Re:street epistemology
« Reply #1 on: 2013-01-20 17:31:38 »
[Fritz] Enjoyed the talk. He did fall into the 'Hitchean' trap of using flogged to death examples such as Burka's and JC's bones that the huddled masses felt somewhat superior about. But then pleasing your audience does enure further gigs, which is a good thing in this case I think.
The Word DOXA intrigued me so I did the usual quick a dirty snooping.
Plato tended to oppose knowledge to doxa, which 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. However, Aristotle used the term endoxa (commonly held beliefs accepted by the wise and by elder rhetors) to acknowledge the beliefs of the city. 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.
Use in sociology and anthropology
Pierre Bourdieu, in his Outline of a Theory of Practice,[4] used the term doxa to denote what is taken for granted in any particular society. The doxa, in his view, is the experience by which “the natural and social world appears as self-evident”.[5] It encompasses what falls within the limits of the thinkable and the sayable (“the universe of possible discourse”), that which “goes without saying because it comes without saying”.[6] The humanist instances of Bourdieu's application of notion of doxa are to be traced in Distinction where doxa sets limits on social mobility within the social space through limits imposed on the characteristic consumption of each social individual: certain cultural artefacts are recognized by doxa as being inappropriate to actual social position, hence doxa helps to petrify social limits, the "sense of one's place", and one's sense of belonging, which is closely connected with the idea that "this is not for us" (ce n´est pas pour nous). Thus individuals become voluntary subjects of those incorporated mental structures that deprive them of more deliberate consumption.[7]
Doxa and opinion denote, respectively, a society's taken-for-granted, unquestioned truths, and the sphere of that which may be openly contested and discussed.[8]
Re:street epistemology
« Reply #2 on: 2013-01-25 14:40:34 »
It seems to me that the position the Dr Boghossian is advocating in this talk is that one should take a single ideological position, that is, against doxatic closure for any reason, everything else is open to revision. In other words, the one doxatic closure you should embrace is the one that seals your mind off from the rest.
If that is the case, then maybe we can call that ideological position "dogmatic rationalism".
It seems to me that the position the Dr Boghossian is advocating in this talk is that one should take a single ideological position, that is, against doxatic closure for any reason, everything else is open to revision. In other words, the one doxatic closure you should embrace is the one that seals your mind off from the rest.
If that is the case, then maybe we can call that ideological position "dogmatic rationalism".
[Fritz]I heard, to be able to accept all possibilities at anytime; that there is no absolute just change. So can accepting that there is no position just change, be dogmatic ?