In the opening sections of Book 1, Kennedy introduces the Greek term endoxa, which means commonly held opinions. When we were introduced to certain Greek terms earlier this semester, doxa was one of them, and my understanding of it was that it means opinion, conjecture. Now, without getting too semantic here, I struggled with seeing a distinction between the two as they both refer to opinion. However, after considering them more closely, I do see a distinction between them in that endoxa has more of a community focus whereas doxa has an individual focus. Put another way, my personal opinions are doxa and the opinions of the general community/population are endoxa. Pretty simple, right? Well, I wasn’t comfortable with the distinction I made, so I went searching for some clarification and came across the article, “Introduction to the Study of Doxa,” by Ruth Amossy. In it, Amossy mentions that the term doxa appears under different guises in scholarship (Great, I’m only going to be more confused). For example, she mentions that doxa can mean “public opinion, verisimilitude, commonsense knowledge, commonplace, stereotype, cliche,” and the list goes on. So, from Amossy’s description doxa is a lot like endoxa, which leaves me asking, what is the distinction or difference between these terms?
My interest in this issue stems from my scholarly interest in analyzing what knowledge base people lead with or draw from when they engage in deliberative rhetoric, which is another term that opens up a mystery or inconsistency to me when comparing Aristotelian ideas about deliberative rhetoric (future focus, an end which the advantageous and the harmful (49)) to how we consider deliberative rhetoric today, (present focus when looking at online discourse, though the future is still a focus such as in Congress/Senate). When looking back at our discussions/readings regarding Plato, Isocrates, and now Aristotle, I tried to assess what each person’s starting point was when communicating. For Plato, it was episteme or knowledge – a capital T knowledge/truth. For Aristotle, his starting point is endoxa, as he describes a person’s ability to aim at commonly held opinions when forming enthymemes (34), a key argumentative form in his rhetoric. As to Isocrates, I was not as sure about his starting point, but he seems to be a mix of episteme, endoxa, and doxa, which seems to be a practical way to approach speaking and writing, and he believes he can instruct a person how to synthesize these three bases of knowledge. So, from this, is Isocrates a way to bring Platonic and Aristotelian theory together regarding knowledge?
As I’m writing this, I realize I’m using the term starting point in a way that potentially could be misleading or confusing with arkhai/arkhe, which are first principles. In footnote 132 in On Rhetoric, Kennedy describes first principles as being “the starting point from which something exists or comes into being or becomes known” (67). Later in the footnote, Kennedy mentions that the foundation of a house is a starting point in construction. Now, when comparing this to discourse, what is going to be the foundation of a person’s argument, where s/he begins? Is it capital T truth or episteme in the Platonic sense, endoxa, doxa, or a combination of all three? Or, am I mixing the concepts arkhai and these three types of knowledge incorrectly in that the three can’t be starting points. Put another way, is there something that comes before knowledge?