible to point to a certain apparent defect or one-sidedness of current