Doxa (δόξα) — Opinion or belief, opposed to genuine knowledge (episteme). The Greek term derives from the verb dokein (“to seem,” “to appear”) and names, in the philosophical tradition, the mode of apprehension proper to sensible, changing things—marked by uncertainty, appearance, and the lack of rational grounding. In Parmenides, the poem On Nature contrasts the “way of truth” (aletheia), accessible to reason alone, with the “way of opinion” (doxa) of mortals, who trust the senses and take the manifold and the mutable to be real. It is in Plato, however, that the notion acquires its conceptual structure: in the image of the divided line, in Book VI of the Republic, doxa covers the realm of the sensible and is subdivided into eikasia (conjecture, the cognition of images and shadows) and pistis (belief in sensible objects), as against knowledge of the intelligible, which joins dianoia and noesis and culminates in the knowledge of the Ideas. Doxa may happen to be true, but without “tethering by a reason” (the aitias logismos of the Meno) it does not amount to knowledge. There is also the rhetorical and sophistic sense: doxa as common opinion or the consensus of the majority, the terrain of persuasion that Socrates submits to the test of dialectic. In phenomenology, Husserl employs Urdoxa (“primal belief”) to name the pre-reflective, spontaneous positing by which we take the world to exist. Concepts directly tied to it are episteme (the grounded knowledge to which it is opposed) and true opinion (orthe doxa), an intermediate degree between ignorance and knowledge.
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