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
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 --> SOC PRE --> 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.
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