Valck invoked common sense to redefine politically-loaded attacks as personal feuds.

Evidence

I feel that no one with a trace of common sense, after being informed of the above, will believe that Aceh influence is behind those attacks and that everyone must agree that they have resulted from personal feuds. Only the interested parties at the attacked plantations feel differently, unpleasant as it must be to find the blame put back on themselves or their subordinates. The truth of the matter later will become evident. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1194

Categorization

• XREF: ‘Common sense’ as an epistemic warrant in colonial argument — pairs with the author’s own framing of ‘colonial commonsense’ in the book’s thesis, and with Valck deploying it to shift blame from assailants to planters.
• DEFINE: Shows ‘common sense’ functioning as a rhetorical-epistemic device in official colonial reporting — a mechanism the reader can trace across many documents.