Revision summary
Common sense is everyday recipes; sociology studies and breaks them. Durkheim: discard prenotions. Schutz, Garfinkel, Giddens: science still depends on members’ meanings. Mills links biography and history. Proof is evidence, not proverb.
Model answer
Copper italics in this answer — like this — are the key facts. Each one is unpacked in the Facts & figures rail.
Introduction
Common sense is the stock of recipes people use to go on in everyday life. Sociology starts from that stock and then breaks it. The relation is neither identity nor contempt. It is disciplined distance.
Body
Distance from prenotions
- Durkheim required the sociologist to discard prenotions. Suicide as sin or as weather is common sense; the rate as a social fact is not.
- Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann showed that the everyday world is already constructed. Sociology studies that construction instead of repeating it.
Dependence on common sense
- Alfred Schutz and later Garfinkel treated the life-world as the condition of any science of action. Without members’ meanings, variables are empty.
- Anthony Giddens’s double hermeneutic: sociology interprets a world that already interprets itself, then returns concepts such as “class” into common talk.
Productive tension
- C. Wright Mills’s sociological imagination links biography to history, which common sense keeps apart.
- Common sense said lockdown was only a health rule. Sociology asked why migrant workers walked home.
Relation stated
- Sociology uses common sense as topic and as a warning.
- It does not use it as proof.
Flow diagram
flowchart TD CS[Common sense recipes] --> TOP[Topic for sociology] CS --> PRE[Prenotions to discard] SOC[Sociology] --> DH[Double hermeneutic] TOP[TOP] --> SOC[SOC] PRE[PRE] --> SOC[SOC]
Conclusion
Sociology is related to common sense as critique and as resource. Durkheim breaks prenotions; Schutz and Giddens show that meaning is already there. The 2020 migrant exodus is a case where common sense of “stay home” hid a structure of informal work.
Quick related
Students also ask
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Do you agree with Max Weber's idea that bureaucracy has the potential to become an iron cage ? Justify your answer
Next question on this syllabus topic (2021 · Q3(c)). View answer →
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Is sociology just organised common sense?
No. It tests claims against comparison and documents, including facts that proverb denies.
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Should sociologists ignore everyday talk?
No. Talk is data. It is not already the theory.
Same topic · past papers
UPSC has asked this before
These previous-year questions sit on the same topic. Open one to practise the earlier ask.
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2025 · Q1(a) · Sociology GS 1 · 10 marks
What is common sense? How are common knowledge and sociology related to each other? Explain. -
2023 · Q4(a) · Sociology GS 1 · 20 marks
Do you think that common sense is the starting point of social research? What are its advantages and limitations? Explain -
2018 · Q1(a) · Sociology GS 1 · 10 marks
The focal point of sociology rests on interaction. How do you distinguish it from common sense? -
2016 · Q2(c) · Sociology GS 1 · 15 marks
Is sociology common sense? Give reasons in support of your argument.
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