“What is common sense? How are common knowledge and sociology related to each other? Explain.” (2025)
- Common sense is the stock of taken-for-granted, unsystematic knowledge that members of a society use to navigate everyday life — acquired through socialization and lived experience rather than through deliberate inquiry.
- As Weber framed it, common sense is routine knowledge of everyday activities, which may rest on genuine observation or equally on prejudice, habit, and mistaken interpretation.
- Peter Berger captured sociology’s peculiar stance toward this knowledge: its task is a “debunking” one, making visible what is ordinarily invisible because it is too familiar to be noticed.
- The relationship between the two is neither simple rejection nor seamless continuity — sociology grows out of common sense as its raw material even as it systematically breaks from common sense’s method.
The Character of Common Sense
- Common sense is practical and local — oriented to getting through the immediate situation rather than to explaining it systematically.
- It is unreflective: it does not ask of itself “why do I hold this view,” and it is transmitted through socialization rather than tested through evidence.
- It is frequently individualistic and naturalistic in its explanations — poverty is explained by laziness, unemployment by lack of ambition, gender roles by biology — attributing social patterns to individual character or “nature” rather than to social structure.
- It is also often internally contradictory: proverbs like “birds of a feather flock together” and “opposites attract” coexist without either being falsified, because common sense is not organized to be testable — it explains everything after the fact and predicts nothing in advance.
Continuity: Common Sense as Sociology’s Raw Material
- Sociology does not operate on a subject matter alien to everyday life; its starting point is often a common-sense observation or problem — what a society itself finds puzzling or troubling frequently supplies the sociologist’s first hypothesis and entry point into the field.
- Anthony Giddens’s notion of the double hermeneutic captures the depth of this continuity: unlike the objects of natural science, the people sociology studies already interpret their own world through common-sense theories, so the sociologist interprets an already-interpreted reality.
- More strikingly, sociological concepts frequently leak back into everyday language and become common sense in turn — terms like “peer group,” “role model,” and “lifestyle” began as technical sociological vocabulary before entering ordinary speech, at which point they start reshaping the very behaviour they once merely described.
- A live illustration of this two-way traffic is the contemporary debate on online misinformation: common sense explains the spread of “fake news” through individual gullibility or ignorance, while sociological analysis locates it in network structure, algorithmic amplification, and group polarization — a structural account that is gradually filtering back into public common sense about digital life.
The Critical Break: How Sociology Disciplines Common Sense
- Durkheim treated common-sense “prenotions” not as a starting point but as an obstacle to be cleared before genuine inquiry begins, insisting that the observer must systematically discard prior conceptions.
- “The first and most fundamental rule is: consider social facts as things.” — Durkheim
- This methodological demand — that social reality be studied with the same discipline applied to a physical object, rather than assumed to be already understood — is the sharpest formal statement of sociology’s break with common sense.
- C. Wright Mills’s distinction between personal troubles and public issues operationalizes the same break: common sense explains one man’s unemployment through his character, but sociology asks why unemployment rates vary systematically across groups and periods, a question no theory of individual character can answer.
- Sociology further submits itself to rules of evidence and public scrutiny that common sense answers to no one for, and draws on a far wider canvas than any individual’s own biography.
Sociology as the Study of Common Sense Itself
- Not every sociological tradition treats common sense as a rival to be corrected — for Alfred Schutz, the “natural attitude” and the everyday “stock of knowledge” are the phenomenological bedrock that makes social life possible, and thus sociology’s proper object of study.
- Harold Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology goes further, treating members’ common-sense reasoning as the topic of inquiry itself, using breaching experiments to expose the unstated rules that ordinarily make interaction run smoothly — here, common sense is not the enemy of sociological knowledge but the very thing sociology exists to explain.
- Common sense and sociology are best understood not as sealed containers but as exchanging contents continuously — common sense supplies sociology’s raw intuitions and, in phenomenological traditions, its very object of study, while sociology supplies common sense with concepts that quietly reorganize how ordinary people understand their own world.
- The decisive difference is not that one is simply true and the other false, but that sociology submits its claims to evidence, comparison, and revision in a way common sense structurally cannot.
- In an era saturated with algorithmically amplified opinion masquerading as self-evident truth, sociology’s oldest discipline — treating the taken-for-granted as a problem rather than an answer — remains its most contemporary contribution.