Week 10: On Caddie Alford's Entitled Opinions

I think this meme captures how many people feel about the proliferation of opinions on social media today. In the case of this meme whose opinion is right? whose is wrong? Or perhaps the better question is, whose opinion is mostly accepted as true? Based on my reading of Caddie Alford's Entitled Opinions: Doxa after Digitality, I think this writer would posit a similar final question. Considering what is most true, or specifically, what is most probable (i.e. the opinion) has gotten a bad rap, partially because it has been the practice of the much maligned sophistic rhetoric of ancient Greece, which Alford seems to revive for a post-truth digital age.

Alford aims to reimagine opinions, noting that "if opinions seem larger than life, perhaps that is because we are finally waking up to their force and complexity" (6), and calls readers to pay closer attention to the role of doxa (instead of the usually more considered episteme) in studies of rhetoric in the digital age. The varied ways to conceptualize doxa serve as a foundation to the argument she develops around its connection to sociality, the infrastructure of opinions, how platforms affect the ways (every)body holds opinions, among other things, and how this all works together to activate invention. It is at this point that I believe Alford springboards from Ulmer's affective view of invention, leaving behind his "departure from topical invention" (Alford 144), that is, if I am reading Alford correctly.

So, what is doxa? It is unstable and often localized (as opposed to episteme's unchanging and universal nature). It is "more obscure than knowledge, but clearer than ignorance" (compared to episteme's "knowledge that comprises scientific truth") (Alford 7). In it's simplest terms, it is opinion (as opposed to fact).

Okay, so now I am definitely having flashbacks, sitting in my 6th grade class, looking at a sheet full of sentences to which I am to write F for factual statements and O for statements of opinion. May I confess here that I am not great at answering questions that can only be right or wrong? Take for instance this online quiz I found. I mean, what the heck does BOTH mean?!?

https://www.palmbeachstate.edu/slc/Documents/fact%20or%20opinion%20hints.pdf

(Source)

Soooo...please, take my poll - I want to see something....

How many facts did you find?

• Not a single one.
• EVERYTHING IS RHETORIC - sorry, what was the question?
• Pardon me, but do alternate facts count?
• I agree with you - This is adding no value to my life!

See All Options

If I had my way, everything would be an opinion. After all, facts sometimes change with new knowledge, so what can really be known?

I guess that this would be a good time to confess that I kind of like the Sophist approach, yunno, use a little bit of information to create an argument to get the crowd to go with what you want. I mean, it's not foolproof (think adoxa) so no need to be too worried, right? Maybe not. Okay, okay, maybe in this age of misinformation presented as facts, I will need to rethink that - especially when we can probably all think of a time when the people around us fell for a foolish opinion, as we stood there like the kid in the tale The Emperor's New Clothes shouting:

THE EMPEROR HAS NO CLOTHES!

To absolutely no avail.

Nevertheless... multiple versions of a fact may be true. Let's consider this conclusion from a more Platonian point of view. If we agree that philosophy, in opposition to rhetoric, is grounded in what can be known or what is good, and that religion is an offshoot of philosophy in that it represents what is believed to be known by a specific group of people who agree, let's say Christians, for example, then how is this verse in the Bible written by Paul explained other than by there being forms of or individualized truths?

"One person esteems one day as better than another, while another esteems all days alike. Each should be fully convinced in his own mind" Romans 14:5

Perhaps the final sentence is key: If we have (and share) an opinion on a matter, we need to be convinced that it is right, that it is true, and that it is for the general/shared good. Maybe rhetoric in its traditional sense only helps us get closer to what the best answer is given a specific set of opinions in a specific set of circumstances. Social media, however, changes all of that as shared opinions that can lead to real and destructive consequences are given more exposure than they would normally get. For that reason I can understand why a theory of doxa in this digital age, as proposed by Alford, is exactly what is needed.