Common sense and collective memory provide opposing paradigmatic images for the repository of social knowledge. They are based on rather different conceptions of knowledge acquisition. This difference, in turn, grounds the distinction between, respectively, Anglo-American and Franco-German philosophies of mind in the twentieth century. On the surface, the difference turns on the distinction between the individual and the collective as the locus of mind. But there is also a deeper distinction in metaphysical orientation. The common-sense approach envisages knowing as an attempt to solve the problem of the one and the many, namely, how to construct an economical yet faithful representation (the one) of reality (the many). In contrast, the collective memory approach takes knowing to be an attempt to solve the problem of the whole and the part, namely, how to provide direction, or “intelligent design” (the whole), to the collection of events that constitute history (the parts). analytic social epistemology, especially its conception of folk epistemology, is wedded to the common-sense conception, whereas Fuller's version tends towards collective memory, especially its institutionalization as information science.

Common sense is typically described as a synthetic faculty that renders the inputs of the five senses into a coherent experience. The synthesis occurs by relating these inputs to the mind's default settings, which presume inductive continuity of experience over time and space. This continuity is grounded in a belief in the inherent reliability of our own and other people's senses, as well as the relative transparency of the external world to the senses.