The Structure of Common Sense and Its Relation to Engagement and Social Change – A Pragmatist Account

1 Introduction

The term common sense has nowadays become an ever-pervasive catchphrase. Its “popularity” seems to enhance the fact that this form of knowledge has a rather controversial status in the public sphere. For some, common sense denotes a set of somehow “forgotten solutions” applicable to any kind of problem, while others hold that it represents an intrinsically unscientific and simplistic way of thinking. It is seen both as the last bulwark against “empty highbrow scholasticism” of the “elites” and as a cause for concern, since the invocation of common sense allegedly plays a crucial role in the rising tide of “anti-intellectualism” and “populism”. Accordingly, in (everyday) political life, we often hear promises that assure us that abstract (scientific) problems are in fact reducible to an understandable and communicable language of catchphrases and proverbs. These types of claims are often followed by a corollary according to which we found ourselves in this grave situation where “there is a need to make ourselves communicable again” (sic.) simply because we have lost touch with some “universally shared core values”. On the other side, (social) scientists – especially sociologists – have traditionally been suspicious of any kind of everyday knowledge. Even if we can find relatively sympathetic views on its importance in interactionist sociology, perhaps most notably in the works of Garfinkel (1967) and Goffman (1974), the prevailing view among sociologists (Merton 1968, 22; Manis 1972) has been that common sense is, as Watts eloquently observes, “the Rodney Dangerfield of epistemologies” (Watts 2014: 13) and therefore deserves no scientific recognition.

After Brexit, and the overall rise of populist movements in Europe, as well as the election of Donald Trump as the US president, this skepticism regarding common sense has only increased. With these developments, social scientists have found themselves in this rather strange situation where some of them feel obliged to get socially engaged and debunk the retrograde populist rhetoric threatening the democratic procedures of the society. And yet, the path of engagement seems to entail that this skepticism regarding common sense in fact needs to be widely communicable to all actors of the public sphere in such a way that avoids both the pitfalls of demagogy and the exclusivity of elitism. In other words, for aforementioned scientists the central question is how to change common sense through (theoretically informed) common sense? Efforts to answer this kind of issues will be at the heart of this paper.^[1]

The following text will be structured in six sections. In the first two sections, we will describe three widespread approaches to common sense and argue why the pragmatist outtake, exemplified in the works of Dewey and Peirce is the most promising one when it comes to theoretically understating this type of knowledge. Then, we will consider how the pragmatist understanding of common sense influenced modern sociological theory – most notably interactionist sociology. In the fourth section we will rely on Donald Davidson’s philosophy of language in order to describe the structure of common sense and also try to illustrate how this “diversification of common sense” might resolve some of the shortcomings regarding issues that we detected in interactionist sociology. Finally, in the last two sections, we will consider how our account of the structure of common sense provides a more nuanced understanding the complex history that lies behind the distinction between common and good sense which will in turn help us to a differentiate theoretical interconnections between different elements of the mentioned structure, social engagement and (radical) social change. Finally, we will outline common sense engagement and goods sense engagement as one more theoretical avenue for achieving Burawoy’s plea (2005) for public sociology.

2 Framing Common Sense

Our preliminary effort to analyze common sense more systematically must start from the fact that both its apologists and critics seem to agree that it provides an inherently intersubjective mode of reduction of the complexity found in our social and natural environment, which in turns enables intervention and engagement with (pressing) practical problems. In this regard, common sense type of problem-solving always refers to an already constructed and relatively stable body of social customs and institutions. It is precisely this fusion between our personal and communal epistemological capabilities which makes common sense such an interesting and often controversial notion.

As already suggested, there are more ways in which one can approach this hybrid nature of common sense. First, there is the optimistic account according to which commonsense knowledge is a perfectly sufficient cognitive resource for regulating our daily political and social life. Taken to its extreme, this view of the apologists of common sense is deeply conservative since it holds that “common sense solutions” can resolve any practical issue – even those that are immensely complicated; such as financial crises and climate change. Moreover, this conservative outtake (Holthoon & Olson 1987) also implies that “fancy talk” found in scientific or philosophical knowledge, in fact, muddies the clear waters created by the commonsense approach of “regular folks”, and when that happens it is up to the conservatives to make sure that we “return” to common sense.

Secondly, there is the pessimistic account which holds that common sense has almost no epistemological value because it is contradictory, incoherent and (to a great degree) culturally biased (Geertz 1975). Authors who denounce common sense on this ground usually admit that this type of knowledge presents a starting point for proper scientific investigation, but at the same time claim that (social) science should somehow progressively displace all kinds of everyday knowledge (Bernstein 1971: 282). The progress of a given community according to this account of the critic and the expert depends on the proper distribution of scientific knowledge that is done by the epistemologically privileged members of that community (Ackerman 2014).

Finally, there is the pragmatist account according to which common sense is both the starting point and the ultimate goal of scientific knowledge (Dewey 1948; Taylor 1947; Hookway 2006), since no matter how technical the vocabulary of science might get, it still must remain relevant and transferrable to practical problems that are selected and defined using commonsense vocabularies. According to this approach, the relationship between common sense and science is not antagonistic and is in fact seen as a form of partnership.

In this paper, we will try to show that this third holistic approach is of key importance for understating why exactly common sense is epistemologically relevant for social sciences. But, perhaps more importantly, the pragmatist account can also inform us on how social sciences could engage with pressing social issues without invoking accusations of “empty scholasticism”, “fancy talk” and elitism on the one side, and on the other, charges of shallow-mindedness and populism that respectively follow the optimistic and pessimistic approach to common sense.

3 Intersubjectivity Of Common Sense and Its Relation to Social Science – Reconstructing the Pragmatist Approach

Epistemological considerations of common sense usually imply some universal and mutually shared cognitive and/or emotional capabilities of our mind that enable us to follow a common interpretive scheme, and allow us to interact with each other and our natural surroundings. When the problem is formulated in this manner, it is of course hard not to consult some of the voluminous literature from cognitive science and developmental psychology (Greenwood 1991; Bloom 2005; Ratcliffe 2006; Bogdan 2008; Andrews 2012) that focuses on folk psychology – a term that at surface seems to be synonymous with common sense. The two most dominant and often opposing views on the nature of folk psychology are the theory-theory and the simulation theory. Proponents of the first school of thought (for example, Bloom 2005) claim that we create innate theories about natural surroundings and mental states of others that we subsequently modify and develop during our social interactions. Conversely, simulation theory proposes that we ascribe beliefs and desires to other people based on our own inner mental experience, that is, proponents of this theory claim that during social interaction we try to mentally simulate the most relevant beliefs and desires of others in order to figure out how to attain mutual understanding and take the appropriate course of action. Both the theory-theory and the simulation theory refer to problems of intersubjectivity, as one of the central issues surrounding common sense. However, there is a subtle and yet important difference in the way in which cognitive science and psychology approach common sense intersubjectivity and the way sociologists have treated this issue. Namely, while the concept of folk psychology is focused on the question of how we attain intersubjectivity in the first place, sociologists are much more interested in social factors that enable or hinder the reproduction of the (already established) intersubjectivity of customs and habits found in a given culture.

This idea that common sense is intrinsically intersubjective is deeply rooted in modern sociological theory. In Common-Sense and Scientific Explanation of Human Action, Schutz (1953) notices that we cannot reduce common sense just to problems of ascribing beliefs and desires to others, since the course of social life in our everyday interactions presupposes an established community with already posited intersubjective norms of interpretation of these interactions.^[2] Therefore, he insists that common sense is an “intersubjective world of culture” and goes on to claim:

“It is intersubjective because we live in it as men among other men, bound to them through common influence and work, understanding others and being understood by them. It is a world of culture because, from the outset, the world of everyday life is a universe of significance to us, that is, a texture of meaning which we have to interpret in order to find our bearings within it and come to terms with it” (Schutz 1953: 7) (emphasis added)

Schutz’s insight brings two important points to the foreground. Namely, common sense is something that society or some specific group demands that we adopt – in other words, it is a form of social obligation that regulates a vast amount of daily social interactions. Second, although these rules of commonsense interpretation are socially bound, they at the same time pertain to a particular problem we find ourselves in during the course of our everyday life. Therefore, every use of common sense entails a constant search for the “middle ground” between, on the one hand, the socially determined “texture of meaning” which is routinely applied to concrete situations, and, on the other, our own bearings within the lifeworld that are based on particular interpretive endeavors aimed at modifying this texture in light of contingency that surrounds human action (León 2016: 167–8).^[3] Common sense should, therefore, be seen as a form of knowledge that bridges the gap between the social structure that we perceive as customs and norms and our own (individual and group) intentions and desires that aim to reshape them and, in the case of a more radical situation, to change them entirely.

The complexity of this “middle ground” is of key importance in any attempt to understand the relation of common sense with other forms of knowledge. Let’s now examine how the three accounts of common sense that we previously outlined approach this complexity. If one fosters an optimistic view of common sense he will probably claim that “our culture” or “our tradition” give plenty of epistemological resources to resolve any problem at hand. We just perhaps need to tweak our commonsense knowledge to the peculiarity of the concrete problem. However, we can relatively quickly “stop talking and start getting things done” (provided that our action does not run too much against our tradition). Reflection and abstraction that give a more complex take on the problem at hand are thus seen as unnecessary, or even as a dubious attempt to slow down the much-needed action. Although this approach to common sense is more often found in politics and journalism, it could be claimed that the earliest theoretical considerations of common sense, like those of Reid, Beattie and other proponents of the “Scottish Enlightenment”, fall fairly close to this outtake (Boulter 2007; Rosenfeld 2011). One of the biggest issues for all proponents of this approach is precisely this need to “guard” or plead for something which is so self-evident and culturally rooted as a resource for figuring out the best possible solution for any practical problem.

On the other hand, the tendency of common sense to reproduce already established norms and customs is the chief reason why the critical or pessimistic approach maintains that common sense must be deconstructed and displaced with a more reflexive and analytical form of common knowledge. This critical stance – which focuses on the fact that common sense is an emanation of historical, cultural and structural givenness – is typical both for structuralists and post-structuralists. Broadly speaking, the former maintain that the change in some underlaying features of the system will cause “ordinary actors” to “let go” of their common sense interpretations of social reality and adopt a more complex worldview based on an ever more precise scientific or theoretical method which ultimately warrants social progress, while the latter tended to claim that common sense (which, according to poststructuralists, also nurtures various hypostatized terms produced in science) needs to be brought into question through permanent negation by showing its genealogy or sedimentation of meaning. Both variations of the pessimist account of common sense remain clearly focused on its alleged inert nature regarding the current normative order which is then used in the ideological justification of this order.^[4] The main problem of this approach is that it fails to understand the adaptive nature of common sense, as well as that this knowledge holds the actors’ identity in coherence^[5] – which is why displacing common sense is a much more difficult task than simply proving that it is determined by the current normative order.

Finally, as already suggested in the introduction, the holistic or pragmatist position on common sense maintains that it can be changed through theory and social science, but also that it has the potential of fostering more comprehensive – and yet intersubjective – acts of social critique and engagement. The most distinctive feature of this outtake on common sense – found in some varieties of phenomenology, interpretive sociology, critical theory – would, therefore, be that there is no rigid boundary between practice and theory.

However, one could argue that pragmatism, in fact, played a key role in the formation of this complex take on common sense. Namely, from the very beginning of the pragmatist movement at the end of the 19^th century, one of the key preoccupations was how to create a profound connection between thought and action. As we shall see, common sense was to provide this mediation. For example, Peirce was very critical of the Cartesian absolute doubt, claiming that rather than dismissing prejudices using maxims, we need to nurture “real and living doubt”, urging us not to “pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts” (quoted according to: Hookway 2006: 210). He thus claimed that common sense is an important factor in both starting and settling a rational debate. This collective sense of certainty that surrounds common sense knowledge strongly influences our abductive reasoning, that is, those “ideas about what sorts of theory should be taken seriously in trying to explain phenomena” (Hookway 2006: 211). This is why the so-called “second-level abstractions” (Rosenthal 1994: 15) of science are inherently connected to common sense knowledge used in everyday experience. On the other hand, Peirce does not glorify common sense, because having “living doubt” for him meant that one applies “critical common-sensism”, which entails a “critical acceptance of uncriticizable propositions” (Peirce 1974: 346). Therefore, according to Peirce, as pragmatists, we should have only one fear: petrification of knowledge. In that regard, it does not matter if common sense or Cartesian philosophy are offering absolute epistemological certainty – their promises are false simply because they exclude potentially more coherent explanations that might be developed in the future.

Building on these insights, in his Common Sense and Science: Their Respective Frames of Reference (1948), Dewey states that common sense and science must be seen as transactions, adding that this means “that neither common sense nor science is regarded as an entity – as something set apart, complete and self-enclosed” (Dewey 1948: 197). Apart from highlighting anti-essentialism, this metaphor of transaction aims also to point out the fact that the two forms of knowledge are bound to be in continuous partnership, as well as that through transaction both common sense and science undergo a change that prevents their petrification.^[6] According to Dewey, we need this flexible and holistic approach to common sense because the environment is an (indistinguishable) interplay between social and cultural factors:

“What is called environment is that in which the conditions called physical are enmeshed in cultural conditions and thereby are more than ‘physical’ in its technical sense. ‘Environment’ is not something around and about human activities in an external sense; it is their medium, or milieu, in the sense in which a medium s intermediate in the execution of carrying out all human activities, as well as being the channel through which they move, and the vehicle by which they go on” (Dewey 1948: 198) (original emphasis).

Here Dewey, much like Schutz, also points out the importance of the pre-given intersubjective world that is socially binding. However, there are two important twists within this position that are also typical for pragmatists. Namely, when Schutz justifies the importance of this pre-given intersubjective world, he follows a general phenomenological line of reasoning and bases his claims on the social structure of the self. Somewhat conversely, Dewey in his definition of environment wants to go beyond strict distinctions between the self, community and our surroundings; arguing that we should instead focus our attention on the process of interaction between these different aspects of environment. And common sense is in that regard valuable because it cognitively and emotionally expresses this interaction. This pragmatist holism further implies that common sense and science must also interact (make transactions) with each other and undergo a change from within during this process. Thus, from the pragmatist perspective, the whole idea of some sort of rigid, “displaceable” distinction between theory and practice or common sense and science is unacceptable.

Common sense according to pragmatists is to a lesser degree abstract knowledge that both cognitively and emotionally denotes concrete practical problems (Dewey 1948: 208). This “hybrid” character of common sense is crucial for our abductive intuitions regarding the process of collectively selecting and solving problems. On the other hand, scientific knowledge has the “liberating effect of abstraction” (Dewey 1948: 206) that enables scientists to make connections between distant parts of the environment. When thinking about distinctive concerns of science and common sense Dewey claims:

“It consists of the position occupied by each member in relation to the other. In the concerns of common sense knowing is as necessary, as important, as in those of science. But knowing is there, for the sake of agenda the what and the how of which have to be studied and to be learned – in short, known in order that the necessary affairs of everyday life be carried on” (Dewey 1948: 205).

Therefore, one could argue that this difference in focus is at the heart of something that we might call the pragmatist critique of common sense. Namely, being critical for pragmatists^[7] means being relevant within the given community regarding the problems and concerns that are raised through common sense, while at the same time trying to make our common sense more complex and reflexive by providing insight into the ways in which the mentioned problems are connected through infinitely complex environment.

4 Some Sociological Implications of The Pragmatist Approach to Common Sense

Views developed by pragmatists profoundly influenced modern sociological theory. Perhaps the most important sociological work that “bears the mark” of the pragmatist account of common sense was done by interactionist sociologists, especially Garfinkel and Goffman. According to Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology,^[8] positivist sociology tended to (over)standardize human social behavior by claiming that particularistic knowledge does not affect the overall functionalist model of social behavior which arguably explains the reproduction of a given culture (Heritage 1991; Emirbayer & Maynard 2011: 239). Thus, he accused this at the time dominant paradigm of being epistemologically authoritarian. According to Garfinkel, this approach to social sciences reduces “the ordinary actor” to a mere “cultural dope” who “produces the stable features of the society by acting in compliance with pre-established and legitimate alternatives of action that the common culture provides” (Garfinkel 1967: 68). And the most important characteristic of this procedure which renders everyday action irrelevant is its total disregard of common sense:

“The common feature in the use of these [dope-like] ‘models of man’ is the fact that courses of common sense rationalities of judgment which involve the person’s use of common sense knowledge of social structures over the temporal “succession” of here and now situations are treated as epiphenomenal” (Garfinkel 1967: 68).

For Garfinkel, therefore, social structure cannot be properly sociologically explained without understanding the laymen methods in which these structures are enveloped and embodied within everyday practices. The commonsensical approximation of these structurally determined and relatively stable rules for interpreting social action, that is, the ways in which we follow and re-articulate them within concrete everyday situations, is of key importance for every sociological theoretical endeavor that wishes to avoid the pitfalls of epistemological authoritarianism. In that regard, Garfinkel’s view on common sense can also help us understand why someone might resent reductionist explanations of their behavior: simply put, no one likes to have his knowledge of the social structure denied because no one likes to feel like a dope, especially a dope regarding his own culture (which is an unfortunate implication of the pessimistic account of common sense).

One could likewise argue that Goffman’s work presents another example of the pragmatist approach to common sense. In his Frame Analysis, Goffman right from the outset dismisses a reductionist approach to everyday experience: “To uncover the informing, constitutive rules of everyday behavior would be to perform the sociologist’s alchemy — the transmutation of any patch of ordinary social activity into an illuminating publication”(Goffman 1974: 5). Frame analysis, according to Goffman, must show how general presuppositions about the meaning of social interaction are continuously modified in concrete social situations. In other words, common sense as the knowledge that fosters both these general presuppositions and particular modifications of rules that govern social interaction cannot be avoided – or for that matter “bracketed”, “deconstructed” or displaced – by any other form of theoretical abstraction (Craib 1978: 80; Scheff 2005: 370):

“I assume that when individuals attend to any current situation, they face the question: ‘What is it that’s going on here?’ Whether asked explicitly, as in times of confusion and doubt, or tacitly, during occasions of usual certitude, the question is put and the answer to it is presumed by the way the individuals then proceed to get on with the affairs at hand” (Goffman 1974: 8).

Framing process^[9] according to Goffman refers to the common sense organization of social experience, or more precisely, to translating contingent situations into intersubjective schemes of meaning. This translation is achieved through linguistic experimentation – or as Scheff points out “shuffling through vocabularies” (Scheff 2005: 382). However, it is important to notice that unlike Garfinkel, Goffman holds that common sense cannot be a stable form of knowledge that could be “taken for granted” primarily because framings of the given situation can be so different that ultimately one could argue that all actors found within one face-to-face interaction are not witnessing the same event.^[10]

Another effort to stress the importance of common sense comes from the “pragmatic turn” in Bourdieu’s sociology that was mainly put forward by Boltanski and Thévenot. In their On Justification (2006) they argue that beneath the seemingly crude way of creating and resolving conflicts found in everyday life lies a profound and complex set of both individual and collective strategies that are ultimately based on various (common sense) “systems of worth”, or “polities”, as Boltanski and Thevenot like to call them (Boltanski & Thévenot 2006: 74–80). The purposeful act of “shuffling through polities” caused by the contingency of everyday practice makes “ordinary actors” able to see the cracks in structural and historically pregiven social structures (Celikates 2006: 31) – which constitutes the starting point of social critique:

“Our intent here … is to treat instances of agreement reaching and critique as intimately linked occurrences within a single continuum of action. Contemporary social scientists often seek to minimize the diversity of their constructs by situating them within a single basic opposition … Our own perspective offers a third approach: we seek to embrace the various constructs within a more general model, and to show how each one integrates, in its own way, the relation between moments of agreement reaching and moments of critical questioning” (Boltanski & Thévenot 2006: 25)

If Garfinkel and Goffman articulated a modern version of pragmatist holism in the sense that they gave us a sociological insight into the pivotal role that common sense plays in rendering social situations intersubjective, then Boltanski and Thévenot surely created a very comprehensive elaboration of the sociological importance of the pragmatist^[11] critique of common sense. The public role of the sociologist therefore in some sense lies beyond the everlasting debate of the scientific relevance of common sense knowledge and should be, as Cyril Lemieux points out, conceived in terms of “clarification and stylization of the rules that organize … common sense” (Lemieux 2014: 155).^[12]

However, even if these sociological implementations of pragmatist holism help us to understand the epistemological importance of common sense, they still remain shorthanded regarding our ability to comprehend the controversial nature of this form of knowledge. For example, both Garfinkel and Goffman explain the “epistemological hazards” sociologists are exposed to when they try to displace everyday knowledge. In a similar vein, Boltanski and Thévenot help us to understand how pragmatist account of common sense might bring about a change in the normative order. Nonetheless, neither of the mentioned sociological models does a good job of explaining why common sense has both a stabilizing and de-stabilizing property when it comes to social structure. I think that one of the reasons for this outcome lies in the fact that Garfinkel, Goffman, Boltanski and Thévenot share a rather homogeneous view on common sense. As we have seen, according to these authors, the ability of common sense to connect the pre-given intersubjectivity of social customs and the particularistic modifications of these customs that are tailored towards solving concrete practical problems under one interactionist scheme makes common sense an indispensable factor in our interaction with the natural and social environment. This, of course, is an important insight, but we also must bear in mind that this seemingly homogeneous form of knowledge is in fact filled with the tension between the world we are socialized in and the one in which we are currently acting and actively changing. Moreover, neither of the aforementioned approaches in sociology can account for the fundamental paradox: that invoking common sense means that we commonsensically understand that some part of the interpretive scheme of common sense doesn’t make sense anymore. In other words, the contingency of social action might put us in a situation where the pre-given nature of common sense loses intelligibility and where we are left only with (particularistic) modifications of common sense as the source of the intersubjectivity of everyday practice. This, in turn, suggests that common sense itself has some sort of internal structure and dynamics that is closely related both to the reproduction of the normative order and to its change.

5 The Structure of Common Sense

Perhaps the easiest way to envision the internal dynamics within the structure of common sense would be to frame the problem of its universality and particularity in linguistic terms. In that regard, the “universal texture of meaning” that we develop through socialization could be redefined as a general vocabulary that was learned with the help of our peers, while, on the other hand, the particularistic modification of this general vocabulary that was forged to tackle concrete situations would be seen as a form of idiolect. If we make this analogy, then complex problems surrounding the issue of how contingency effects the reproduction of structurally pre-given norms of interpretation of everyday life could be further analyzed from a relatively new, neopragmatist, perspective. What the neopragmatist blend of analytic philosophy and classical pragmatist holism brings to the table is a relatively robust theory of translation which can hopefully help us understand how exactly particularistic knowledge attains intersubjectivity, as well as how the convergence of different particularistic commonsensical insights might change the universal norms of everyday understanding or the intelligibility of social action.

When in his A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs (2006), Donald Davidson ponders the nature of language competence, he makes a rather revealing distinction between prior theories and passing theories. Namely, according to Davidson, prior theories fall close to what we colloquially call “the dictionary meaning” in the sense that they “… come first in the order of interpretation” (Davidson 2006: 253). From our early childhood, we adopt numerous tokens of language competence; we learn the meanings of words and non-verbal gestures, and later in life, we adopt peer jargon and enter adulthood with an array of specialized or vocational vocabularies. This type of socially and culturally pre-given “dictionary knowledge” is a necessary condition for making any kind of social action intelligible. However, as we know, everyday life communication is full of inaccuracies, misunderstandings and flat-out blunders that cannot be predicted in advance and therefore cannot be part of any general vocabulary. According to Davidson, from these instances of linguistic contingency emerges a set of particularistic, or as he calls them, passing theories of meaning which aim to attain intersubjectivity even though they were caused by “miscommunication”. This is why malapropisms are illustrative and important; when the speaker utters: “I wish to dance the flamingo” or “all people are cremated equal” the interpreter gets the intended meaning in spite of the fact that both the speaker and the interpreter do not have a pre-given scheme of interpretation. Davidson summarizes the relation between first and passing theories in the following way:

“For the hearer, the prior theory expresses how he is prepared in advance to interpret an utterance of the speaker, while the passing theory is how he does interpret the utterance. For the speaker, the prior theory is what he believes the interpreter’s prior theory to be, while his passing theory is the theory he intends the interpreter to use” (Davidson 2006: 260–61).

If we take a closer look, Davidson’s analysis of malapropisms implies that pre-given norms of interpretation, strictly speaking, cannot be intersubjective because the success of any given communication depends on the correctness of the speaker’s belief regarding how the hearer is ready to interpret him – which can vary wildly during the speech interaction. Therefore, mutual understanding cannot be determined through prior theories simply because they stand outside of the realm of concrete speech situations. However, prior theories are still important because they are in some sense a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for entering concrete speech situations.

“Stated more broadly now, the problem is this: what interpreter and speaker share, to the extent that communication succeeds, is not learned and so is not a language governed by rules or conventions known to speaker and interpreter in advance; but what the speaker and interpreter know in advance is not (necessarily) shared, and so is not a language governed by shared rules or conventions. What is shared is, as before, the passing theory; what is given in advance is the prior theory, or anything on which it may in turn be based” (Davidson 2006: 264).

Here Davidson draws our attention to the fact that although prior theories provide to the speakers the initial intelligibility of the concrete speech situation, their intersubjectivity is far from warranted. In other words, just because we are socialized to have beliefs regarding how a situation might be interpreted does not mean that these beliefs will be mutually shared once we find ourselves within concrete (speech) practice (Lepore & Ludwig 2007: 271–73; Turner 2001: 130).^[13]

We can now use Davidson’s insight into everyday communication in order to shed some new light on our initial question regarding the dynamics and structure of common sense. The first aspect of this structure which pertains to concrete everyday situations we will call everyday common-sense knowledge. This is the world that Garfinkel and Goffman depict in their sociologies, a world where people ask “what is going on here” and then very often, quite competently, get the answer they were looking for. This type of common sense is utilized in those situations where the problem at hand does not require much abstraction, and therefore solutions remain more or less obvious. Everyday commonsense knowledge can thus be defined as particularistic knowledge obtained through individual interactions with natural and/or social environment which remains applicable to a limited number of situations. Although we navigate through everyday practice using competences that are gained through various institutions, one can hardly ignore the fact that our daily routines also generate relatively separate type of knowledge which is based on idiosyncrasies of individual experience and situations. In other words, everyday commonsense knowledge is extremely variable and therefore resists total determination. In that regard, it falls close to Davidson’s passing theories because everyday commonsense knowledge is the vocabulary that we deploy in order to obtain intersubjectivity and mutual understanding. It is precisely this type of common sense that must converge between different actors when contingency obstructs the reproduction of everyday practice. From the perspective of Garfinkel’s and Goffman’s sociology, everyday common-sense knowledge is the knowledge of indexical modifications of common understanding – or particularistic re-framings – that are generated within new social experiences. The fact that this type of knowledge is particularistic can raise the objection that we are advocating here some sort of psychologism or extreme nominalism. However, everyday common-sense knowledge is a product of the convergence of idiosyncrasies and in that regard, it is intrinsically social, which means that we can set aside worries about this kind of reductionisms. Finally, everyday common-sense knowledge is limited in its universalizability because of its extreme context-dependence.^[14] This restricted universalizability is the main reason why this type of common sense remains confined to the realm of everyday practice. In other words, it cannot be codified into abstract rules that usually govern institutions.

Now we come to the second dimension of common sense which is much more abstract in its nature. This aspect of structure of common sense, which we shall call common-sense quasi-theories, can be defined as a set of historically generated and metaphysically based rules that to a variable degree instruct the way in which we form and use everyday commonsense knowledge. Let’s take a closer look at the first part of the definition. What exactly do we mean when we say that the quasi-theories are historically generated and metaphysically founded? Here we first want to stress the fact that, through socialization, social actors adopt and interiorize social conventions that provide the initial intelligibility of social situations, as well as cognitive resources for solving potential practical misunderstandings. In other words, quasi-theory refers to those commonsense insights that are a part of tradition or culture which are therefore inherently historical. However, from the perspective of an actor that habitually acts using commonsense quasi-theory, these cultural resources are not understood as a product of uncertain complex historical development, conflict and struggle, but rather as something which is “self-evidently” valid and eternal. This tendency of essentializing and petrifying culture is the main reason why common-sense quasi-theories are also metaphysical. The second part of our definition states that quasi-theories aim to determine the “lower level” everyday commonsense knowledge. Namely, as already mentioned, ad hoc solutions of everyday knowledge of common sense cannot be effectively socialized. Therefore, if we are to embark upon any type of communicative acts, we need initial rules which will guide our interpretation of social interaction. This is why in the early childhood actors adopt culturally coded abstract notions which overcome the idiosyncrasies and provide typification of all particular social situations. The metaphysical nature of quasi-theories certainly helps in “bridging the gaps” in the stream of our everyday social life. However, this feeling of continuity comes at a cost; the eternal metaphysical perspective of quasi-theories is often used for providing a specific justification of institutions and customs which goes beyond the contingencies of everyday social life – and history for that matter – and thus perpetuates current structural inequalities and injustices. This rationalization of structural asymmetries is the main reason why in the eyes of some social theorists, as is the case with Bourdieuan sociology and critical theory, common sense is seen as an embodiment of social domination.

As we can see, common-sense quasi-theories fall close to Davidson’s understanding of prior theories in that they provide the intelligibility of social interaction. But, as Davidson has shown, the more abstract and codified linguistic rules which provide the intelligibility of social interaction can never entirely determine ad hoc rules that are formed within concrete social practice. The main reason for this indeterminacy between two vocabularies of common sense lies in the contingency of language and our everyday practice. This unresolvable instability of meaning formation within the structure of common sense can help social theory to understand both the dynamics of common sense and the modes of engagement between theory and practice. According to our account, common sense always presents itself to social actors as something unquestionably valid and self-evident, even though they must, on daily basis, derail from their quasi-theoretical hypotheses and form with their peers more specific meanings of concrete social problems and situations based on everyday commonsense knowledge. From here it is easy to claim that if the convergence of everyday commonsense knowledge is wide enough it can change the quasi theories and become a new social custom or basis for engaged social action. It is also very important to highlight that regular theoretical and scientific knowledge can comprehend and describe the contingency of social practice and change quasi-theories and, consequently, to a degree alter everyday common-sense knowledge. Our education can also largely modify the quasi-theoretical worldview which could consequently change the way in which we approach a practical misunderstanding and form the intersubjectivity within the concrete instances of social interaction.^[15] Therefore, one could argue that the role of social theory is twofold: on the one hand, it needs to uncover and interconnect those situations in which quasi-theories have lost their potential to generate intelligibility of social interaction, while on the other it needs to analyze and critique quasi-theories in order to render them more adaptive towards contingency of everyday life (or in some circumstances altogether change them). In this way, social theory remains critical towards common sense without the risk of being reductionist or metaphysically irrelevant when it comes to issues of everyday social practice.

This abstract account of common sense certainly demands a more concrete illustration. Hence, in the next section we will try to give a few examples of how our understanding of structure of common sense might help settle some of the controversies that have followed common sense throughout its history.

6 Common Sense and Good Sense Modes of Social Engagement

The structure of common sense that we have laid out in the previous section can also help us to understand how common sense ignites social engagement and brings about social change. Namely, common sense has always been in some regard a paradoxical notion. Indeed, if some statement is self-evident why is controversy always somehow shadowing it? The shortest possible answer would be that invocation of common sense in fact usually marks some sort of hindrance of mutual understanding. This inherently intersubjective sense that intersubjectivity of social interaction is endangered causes the actors to reflect upon social rules and norms which otherwise might remain a matter of habit or custom.^[16] This type of collective reflection on rules is at the heart of what we colloquially call “engagement”. In other words, when we invoke common sense we are basically stating that norms and rules of interaction need to be attended or altogether changed.

The close connection between the structure of common sense that we introduced in the last section and the perceived crises of intersubjectivity has followed the term from its very beginning – and its history is somewhat surprisingly relevant for the issues we have raised in this paper. As Sophia Rosenfeld points out in her inspiring book, Common Sense: A Political History: “Common sense generally only comes out of the shadows and draws attention to itself at moments of perceived crisis or collapsing consensus” (Rosenfeld 2011: 24). According to her opinion, the modern historical starting point of common sense came with Shaftesbury’s modification of the Aristotelian idea of κοινὴ αἴσθησις or sensus communis – which roughly refers to the one sense that binds all others in both humans and animals (Gregoric 2007) – into a much more culturally situated notion. Namely, in Shaftesbury’s interpretation there is a mutually binding sense that reflects “the public weal and [is] of the common interest” (quoted according to: Rosenfeld 2011: 23, see also: Klein 1994; Rivers 2000). Shaftesbury’s innovation had big political implications because if there is an innate cognitive sense to apprehend common interest which is – as is the case with sight and hearing – evenly distributed among the population, then we can develop an entirely secular mode of public deliberation. This modern formula of common sense which combines epistemology (because it deals with interpretation), social ontology (because it deals with inherently group modes of interpretations) and policy (because these group interpretations pertain to practical issues and public life) had two major developments: common sense and good sense.

Although this distinction has never been clear-cut, one could argue that from a historical perspective it is rather obvious that common sense was first conceptualized in its modern form at the end of the 17th and the beginning of the 18th century as a relatively conservative cognitive means for gradual social change which would be justified in a secular manner. This “epistemological populism” as Rosenfeld calls it, was first successfully used by the Aberdeen members of the so-called Scottish Enlightenment as a safeguard against the “anomic tendencies” of English empiricism. Reid and Beattie, who were the main proponents of common sense at the time, were mainly worried that “philosophical skepticism” advocated both by Locke and Hume entailed corrosive doubt which could introduce relativism into everyday life and thus ultimately render it meaningless. Therefore, according to Reid, we should base our knowledge on common sense principles which are “unconditionally given to all men” (Reid 1785: 506) and reflect “the consent of ages and nations, of the learned and unlearned” (1785: 43).

As we can see, even in its early days, common sense is understood as a form of collective consent, that is, as something which is extremely stable, but not (necessarily) metaphysically petrified. In other words, when someone calls for common sense, he is in fact calling for a Peirceian “everyday grounded doubt” that takes into account both the “mind and heart” when questioning the current social norms. If we fail to do this, then Beattie, in a rather pragmatist tone, warns us that “When Reason invades the Rights of Common Sense, and presumes to arraign that authority by which she herself acts, nonsense and confusion must of necessity ensue; science will soon come to have neither head nor tail, beginning nor end” (Beattie 1805: 153). Therefore, when conventional rules of social interaction fail to account for contingent practical issues – something Boltanski and Thevenot call “tests” (Boltanski & Thévenot 2006: 133–38) – and when we wish to amend the given social order, we will say that common sense demands the correction of social norms.

To this day, the so-called “civic engagement^[17]” functions under this idea that citizens pay attention to issues that occur in everyday practical life and provide reasons and justifications for concrete modifications of rules that govern social interaction and relations. For example, suppose that you wish to install a new traffic light in your neighborhood because a particular road intersection has proven to be dangerous. This act of engagement is closely related to the structure of common sense in several ways. First, you need to find yourself in a problematic situation, that is, in a situation where social norms fail everyday practice. In this case traffic rules (suppose that the intersection is at the moment regulated through stop signs) fail everyday life on that particular intersection because the locals don’t feel safe. Second, you need to envision the modification of social norms in an intersubjective manner – in this case a new traffic light. This is a simple and clear case of “common sense engagement”: a rupture in the normative realm caused actors to engage rules that govern their habitual behavior which brought about social change in daily interactions of these actors. In this case, something that we have called everyday common-sense knowledge plays a crucial role in settling one concrete situation, because all the actors that were driven to be engaged due to the partial rupture in the intelligibility of social norms used ad hoc (idiosyncratic) modifications of norms as passing theories to negotiate and converge on what they believed to be the best modification of the traffic rules.

However, one might ask whether common sense plays any role in a more radical social change. There are certainly those who would argue that the optimistic view of common sense – and engagement which it cognitively fuels – represent a weak basis for social change. Indeed, as we have already pointed out, the optimistic account of common sense that was advocated by the Aberdeen philosophers was to a large degree conservative in its nature. Still, Reid and Bettie’s understanding of common sense is important for us because it brought everyday practical issues – which were both affective and factual – to the foreground of theoretical understanding. Although this optimistic view was used to justify the current social and religious order, once the barrier between the public affairs and “unconditionally available” theory was so explicitly demolished, it was only a matter of time before common-sense-like type of reasoning became a cognitive resource for a much more radical social change.

This is where the so-called good sense enters the picture. Namely, as Rosenfeld points out, the development of common sense in Britain was almost simultaneously followed by the development of the “good sense” on the Continent. And while both the concept of common and good sense stemmed from the ever-larger reading public in Europe of the 18th century, there were significant differences between them. While, in following Shaftesbury’s modification of Aristotle’s sensus comunis, Reid and Beattie wanted to find a way to stop “dangerous implications” of English empiricism that, however, will not call upon the old metaphysical redoubt against skepticism, public debate and gradual social change, the good sense, on the other hand, was based on a much more radical enlightenment projects that were envisioned first in Amsterdam and later in France, and which wanted to instantly demolish prejudices and the unrepairable falsehood of old customs. For authors such as Marquis d’Argens or Baron D’Holbach there was an inherently intersubjective vocabulary of habit and current norm, but also an inherently comprehensible vocabulary of doubt and discord in which we deployed good sense. This second ability to collectively question and dissolve even the deeply rooted norms was, according to proponents of good sense, to be used to overthrow the customs of ancien régime and bring about a more rational society. As Rosenfeld pointly detects:

“If, in eighteenth century Britain, common sense promised to fulfill a regulatory function, maintaining community norms in the absence of an elaborate apparatus of censorship laws, in continental Europe its cognate, good sense, promised to do the opposite. It would aid in undermining social and religious orthodoxies … Whereas, in the British context, common sense was meant to encourage taking things as they generally seemed, on the continent its French counterpart stood for the human potential to see beneath misleading facades and to expose le nonsense (itself an eighteenth century neologism meaning ‘absurdity’) in an effort at subversion” (Rosenfeld 2011: 95–96).

As we can see, good sense was meant to usher more radical social change in continental Europe as it was about to enter the “Age of Revolution”. If we consider good sense from our Davidsonian perspective, we will see that the good sense is mutually understandable whenever contingency renders norms derived from current social structure utterly unintelligible, so much so that they even appear “nonsensical”. Good sense reveals that the given normative order has, through operation of quasi-theories, become petrified and that it cannot support daily interactions – hence, it needs to be entirely discarded. Therefore, invocation of good sense refers to those situations in which the rupture in the normative realm is so severe that the rupture itself turns into a source of intelligibility of social interaction. In other words, we have a much greater degree of mutual understanding about the fact that norms are nonsensical than about what norm should be in their place. We also must have in mind that this potential of good sense to see beyond common sense^[18] needs a “jump start”^[19] and, as we shall see, this is one of the roles of engaged social theory.

Let’s apply this understanding of good sense to our example of traffic engagement. Suppose that there was a horrific accident on our already dangerous intersection. Furthermore, suppose that when debating what is to be done regarding this severe incursion of contingency and the inability of given traffic rules to prevent it, a group of engaged actors sets out to search for a more “thorough and comprehensive” solution and happens to come across a radical theoretical insight that problematizes the privileged status that the car has in modern urban planning (for example: Gehl 2013; Montgomery 2015) and generally the spatial aspects of late capitalism (Harvey 2012) and starts campaigning for more public space, or even that we need to get rid of car infrastructure in our neighborhoods and cities, or capitalism altogether. Notice that in this situation the rupture in social meaning is so great that for our group all norms that pertain to traffic seem absurd. As we have already pointed out, if we push this example to the extreme we can argue that the absurdity of the given social (traffic) norms becomes the source of intelligibility of social interactions and in fact drives the engagement of actors, that is, (at least in the initial stage) the engaged group uses this negative intelligibility to communicate the urgency of social change which they advocate to other non-engaged actors. In our case, actors agree that the sheer scale of tragedy implies that traffic rules do not make any sense and can, in an inherently intelligible manner, pour doubt over any particular modification of the (traffic regulation) norms – which is why this engaged group ultimately tries to formulate and communicate new set of rules and norms. Hence, as actors engaged through good sense, we are not interested in amending social norms, but in radically changing them.

There is also a third variation of this example. If we take a closer look, all of the aforementioned cases of common sense/good sense engagement pertain to (however slight) progressive social change. This is because in both cases there is recognition and mutual understanding that the contingency of everyday practice has abrupted the normative order. However, suppose that the driver of the vehicle that caused the tragedy is an illegal immigrant. Unfortunately, we can easily picture an engaged group which uses this fact to start a racist anti-immigration campaign arguing that all immigrants are incompetent or even dangerous. This group also invokes common sense, but in a different manner. Namely, while in the prior two cases mentioned above the engaged actors acknowledged that the contingency has caused a rupture in the normative order, here we have a negation of there being any problem with that concrete set of normative (traffic) rules. Instead, we have an immediate spinning into the metaphysical – more precisely, quasi-theoretical – evaluation of immigrants and their alleged intrinsic values and abilities. Thus, in this example common sense, in its quasi-theoretical form, is used to negate contingency.

Now we can perhaps try to give a more structured insight into the complicated relation between common sense engagement and social change. First, we have commonsense engagement in which contingency creates a rupture in the structure of social meaning in such a way that the intelligibility of social norms becomes hindered. As we have seen in our example, this type of engagement brings about a particular and concrete social change. Our Davidsonian account of the structure of common sense suggests that in this case contingency opens a path for creative and intelligent innovation in the everyday knowledge of common-sense. This type of commonsense engagement has an element of social critique because the symbiosis between everyday commonsense knowledge and contingency moves the normative realm from quasi-theoretical justification of the status quo (provided that the convergence on the innovation of the normative rules is large enough). It is also worth noting that commonsense engagement is much more situated in the concrete and present issue, that is innovations in the understanding of the social reality remain limited in their scope. The second example pertains to the good sense engagement. In this case, contingency damages the structure of social meaning in such a severe way that the actors mutually share only this rupture. We can even say that in some limited sense the rupture becomes the source of intelligibility of social situations and therefore the claims for social change that are based on good sense engagement will always be more radical in nature. As it has been pointed out, this overall discarding of the old structure of social meaning can only be achieved through a symbiosis between contingency and (however rudimentary) theoretical insight into social interaction. The role of theory in this case would be to offer some quality to the purely negative “sense of the absurd” caused by contingency once it rendered some concrete set of rules or norms utterly meaningless. Good sense engagement therefore pertains to a much more future oriented and comprehensive social change. Finally, there is the third example in which quasi-theoretical knowledge of common sense is used to negate the fact that contingency has hindered the social structure of meaning. Here we do not see any attempt at progressive social change that requires justification, rather this type of conservative commonsense engagement is focused on reaffirming the already established normative order or even re-articulating one that has already been discarded. In that regard, the outcome of conservative commonsense engagement is a social change against social change; its main goal is to negate the emancipatory potential of contingency.

7 Conclusion

This paper tried to understand the seemingly infinitely controversial nature of common sense from a pragmatist perspective that advocates a holistic relation between the everyday cognition of “ordinary actors” and “proper” theoretical knowledge done by social theorists. One of the key findings of this text is that this holism can become much more robust if we do not treat common sense as a homogeneous type of knowledge. Common sense is neither intrinsically superior or inferior to theoretical knowledge. Those who foster a pessimistic outtake on common sense and wish to find a general method of displacing it, as well as those who optimistically hold it as a bulwark against irrelevant abstractions, fail to understand that common sense is a highly versatile and indispensable set of cognitive tools tailored specifically for handling the contingency of daily life. However, in some situations this handling of contingency can turn into its (commonsensical) negation. In other words, our model of the structure of common sense tried to show which aspects of common sense are candidates for displacement and which are a bulwark against irrelevant abstractions.

In doing so, we were hoping to achieve several things. First, we wanted to make social theory more relevant regarding the everyday issues and problems that people face. Over the last couple of years there has been a number of efforts (Flyvbjerg 2001; Dépelteau 2015; Clawson et al. 2007) to make social science more relevant in the eyes of the broader public. As Michael Burawoy pointily stressed in his 2004 American Sociological Association Presidential Address: “We have spent a century building professional knowledge, translating common sense into science, so that now, we are more than ready to embark on a systematic back-translation, taking knowledge back to those from whom it came, making public issues out of private troubles, and thus regenerating sociology’s moral fiber” (Burawoy 2005: 5). In that regard, our understanding of everyday commonsense knowledge which “ordinary actors” use to achieve intersubjectivity in situations where contingency has made a particular norm unintelligible provides a focus for this determination to translate science into common sense. Namely, a social scientist can analyze existing concrete political struggles and instances of commonsense engagement in order to provide a framework that would interconnect these inherently particular attempts of normative innovation by using social research to reveal often overlooked similarities between different initiatives. Second, we wish to stress the important role that social theory plays in a much more radical social change. It does this either by offering an “inviting” social critique (that is, a social critique that negates harsh epistemological asymmetries between the experts and the public), or, perhaps more importantly, by exposing and then radically re-describing the rupture of social meaning which was so vast that it turned into the source of intelligibility of social interaction. In these cases, in which we only agree about the fact that the social world is in crisis, the social theorist could provide a way to find another paradigm of meaning. And, lastly, we hope to avoid being apologetic towards common sense and to offer a way to understand the circumstances under which it can play an ideological role. Here, social theory gets a more focused aim in debunking the essentialism and simplification of social interaction which is developed in order to safeguard the given social structure of meaning from the contingency of everyday practice and from challenges that are immanent to it. And that is neither small, nor undemanding task at all.