Endoxa
from 340 BCE Topics and the ethical works
Begin from what everyone, or most people, or the wise already believe — save as much of it as you can, and only give up what you must.
- Active
- from 340 BCE
- Where
- Athens
- Also
- endoxa
- Status
- In use
- Tradition
- Classical procedures
What it is
Endoxa are the opinions held by everybody, or by most people, or by the wise. Aristotle's method is to gather them, set out the difficulties they raise against each other, and then produce an account that preserves as many as possible.
The underlying claim is that widely held beliefs are evidence. Not conclusive, but not nothing — if everyone has always thought something, that fact needs explaining even if the belief turns out to be false.
How it works
Collect what is actually believed, including by people you disagree with. Set the beliefs against each other and find where they conflict. Produce an account that saves the greatest number and the most important. Where a belief must be given up, explain why it was held.
The last step is what distinguishes the method from mere consensus-following. A view you discard still has to be accounted for.
The moves, in order
- Collect the opinions held by all, by most, or by the wise
- Set out where they conflict with each other
- Construct an account preserving as many as possible
- Where one must be abandoned, explain why it was believed
- Treat the surviving set as the finding
The procedure
Proposition Upstream users may take water for stock but not for irrigation during a restriction.
- Everyone along the creek accepts that stock must be watered; nobody proposes letting animals die.
- Most accept that a licence confers a real entitlement rather than a courtesy.
- Those with the longest experience of the creek hold that irrigation in a dry spell is what actually empties it, and the graziers agree, though they draw the opposite conclusion about who should stop.
- An account permitting stock water and suspending irrigation preserves all three: the animals are watered, licences remain real because they are suspended rather than cancelled, and the practice known to empty the creek stops.
- The belief given up is that a licence entitles the holder to take at any time. It was held because in every ordinary year it is true, and the account explains why the exception feels like a loss.
Therefore Stock water continues, irrigation is suspended, and the rule is one that everyone at the table can already see the reason for.
No principle was imported. The result is assembled from what the parties already believed, which is why it can be enforced without anyone being told they were wrong about everything.
What it is good for
Ethics, politics and any domain where the subject matter is human practice and there is no external standard to appeal to. It is also the method of choice when a rule has to be accepted by the people it binds.
Where it fails
It is conservative, structurally. A method that begins from what is already believed and saves as much as possible will be slow to overturn a settled and wrong consensus, and history is not short of those. Every reform has had to argue against the endoxa of its day.
It also has no principled way to weight the opinions. Aristotle says the wise count for more, which is either an appeal to expertise or a way of privileging the arguer's own circle, and nothing in the method distinguishes those two.
Common misconceptions
That it is an appeal to popularity. The difference is that popularity is offered as proof, while endoxa are offered as the starting material — and the method fully expects some of them to be abandoned.
Where it came from
Aristotle's standard opening move, most explicit in the Topics and visible throughout the Nicomachean Ethics, which begins nearly every discussion by asking what people say.
What became of it
Rediscovered in the twentieth century as the ancestor of reflective equilibrium and of the method of cases in analytic philosophy.
Lasting influence
Rawls's reflective equilibrium is essentially this method with a modern vocabulary, as is much of the appeal to intuition in contemporary ethics.
Why it still matters
High, and mostly unrecognised. Any argument that begins we all agree that is doing this.
Put another way
Renovating rather than demolishing. You keep the walls that are sound.
Texts
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
Book VII opens with the clearest statement of the procedure, immediately before applying it to weakness of will.
Where to start
Watch how the Nicomachean Ethics starts each topic. It is nearly always with a survey of what is said.
The surprising bit
The most systematic philosopher in the tradition thought the right place to begin was with what ordinary people already say, and only departed from it under pressure.
In their own words
We must set out the appearances, and having first raised the difficulties, go on to prove, if possible, the truth of all the reputable opinions
Who held it
Martha Nussbaum
Connections
- Set against
- Genealogy
- Influenced
- Reflective equilibrium, The method of cases
- Parallel to
- Ordinary language
The verdict
The best available method where there is nothing outside human practice to check against, and constitutionally unable to lead a revolution.