Conventional wisdom
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Conventional wisdom is the body of ideas or explanations generally accepted as true by the public or by experts in a field. Such ideas or explanations, though widely held, are unexamined. Unqualified societal discourse preserves the status quo.
The term is often credited to the economist John Kenneth Galbraith, who used it in his 1958 book The Affluent Society:
It will be convenient to have a name for the ideas which are esteemed at any time for their acceptability, and it should be a term that emphasizes this predictability. I shall refer to these ideas henceforth as the conventional wisdom.
The term in actuality is much older and dates at least to 1838.
Received view
A received view is any world view that is taken for granted or that is assumed to be true without further criticism by the part of the "receiver" – until he or she manages to "unhide" it, e.g. by getting to know another contrasting worldview. The expression is usually used by other philosophical schools to refer to the logical-positivist view; see, for instance, the received view of theories.
- "The term ‘Received View’ was coined by Hilary Putnam in 1962.4 ‘Scientific theories’, we are told by the View, ‘are axiomatic calculi which are given partial observational interpretation by means of correspondence rules.’"--PD
See also
- Argumentum ad populum
- Boiling frog
- Common sense
- Consensus reality
- Contrarian
- Dominant ideology
- Paradigm shift
- Social constructionism
- Speaking truth to power
- Truthiness
