A frequent charge against sociology is that it merely dresses up common sense in technical language. The reply is central to the discipline's claim to be a science: sociological knowledge differs from common sense in how it is produced, tested and held.
What is common sense?
Common sense is the everyday, taken-for-granted knowledge people use to navigate social life. It is practical, unexamined, and often contradictory — a stock of proverbs and assumptions that vary from group to group and are rarely tested against evidence.
How sociology differs
Sociological knowledge is distinguished by several features.
- It is systematic and methodical, produced through defined research methods rather than casual observation.
- It is empirical, resting on evidence that can be checked, rather than on assertion or anecdote.
- It is theoretical, seeking general explanations and locating particular facts within wider structures.
- It is critical and reflexive, questioning the very assumptions common sense takes for granted, including its own.
Where common sense sees the obvious, sociology asks why it seems obvious, and to whom.
Durkheim's demonstration
Émile Durkheim offered the classic illustration. Common sense treats suicide as the most private and individual of acts. Durkheim showed that suicide rates are remarkably stable and vary systematically between groups — that they are, in his terms, a social fact explicable by social forces such as integration and regulation. A phenomenon common sense assigns to individual psychology turns out to have a social patterning that only sociology reveals.
The sociological imagination
C. Wright Mills captured this quality as the "sociological imagination" — the capacity to see the link between personal troubles and public issues, between individual biography and social structure and history. It is precisely what common sense lacks: the ability to place one's private experience within the larger social forces that shape it.
How to use this in the exam
Do not simply assert that sociology is superior; show how it differs — method, evidence, theory, reflexivity — and clinch the argument with Durkheim's study of suicide and Mills's sociological imagination. A balanced answer also concedes that common sense is a legitimate object of sociological study in its own right.