Common sense is fluid, replenished by specialist ideas that sink into popular knowledge.

Evidence

Common sense is not something rigid and immobile, but is continually transforming itself, enriching itself with scientific ideas and with philosophical opinions which have entered ordinary life. ‘Common sense’ is the folklore of philosophy, and is always half-way between folklore properly speaking and the philosophy, science, and economics of the specialists. Common sense creates the folklore of the future, that is as a relatively rigid phase of popular knowledge at a given place and time. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 2456

Categorization

• DEFINE: Renders common sense as a dynamic process of sedimentation rather than a fixed folk residue.
• SEED: Angle: trace how specialist discourse (security studies, counterterrorism expertise) sediments into popular common sense about Muslims.