Model answer & approach
- What is common sense? How are common knowledge and sociology related to each other? Explain. (Answer in 150 words)
Introduction
Sociology begins in common sense and cannot stay there.
Body
1. Common sense as a kind of knowledge: The taken-for-granted stock of recipes a group uses to get through the day — Schutz's stock of knowledge at hand. It is inherited rather than tested, local to its holders, self-evident, and never asked for its grounds.
2. Where they meet and where they part: They meet in their material: what people believe is itself a social fact, and interpretive sociology takes it as data. They part on procedure — sociology declares its concepts, cases and evidence so a finding can be checked, and Durkheim's Rules requires prenotions discarded and social facts treated as things. Traffic runs back: Giddens's double hermeneutic notes that status symbol and life chances re-enter everyday speech.
3. What sociology's claim rests on: Not superior insight but method open to inspection: Durkheim showed suicide, the most private of acts, following the rate of social integration.
Conclusion
Common sense supplies the questions; evidence stops sociology returning the same answers.
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