Doxa Is of What Seems
What kind of thing is Plato’s doxa? This is a question nowadays rarely asked. It is widely assumed that Plato had in mind something perfectly familiar to us from commonsense contemporary epistemology: belief. I will argue that Plato’s doxa is instead essentially to be understood as the cognition of a special kind of object, what seems. Plato chooses ‘doxa’ rather than some more general or neutral term to name the inferior cognitive condition because of the etymological link with seeming (to dokein), which we find actively exploited in the Presocratics. Plato inflates this link into a substantive theory: what seems is something ontologically distinct from what Is, and when we attend to what seems we have doxa rather than epistêmê. This is particularly evident in Plato’s discussions of rhetoric. Thus the defining object of doxa is what seems.