User:JedSmith19/be bold

In Plato’s Gorgias (dialogue), Plato presents the Sophists, rhetors who taught people how to speak for the promise of commercial success, as wordsmiths that ensnare and use 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 Occident as pure negativity, which can take various forms, among them the form of illusion. As such, doxa may ironically be defined as the "philosopher's sin". In classical rhetoric, it is contrasted with episteme.

Plato’s student Aristotle objected to Plato’s assumption of doxa. Aristotle perceived that doxa’s value was in practicality and common usage, in contrast with Plato’s philosophical purity relegating doxa to deception. Further, Aristotle held doxa as the first step in finding knowledge, as doxa had found applications in the physical world and those who held it had great amount of tests done to prove it and thus reason to believe it. Aristotle clarifies this by categorizing the accepted truths of the physical world that are passed down from generation to generation as endoxa. Endoxa is a more stable belief than doxa, because it has been "tested" in argumentative struggles in the Polis by prior interlocutors. The use of endoxa in the Stagirite's Organon can be found in Aristotle's Topics and Rhetoric.

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