In Defence of Common Wisdom

Since Bourdieu's import of Bachelardian epistemology, the ultimate credo of French social scientists has been the destruction of common sense. Writing against "idées reçues" is an internalized norm among most of my French colleagues; to some extent, Cyril Lemieux's interventions in the radio show La suite dans les idées institutionalizes this practice by first examining a "lieu commun" and then claiming to overthrow it (French term: "renverser") by calling upon the social sciences.

In several occasions, I have heard British colleagues falling for the same trick of opposing "common wisdom," as if commonsensical results were intellectually unimaginable. However, more often in British crowds than in French ones, I have heard people ask: "You referred to common wisdom, but where did you hear that? I never heard anyone support this opinion. Where is the data? Is this even remotely derived from a tangible reality?" (Admittedly, in many instances I was asking the questions myself.)

It has always been my greatest surprise to hear people refer to a fictitious straw-man, which is not antithetical to scientific reasoning, and then charge it with the qualificative of "common sense", or "widely shared opinion", or anything equivalent -- in French, "une idée communément admise". I would say that, out of hundred occurrences, I have never heard more than two or three references to "common wisdom" followed by actual empirical data, such as a poll or a large volume of press material.

Today, while listening to Cyril Lemieux referring to Max Weber, I was expecting him to state against what common wisdom he was asking Max to fight with. Surprisingly, the straw-man was not there. The sociologist's argument was left intact without it referring to some invisible viewpoint supposedly derived from mass publics. It clearly appeared to me that the fight against common wisdom was an instrumental fiction so well internalised that it did not even need a clear statement any more.

My belief is that sociologists suffer terribly from intellectual isolation and that matching against a viewpoint supposedly held by many provides them with some illusion of a social debate that helps them fight the trivial and anomie-generating aspect of their work. In that sense, common wisdom is a necessary fiction for people who do not naturally compare across contexts or epistemologies, and who need to create contrast with rival theories at the phenomenological level.

This last sentence is a rather harsh judgement which I may have to rephrase more clearly: in my opinion, in sociological settings, appeals to common wisdom are the result of an analytical dearth in the search for competing explanations at the theoretical and empirical level, respectively by comparing epistemologies and contexts. It appears to me as an analytical deficiency, ironically where most social scientists will parade at their sociological explanation in its triumph over conventional representations.

In defence of common wisdom, there is no properly scientific way to counter common sense. Scientific explanations can match only their equals, and the institutionalised challenge of social science against common wisdom only shows that the scope of scientific analysis is much more narrow than it claims to be.

*

Important disclaimers: this text was not written as an attack against Cyril Lemieux, his chronique radio only verified some personal intuitions and was used as a springboard for writing them up. It is almost understandable in the context of a radio show to use common wisdom as a shorthand--almost.

Identically, this text is neutral towards phenomenology.

Finally, my title does mean that common wisdom actually exists and needs to be defended--only, as a non-scientific concept (a shared feeling, probably, rooted in individual psychology, not Le Bon/Tarde psychology; Halbwachs, perhaps). My rant concerns scientists toying with it, which I find to be nonsensical. I see what Zeitgeist stands for, but I do not credit as an argument on which to build scientific explanations.