The problematic of common sense knowledge in sociology: The comparison of R. Bhaskar's critical realism and H. Garfinkel's ethnomethodology

There are two opposing approaches in sociology regarding the position of common sense knowledge in the process of generating sociological knowledge. The first is the Durkheimian view, which suggests that common sense knowledge should be excluded from the process of producing sociological knowledge. According to this perspective, common sense knowledge has a contradictory, inconsistent, ambiguous and deceptive nature. Therefore, this knowledge must be purified from the process of scientific inquiry. On the other hand, Schutz, one of the most important representatives of the phenomenological approach in sociology, influenced by Husserl, takes a different position. According to Schutz, it's neither possible nor desirable to draw a clear line between sociological knowledge and common sense knowledge, because the object of sociology is the reality constructed by ordinary individuals on the basis of common sense knowledge. Therefore there is continuity between the two types of knowledge. While the disagreement between these two approaches has epistemological aspects, it also has an underlying ontological divergence. In this thesis, the approaches of Garfinkel and Bhaskar, which have different social ontologies, are important in making this divergence visible and in providing a robust analysis of the problem of common sense knowledge. It is argued that the approaches of these two thinkers present the different dimensions of the problem of common sense knowledge in a rich way and provide sociology with an opportunity to reflect on and analyse it. For this reason, this study compares the thoughts of the two thinkers on the above problem.