Common sense is conservative so new truths entering it prove exceptional force

Evidence

What was said above does not mean that there are no truths in common sense. It means rather that common sense is an ambiguous, contradictory and multiform concept, and that to refer to common sense as a confirmation of truth is a nonsense. It is possible to state correctly that a certain truth has become part of common sense in order to indicate that it has spread beyond the confines of intellectual groups, but all one is doing in that case is making a historical observation and an assertion of the rationality of history. … In this sense, and used with restraint, the argument has a certain validity, precisely because common sense is crudely neophobe and conservative so that to have succeeded in forcing the introduction of a new truth is a proof that the truth in question has exceptional evidence and capacity for expansion. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1513

Categorization

• DEFINE: Posits common sense as conservative and neophobe — key mechanism for how ideas circulate and sediment into taken-for-grantedness the reader needs.
• XREF: Connects to Hall’s account of how reactionary common sense gets produced and challenged during conjunctural crisis; also anticipates Gramsci’s ‘good sense’ versus ‘common sense’ distinction. — connects to: Common sense is ambiguous and conservative, resisting new truths; Common sense is a political resource against the imposition of a ruler’s single reality. — Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying: The New…, 290
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that any truth that penetrates common sense proves its own exceptional force is a dense, counterintuitive epistemics-of-circulation idea — the conservative medium becomes the measure of the idea’s power.

Broader Connections

• Common sense is ambiguous and conservative, resisting new truths #expands (0.90)