This content was created by Tamsen Webster. This content was uploaded by Tamsen Webster. This is a YouTube video titled "New favorite (and useful!) word alert: ENDOXA" (uploaded July 31, 2025). The excerpt is an English monologue by a single presenter who defines Aristotle's term "endoxa" (public opinion / commonly held beliefs), gives examples (axioms, widely held cultural beliefs), cites sources like Wikipedia and Cambridge University Press, and argues that making these implicit beliefs explicit can create common ground and strengthen persuasive reasoning and case-making.
Chapters
You know I love me some Aristotle, and I also love me a new word. So when I find a new word from Aristotle, oh, it is bliss, and I am happy to share that with you. Here it is. Ready? Endoxa. Oh, isn't that fabulous? Great. But what is our endoxa? Endoxa, singular endoxon, is how Aristotle termed public opinion, commonly held truths, the consensus of the populace. In other words, those recognizable truths that serve as the strongest base, the strongest premises for your core case, your externalized mental model for why you believe in a particular strategy, change, or approach. And these can be incredibly powerful, especially in this day and age where it feels like there are beliefs that are incredibly immune to change, that the beliefs are conflicting. It can be hard to see where or even if it's possible to find common ground. But even in this highly complex, highly combative situation, There are still beliefs, still universal mutually held beliefs that go deeper than ideology, deeper than political stances, and are just above individual primal beliefs to the core. Those are the endoxa. These can be basic mathematical and scientific principles. In that case, they're known as axioms, but they can also be universally held cultural beliefs. Things like, that happiness is desirable and that wealth is beneficial or that opportunity should be fair, even that kindness is helpful and that physical health is important. I'm borrowing heavily from Wikipedia and Cambridge University Press in those examples. The trick with endoxa, though, is that they hide. They are so universal and so commonly held that they stay under the surface. They stay, as psychologists and cognitive scientists would say, They stay implicit, but something magical happens when we make them explicit. When we say them out loud, we A, bring them to the front of people's attention, which means they're starting to think through and use that lens for any information that follows. And then second, research shows that when people have these endoxic, widely commonly held beliefs in that center of attention, they are much less likely to create us/them separations. They're much more likely to widen the group of people to whom they believe that particular induxin applies. I hope you see what I do in the potential and the possibility of these kinds of induxa being used in our explanations, in our argumentation, in our reasoning, in our case-making about the positions that we take, not only about our products and services, but also about why we hold the positions that we believe we do. We may just find that we have a lot more common ground than we thought.
