Common sense is society’s incoherent assumptions while good sense is practical empirical judgment

Evidence

The meaning that Gramsci gives to these two terms is explained in the paragraphs which follow. Broadly speaking, “common sense” means the incoherent set of generally held assumptions and beliefs common to any given society, while “good sense” means practical empirical common sense in the English sense of the term. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 2450

Categorization

Category: Definitional Content

• DEFINE: Establishes the core Gramscian distinction between common sense and good sense needed before the rest of the section becomes legible.
• XREF: This distinction between common sense and good sense is the same conceptual machinery later Islamophobia critics use to separate taken-for-granted prejudice from critically sound judgement.

Related

• Common sense is the uncritical, unconscious worldview common to an epoch (similarity 0.91)
• Common sense merits only a limited empirical trust, not philosophical authority. (similarity 0.90)
• Common sense once carried real experimental merit but now has far less. (similarity 0.85)
• Common sense is contradictory and only validates truths by their historical spread (similarity 0.85)
• Dialectical thinking contradicts vulgar common sense’s demand for certainties. (similarity 0.83)
• Philosophy and common sense differ in degree, not kind (similarity 0.82)
• Science had to destroy traditional good sense to create a new one (similarity 0.82)
• Common sense is an uncritically absorbed, fragmentary folklore of philosophy, not a coherent system. (similarity 0.82)
• Common sense is class-bound folklore that sedimented philosophies leave behind (similarity 0.82)
• Common sense is historical and plural, with religion as only one fragment of it (similarity 0.81)
• Common sense is the sediment of past philosophy, not fixed belief (similarity 0.81)
• Common sense layers sedimented historical beliefs with crude realistic elements, remaining acritical (similarity 0.80)
• Common sense is the fragmentary, incoherent philosophy of non-philosophers tied to their social class (similarity 0.80)
• Common sense is the sedimented residue of past philosophies, continually transforming. (similarity 0.79)
• Theory’s power lies in its accumulated common sense (similarity 0.79)