Familiarity as Standard of Intelligibility

Familiarity as Standard of Intelligibility names the structural principle by which logos, in its everyday operation, measures understanding not against the "expressed matter" itself but against what is already recognized, already circulating, already at home in the shared world of das Man. The concept identifies the telos of ordinary speech as a movement from the questionable or unintelligible toward a "definite familiarity" — not toward truth or disclosure, but toward re-absorption into the pre-given horizon of endoxon (received opinion, doxa). Intelligibility, on this account, is not grounded in adequate access to a state of affairs but in conformity with what the anonymous collective already accepts as self-evident. The standard is set not by the thing spoken of but by the generic recognizability that circulates through Gerede.

This principle is paradoxical in the precise Heideggerian sense: it is simultaneously a structural distortion and a condition of possibility. Because all concept formation in average everydayness passes through this loop — from endoxon outward to the questionable, and back to endoxon — familiarity is not merely a cognitive shortcut or social bad habit. It is the indigenous mechanism by which Dasein acquires its pre-theoretical "definite comprehension" of itself and its world. Dissimulation is therefore not an accidental feature of speech but the constitutive operation of a logos that is oriented by familiarity rather than disclosure: what is covered over is covered over precisely by appearing already understood.

Within samuel-mccormick-the-chattering-mind-a-conceptual-history-of-everyday-talk-unive, this concept functions as the precise ontological mechanism that explains why Gerede is not merely degraded speech but structurally foundational. The canonical synthesis of Gerede establishes that idle talk produces "sham clarity" and operates as the linguistic medium of dissimulation — but it does not name the internal standard by which that clarity is measured. Familiarity as Standard of Intelligibility fills that gap: it specifies what Gerede is oriented toward, namely the re-inscription of the questionable back into the endoxon. The concept is therefore a specification and internal elaboration of Gerede rather than a rival or correction of it.

The concept also resonates with the canonical account of Ideology, particularly in the Žižekian register where ideology operates not through conscious belief but through structural non-knowledge embedded in the very fabric of participation in social reality. Familiarity as Standard of Intelligibility provides a discursive-ontological ground for that mechanism: if intelligibility itself is indexed to doxa and the circulating opinions of das Man, then ideological reproduction is not an imposition on an otherwise neutral communicative field — it is built into the logic of logos as such. The move here aligns with Lacan's claim (noted in the Ideology synthesis) that perception is the model of ideology: the standard of familiarity ensures that what is "seen" or "understood" is always already shaped by the pre-given horizon of the endoxon, making ideological distortion coextensive with ordinary intelligibility.

The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday TalkSamuel McCormick · 2020 (p.182)

All speaking is oriented toward bringing the questionable, the unintelligible, into a definite familiarity. Familiarity is the standard of intelligibility that logos possesses, that proceeds from the endoxon and returns to it.

The phrase "proceeds from the endoxon and returns to it" is theoretically loaded because it renders intelligibility as a closed loop — logos does not open outward toward the matter itself but circles back to received opinion, making the endoxon simultaneously the origin and destination of understanding. The pairing of "standard of intelligibility" with "familiarity" (rather than truth, adequacy, or disclosure) names the displacement at the heart of Gerede: the measure of whether something makes sense is not correspondence with the world but conformity with what das Man already recognizes.