What are prenotions? Can you give examples?

• Preconceptions, that we tend to confuse them as the object that it represents and it is shaped by experience and society

• Idea that we have before even interacting with the thing it represents

• We get them from everyday life and experience, interacting with things and people,

• Biased, because we all look differently at reality, do its influenced by our background; people have theories and ideas about everything in life themselves, because we need these ideas and theories to live together in society

• Prenotions are crudely forled, scematic, vague, inadequate representations. They distort the true appearance of things

• Raison dêtre: by and for experience, providing a roughly appropriate practicality of practical remedies and moral prescriptions

• We take them for granted

• Examples could be literal like a chair or a tree but also could be less literal, electricity, man

• Example: tree, Durkheim expresses how sociologists assume everyone is thinking about the same tree, when in reality we all have different representations of it, preconception, prenotions, therefore he explains how sociologist should study the prenotions themselves, and not the object itself

Why are prenotions a problem?

• we confuse them with the real thing

• Distort reality, false representation of thing, can lead to marginalisation of groups

• Not easy to abolish them, we experience it every day and they appear as self-evident, we believe them

• Invested with kind of ascendency and authority, thus everything conspires to make us see in them to true reality, holding sway over the mind

• They are commonly used with assurance, as if they correspond things well known and well defined, while in fact they evoke in us only confused notions, amalgam of vague impressions, prejudices and passions

• Just as subject matters physics consists of actual physics bodies and not the idea that ordinary people have of it

• These ideas are not to be studied, because they dont cause behaviour (they explain it), these prenotions have social forces behind it

Social facts as things

• social facts: it has occured and has a social character =social phenomena, social forces

• What does it mean to consider them as things:

  • for example look at crime and look at punishment which is measurable

  • Theres is something out there called crime, but people doing crimes doesnt change the meaning of a crime, its a thing outside of us

• External, outside of us, it exists in itself

• Its coercive, something pushes us to it, causal forces

• Independent of ourselves, a diploma only has value because other people have it too

• a thing is principally recognisable by virtue of not being capable of modification through a mere act of will