THE ESSENCE OF TRUTH
ἀλλοδοξία as 'confused opinion' [verwechselte Meinung]. It is precisely confusion as such that this third explanation does not grasp. The misunderstanding is grounded in the faulty translation of the word ἀνταλλάττεσθαι; this does not mean confuse, but rather substitute, interchange.
From this you can see that the third attempt does get close to the peculiarity of the phenomenon of distorted view - which is indeed something like confusion - but on the other hand does not grasp the structure of confusion, only of substitution. This is not by accident, but there is a reason for it. In the background is the idea that opinion is the positing of the one and the other. Instead of seeing that the δόξα has only one object, which, however, possesses a complex rather than a simple unity, and that this complexity is the genuine problem, the prevailing view is always that the object of δόξα consists of two objects. We shall now see in what degree Plato succeeds in comprehending this complexity and its corresponding comportment, and in what points, and for which reasons, he fails.
Does the conversation remain without 'result'? We can recognize, without even coming to the end, that much 'results' to which subsequent philosophy and human knowledge could no longer measure up.
We are discussing the ψευδής δόξα. We have brought the preliminary investigation to a close. We have shown why the third attempt (ψευδής δόξα as ἀλλοδοξία) comes closer to the phenomenon than do the first and second attempts. What positively emerges from this third attempt, i.e. what is important for the main investigation, is that an attempt is made to grasp the δοξάζειν as a λόγος, λέγεσθαι, διαλέγεσθαι. The saying-something-to-oneself and the holding-of-oneself-to (to what is said) means simultaneously: to address something in a specific way. This demonstration of the λόγος-character of the δόξα is important in so far as it alone is retained in the later development of the δόξα concept, so that the primordial elements of the δόξα disappear behind this characteristic, and the δόξα, as 'opinion', is linked to assertion and the genuine phenomenon disappears.