CONCEPT
Doxa (Bourdieu)
Assumptions so deeply embedded they go without saying — the pre-ideological ground structuring what can be thought, distinct from orthodoxy (explicit defense) and heterodoxy (explicit challenge).
Doxa is Bourdieu's term for the universe of presuppositions that agents accept without question — beliefs experienced not as beliefs but as reality. Doxa is distinguished from opinion, which is conscious and debatable, and from ideology, which is articulated and therefore vulnerable to critique. Doxa operates below the threshold of discourse, structuring perception itself: it determines not just what people think but what they are capable of thinking, marking the boundaries of the thinkable. When a field's doxa is stable, agents experience the field's arbitrary features as natural. When doxa is disrupted — by crisis, by technological rupture, by the entry of new agents — it fragments into orthodoxy (the explicit defense of what was previously taken for granted) and heterodoxy (the explicit challenge from positions of weakness).
In The You On AI Field Guide
Bourdieu introduced doxa in Outline of a Theory of Practice (1972) to describe the Algerian peasants' relationship to their social world — a relationship of such complete practical mastery that the categories structuring their