Chapter 7 - Social Representations and Common Sense

Summary

7. In daily life, common sense refers to established uniformities of a physical, biological, and social nature, and it is usually assumed to be self-evident. Humans sense such uniformities as constancies passed on over generations, and common sense is an implicit and normative guidance for daily acting.

In this chapter, I have shown that the relations between common sense and social representations are complex and manifold, and one cannot substitute one phenomenon for the other. I insisted that relations between common sense and social representations are different in the broad and narrow perspectives of social representations.

In the broad perspective, Moscovici distinguished between two forms of common-sense knowledge: historically, first-hand common-sense knowledge generates scientific knowledge. It is based on traditions and consensus, comprising daily thinking and language, images, and metaphors. Second-hand common-sense knowledge results from the transformation of scientific knowledge into daily knowledge.

In the narrow perspective, I suggest that Moscovici was not primarily concerned with rationality of common sense but with reversals of unconscious into conscious beliefs and knowledge, and vice versa, in the formation and transformation of social representations of specific phenomena. I identify two sources of such reversals: the unconscious (and non-conscious) and themata.