Workshop Leaders
Caddie Alford, Virginia Commonwealth University
Jordan Loveridge, Mount St. Mary’s University
Opinions are central to contemporary digital media issues; from radicalized Facebook groups to misinformation circulating across TikTok, what seems to be the case is often more compelling than what might actually be the case.
In Gorgias, Plato aligns rhetoric with empeiria (experience), placing it alongside “sham arts” like cookery and cosmetics; empeiria produces only contingent knowledge that mimics “Truth.” While this critique has immensely influenced rhetoric’s disciplinary trajectory, it missed the point of the Sophists’ contribution. Jasinski observes that “contingency is juxtaposed to necessity and impossibility while linked to the … presence of multiple possibilities” (108). Its goal is not apprehension of truth, but the negotiation of possibility. The ancient Greek expression of this negotiation is doxa, or opinion. “Doxa” encompasses social types of truths, ranging from a lack of certainty to the widely accepted.
Led by a digital rhetorician and a historian of rhetoric, this workshop positions contingency and doxa as vital to rhetoric’s character. We ask: how can/should contingency/doxa animate rhetorical studies? How has digitality mobilized doxa as a modality of knowing?
Participants will:
- Engage historical and contemporary readings theorizing contingency and doxa alongside urgent digital case studies.
- Workshop a draft of a project that interrogates contingency and/or doxa.
Note: This workshop has limited space for remote participation.
Caddie Alford is Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Writing at Virginia Commonwealth University and Book Review Editor for enculturation: a journal of rhetoric, writing, and culture. Her forthcoming book, Entitled Opinions: Reclaiming Doxa for the Digital Age, reworks doxa as a salient concept for both revealing and re/inventing emergent digital rhetorics.
Jordan Loveridge is Assistant Professor of Communication at Mount St. Mary’s University and Vice President of the American Society for the History of Rhetoric. His in-progress manuscript, supported by an ISHR fellowship, argues doxastic probability is a central, yet under-acknowledged component of ancient and medieval rhetoric.