Sociology Plus
Common-Sense Knowledge Definition
Common-sense knowledge is the everyday, taken-for-granted knowledge that people use to make judgements and find their way around the social world. It interests sociologists both as the practical resource on which ordinary life runs and as a distinctive form of knowing whose character can be contrasted with that of science.
Two Sociological Interests
At one level, sociologists study common sense simply because it is what people actually use in conducting daily life; Erving Goffman is a leading analyst of common sense in this practical sense. Ethnomethodologists and social phenomenologists, however, are more interested in its character — particularly as it compares with what they take scientific knowledge to be. Everyday speech, they note, employs words that are never rigorously defined, and there are no fixed criteria for establishing what other people mean; yet people manage perfectly well with this apparently unsystematic body of knowledge.
The Argument Against Scientism — and Its Limits
From this observation, ethnomethodologists and phenomenologists have argued that sociology takes a false path when it tries to imitate the natural sciences, and should instead content itself with the more modest, everyday credentials of common-sense knowledge. Critics reply that such arguments rest on an exaggerated picture of how “scientific” communication within science really is, and overlook the ways in which common sense is itself refined and systematised in institutions such as the law. The sharp divide between common sense and science that these approaches presuppose does not, in fact, exist in the form they suppose.