“Do you think that common sense is the starting point of social research? What are its advantages and limitations? Explain.” (2023)
- Common sense is the stock of taken-for-granted, unreflective knowledge that members of a society use to navigate everyday life — acquired through socialisation rather than systematic inquiry.
- Emile Durkheim, in laying down the rules of sociological method, treated common notions about society (what he called prenotions) as an obstacle rather than a resource — the first duty of the sociologist, for him, was to discard them and treat social facts as “things.”
- Yet the more defensible position, and the one this answer takes, is that common sense is a legitimate starting point for social research — it supplies the researcher’s first questions, hunches and points of entry — but it cannot remain the basis of knowledge; it must undergo a disciplined transformation before it earns the status of sociological knowledge.
- The relationship, in other words, is not one of simple continuity or simple rejection, but of a methodological break: sociology begins in the same everyday world common sense inhabits, and then submits that world’s assumptions to evidence, testing and revision.
Advantages: Why Common Sense Is a Genuine Starting Point
- Accessibility and familiarity with the field — unlike the natural scientist studying an inert object, the sociologist is already a member of the society being studied, and this lived familiarity orients fieldwork and helps frame relevant questions.
- Source of hunches and hypotheses — many research problems originate in an everyday puzzle or popular belief (does urbanisation weaken family ties, does reservation reduce inequality); common sense supplies the raw proposition that method later refines into a testable hypothesis.
- Signals what a society finds problematic — what ordinary people notice, worry about, or argue over is itself sociologically significant data about a society’s preoccupations, even before it is verified.
- Foundational to qualitative and grounded approaches — methods that build categories up from participants’ own everyday meanings, rather than imposing an external theoretical scheme, treat common sense as a resource to be documented, not merely corrected.
- Useful in interpretive sociology — Max Weber’s notion of Verstehen requires the sociologist to grasp the subjective meanings actors attach to their action, meanings first expressed in ordinary, common-sense language before being analytically reconstructed.
Limitations: Why Common Sense Cannot Be the End Point
- Unsystematic and anecdotal — common-sense claims are generalised from a narrow, personal range of experience rather than from representative evidence.
- Riddled with bias, stereotype and self-interest — common sense frequently naturalises the vantage point of the socially dominant group, presenting a particular, interested view of the world as simply “how things are.”
- Internally contradictory and unfalsifiable — common sense supplies a proverb for every outcome (“absence makes the heart grow fonder” and “out of sight, out of mind” are both common sense), so it explains everything after the fact while predicting nothing in advance.
- Not universal but socially positioned — what counts as common sense to one class, caste, gender or generation is often unrecognisable to another, which means common sense is itself a social product requiring explanation, not a neutral foundation.
- Individualistic in its mode of explanation — common sense explains poverty by laziness or deviance by bad character; it rarely asks why rates of such outcomes vary systematically across groups and periods, which is precisely the sociological question.
The Methodological Break: From Prenotion to Verified Knowledge
- Durkheim’s injunction to eradicate prenotions is best read not as a demand to ignore common sense but to stop treating it as self-evidently true — the task is to convert a common-sense proposition into an operational, testable statement and then accept whatever the evidence yields, even if it overturns the original hunch.
- This is an act of what may be called an epistemological break: the movement from a spontaneous, everyday grasp of social reality to a constructed, methodologically disciplined body of knowledge, built through concepts, sampling and systematic comparison rather than given directly by experience.
- Contemporary survey research shows why this break matters in practice: global perception surveys conducted in recent years have repeatedly found that publics, including in India, badly misjudge basic social facts — unemployment, migrant numbers or crime trends are routinely over- or under-estimated relative to official data, precisely because common sense generalises from vivid impressions rather than systematic measurement.
- Common sense, then, deserves neither the uncritical trust it commands in daily life nor the wholesale dismissal Durkheim’s harsher language sometimes implies — it is the raw material of social inquiry, not its finished product.
- The advantages make it indispensable as an entry point: without it, the sociologist would have no questions to ask and no vocabulary to begin with.
- The limitations make it insufficient as a foundation: without systematic testing, common sense remains a set of unexamined, often self-serving beliefs that can never be shown to be wrong.
- The enduring task is to keep performing this break — turning the taken-for-granted into the questioned, and the questioned into the evidenced — which is also why sociology can never retire from checking even its own most confident assumptions against new data.