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4 THE SOPHISTS AND FALLACIOUS ARGUMENT Aristotle’s Legacy Sophistry is certainly a word of ill-repute, and indeed it is particularly through the opposition to Socrates and Plato that the Sophists have come into such disrepute that the word usually now signifies that, by false reasoning, some truth is either refuted and made dubious, or something false is proved and made plausible .We have to put this evil significance on one side and to forget it. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy When we turn to the work ofAristotle and consider his engagements with the Sophists, we find no comparable set of texts in which they are so vividly portrayed .Aristotle’s “Dialogues” are lost, and the few references in the Fragments to a Sophist or Grylos (Aristotle 1984, 2418) in which rhetoric is discussed tell us nothing about the discussants involved. Instead we must turn to what is calledAristotle’s esoteric work, where more direct claims are made about the Sophists’ manner of arguing. THE SOPHISTS AND FALLACY While theories of argument have not given much space to the ideas of the Sophists, theories of fallacy certainly have.As has been noted in earlier chapters , it has been taken as a commonplace that the paradigms of fallacious arguments are found in the reasonings of the Sophists, as exemplified in Plato’s Euthydemus and Aristotle’s Sophistical Refutations. Here the judgments of Plato andAristotle have been decisive in establishing the deeply entrenched opinion of the tradition. In modern parlance the fallacy and the sophism are deemed synonymous.There are several questions that can be raised here, but principally we might ask whether the historical assumption that equates fallaciousness with sophistic argument is fair; and whatever answer we give to that question, whether all sophistic modes of argument are reflected in the types presented in the Euthydemus and Sophistical Refutations. Both questions will be explored in this chapter. Poulakos (1997) asks questions that seem so obvious once posed that our failure to have asked them earlier is itself instructive:“If the philosophers were The Sophists and Fallacious Argument 45 right, how on earth did the sophists’ contemporaries believe them? Couldn’t they see through their deceptions, inconsistencies, and contradictions?” (13). While we have seen a mixed reaction to the Sophists, several of them at least were highly respected and enjoyed positions of responsibility. Protagoras, it has been noted, was well regarded by Pericles and commissioned to write the laws for the Athenian colony of Thurii; and Gorgias was sent as an ambassador from Leontini, his home, toAthens. On the other hand, there is no doubt that the Sophists also could be the subjects of humor and derision. Aristophanes ’ Clouds would have contributed to this perception, even if it was not descriptive of it (that is, there is a question of whetherAristophanes is reflecting a common mood toward the Sophists or creating it).This mixed portrait does nothing to clarify matters, but it does suggest that no simple equivalence between sophistic argument and fallacy is plausible. Rosamond Kent Sprague’s (1962) study of the use of fallacy in Plato’s dialogues is instructive on several fronts. Her intention is to defend Plato against the charge that he engages (unintentionally) in fallacious argumentation. Her thesis is that all uses of fallacy are conscious.The bulk of the work is given over to a detailed analysis of the Euthydemus, where the nature of eristic argument is explained and illustrated.The key distinction lies in the intention behind the use of fallacy, here equated with eristics: the Sophists, represented by Euthydemus and his brother Dionysodorus, aim for victory in argument; Plato on the other hand employs fallacy to advance his argument, to demonstrate the flaws in such discourses and hence their inadequacy. However, Sprague’s study also examines parallel arguments in the Theaetetus and Cratylus and some similar arguments in the Hippias Minor. In defending Plato’s use of eristic arguments in the Theaetetus, she makes an important distinction: “that arguments which may, from their resemblance in form to arguments in the Euthydemus, be called‘eristic,’ need by no means be employed in an eristic spirit” (81).This serves to emphasize several points.The committing of a fallacy, in Sprague’s eyes, lies not in the argument itself but in the “spirit” of its use.This allows her to salvage Plato’s logical reputation; his facility is such that he can employ both good and bad arguments to...

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