It’s astonishing how bad ’folk sociology’ is. I spend a lot of time talking about how bad liberal political theory is, but most people aren‘t even that sophisticated. Their model of society is just some negative aspect of behavior inflated to cover all events: greed, lust, etc.
Discounting language (and so ideas, concepts, etc) is perhaps most egregiously self-defeating aspect of our ‘folk sociology’. ‘Nobody means what they say.‘ How is anything at all organized then?
The badness of folk sociology is an interesting sociological issue in its own right. Apparently having a functioning society doesn’t require having a sensible public discourse about how society works.
If you ask somebody about the institution they work in, the answer you get will almost certainly be aimed at situating them inside that institution (‘everyone else is incompetent’) rather than giving any kind of detail about how it works. We are not natural ethnographers.
