This photo by Kosta Karampelas appears to be of a wall of Post-It Notes, each one (perhaps) representing opinions as doxa, endoxa, adoxa, or ur-doxa.
In Entitled Opinions: Doxa after Digitality (2024), Caddie Alford, an assistant professor of writing and rhetoric in the Department of English at Virginia Commonwealth University, writes of opinions as doxa, specifically doxa, endoxa, adoxa, and ur-doxa. She writes as a rhetorical theorist and is particularly focused on how opinions operate in the realm of social media: “Opinions are the tickets for participating online” (p. 12). Doxa, Alford explains, is an ancient Greek term “generally translated as opinion or seemingness, but the word harbored other meanings such as fame, conjecture, reputation, and expectation” (pp. 9-10). Although the plural of doxa is doxai, Alford uses doxa as both a singular and a plural term. This use of the term is part of Alford’s “repurposing” of an old word for a new age. She writes that she wants “to make it abundantly clear that I am chasing novel trajectories for contemporary opinions. Repurposing doxa’s constellation changes the message of opinions—indeed, the message of social media” (p. 11).
Endoxa, a term Alford borrows from Aristotle’s Topics, is defined as “credible and received opinions that can serve as premises for exploring a problem . . .” (p. 8). “As opinions that just immediately seem “right,” Alford writes, “these opinions had to have been in circulation, and being in circulation in Aristotle’s context required a specific kind of social status” (p. 8). For Alford’s purposes, she views endoxa as “the shared truths that create assemblies of communities” (p. 16). Adoxa does not mean zero opinion, as one might suppose, but rather opinions that don’t have very much strength or substance to them. Insofar as opinions are “integral to public relationality,” adoxa represent lack of status (p. 16). Just as doxa can mean expectation, adoxa can represent the unexpected and socially disreputable, as Alford pointed out in a recent interview for VCU’s news site. At one point in the Introduction, Alford distances doxa from opinions in the word adoxa, writing that “what runs counter to opinions—adoxa—are things that detract from relating socially” (p. 16). Similarly, in Chapter One she writes that adoxa “might be accepted . . . as things we all host, albeit unwillingly, reluctantly, and guardedly” (p. 30). Interestingly, she writes that Aristotle referred to “endoxa as “the things” many people believe in” and that he “positions endoxa like fruit: present, definite-pronoun-ed “things” ripe for the taking” (p. 27). Referencing the work of Ekaterina V. Hastings, Alford writes that here endoxa seem more “objects of belief” instead of statements expressing beliefs” (p. 27). Ur-doxa, a term coined by Edmund Husserl, is defined as “the beliefs and concepts that appear to anchor other opinions” (p. 18). In Chapter Four of her book, which deals with doxa and time, Alford writes that the famous German philosopher came up with this term “to ascertain opinions that seem originary in nature, like timeless bases in nature” (p. 117).
In a brief autobiographical section of her Introduction, Alford shares with her readers that her interest in doxa began with opinions surrounding what a family is considered to be and not be. She writes that she “went through the foster care system” and has been “without a traditional family structure since I was seventeen” (p. 13). She writes that she “notice[s] doxa about families in ways others don’t. The fact that I stood outside some of the most taken-for-granted opinions about “family” drew me to doxa in the first place” (p. 13). Here I am reminded of Gregory Ulmer’s mystory punctum, or “sting of memory,” used to “locate items significant to” the writer (Teletheory, p. 245).
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