Doxa

Doxa (Ancient Greek: δόξα; from verb δοκεῖν, dokein, 'to appear, to seem, to think, to accept') is a common belief or popular opinion. In classical rhetoric, doxa is contrasted with episteme ('knowledge').

The term doxa is an ancient Greek noun (δόξα) related to the verb dokein (δοκεῖν), meaning 'to appear, to seem, to think, to accept'.

Between the 3rd and 1st centuries BC, the term picked up an additional meaning when the Septuagint used doxa to translate the Biblical Hebrew word for "glory" (כבוד, kavod). This Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures, as used by the early Church, led to frequent use of the term in the New Testament. The word is also used in the worship services of the Greek Orthodox Church, where the glorification of God in true worship is also seen as true belief. In that context, doxa reflects behavior or practice in worship, and the belief of the whole church rather than personal opinion. The unification of these multiple meanings of doxa emerges in the modern terms orthodoxy and heterodoxy. This semantic merging in the word doxa is also seen in the Russian word slava (слава), which means 'glory', but is used with the meaning of praise or worship in words like pravoslavie (православие), meaning "orthodoxy" (or, literally, "true belief", "true way of worship") related to the verb 'славить' – "to praise" but calqued from the Greek ὀρθοδοξία (orthodoxia).

In his dialogue Gorgias, Plato presents the sophists as wordsmiths who ensnared and used the malleable doxa of the multitude to their advantage without shame. In this and other writings, Plato relegated doxa as being a belief, unrelated to reason, that resided in the unreasoning, lower-parts of the soul.

This viewpoint extended into the concept of doxasta in Plato's theory of forms, which states that physical objects are manifestations of doxa and are thus not in their true form. Plato's framing of doxa as the opponent of knowledge led to the classical opposition of error to truth, which has since become a major concern in Western philosophy. (However, in the Theaetetus and in the Meno, Plato has Socrates suggest that knowledge is orthos doxa for which one can provide a logos, thus initiating the traditional definition of knowledge as "justified true belief.") Thus, error is considered in as pure negative, which can take various forms, among them the form of illusion.

While doxa is used as a tool for the formation of arguments, it is also formed by argument. The former can be understood as told by James A. Herrick in The History and Theory of Rhetoric: An Introduction:

The Sophists in Gorgias hold that rhetoric creates truth that is useful for the moment out of doxa, or the opinions of the people, through the process of argument and counterargument. Socrates will have no part of this sort of 'truth' which, nevertheless, is essential to a democracy.

Importantly noted, democracy, which by definition is the manifestation of public opinion, is dependent upon (and therefore also constrained by) the same limits imposed upon the individuals responsible for its establishment. Due to compromised opinions within a society, as well as opinions not counted for due to inaccessibility and apathy, doxa is not homogeneous, nor is it created agreeably. Rather, it is pliable and imperfect—the outcome of an ongoing power struggle between clashing "truths."