Common sense is the unexamined practical knowledge members of a society share about how the world works — that hard work brings reward, that mothers are naturally better with infants, that crime is caused by poverty. It is acquired informally, held with confidence, seldom tested, and frequently contradictory within itself. Sociology begins where common sense stops asking questions.
How it differs from sociology
Four differences matter. Sociology is systematic, organising claims into theory rather than leaving them as scattered maxims. It is evidence-based, requiring that assertions be checked against data gathered by explicit methods that others can inspect. It is reflexive, stating its concepts and assumptions openly so they can be criticised. And it questions the obvious, treating what everyone knows as the very thing needing explanation. Durkheim insisted that the sociologist must first discard the prenotions of ordinary language, because lay categories smuggle in the society's own self-image. Berger made the same point by describing sociology as the debunking of taken-for-granted interpretations. The result is often counter-intuitive — that suicide rates are socially patterned, that education can reproduce inequality while appearing to reduce it.
Gramsci on common sense and good sense
Gramsci gave the term a political edge. Common sense, for him, is the sedimented residue of past ideologies — an incoherent mixture of folklore, religion, prejudice and fragments of philosophy through which hegemony becomes ordinary. Yet within it lies a kernel of good sense, the practical, experiential insight of subordinate groups. The task of critical thought is not to sneer at common sense but to work that kernel into a coherent worldview.
Points of debate
Phenomenologists and ethnomethodologists reverse the hierarchy. For Schutz and Garfinkel, common-sense reasoning is not an obstacle to be cleared away but the very accomplishment sociology must describe, since social order is built out of it.
For the UPSC answer
The distinction is a standing question in Paper I. Give the four contrasts crisply, anchor them in Durkheim's prenotions, then add value by noting the Gramscian and phenomenological positions — sociology both breaks with common sense and takes it seriously as data.
References & further reading
- Durkheim, E. (1982). The Rules of Sociological Method. Macmillan. (French original 1895.)
- Berger, P. (1963). Invitation to Sociology. Anchor Books.
- Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Lawrence and Wishart.