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7 CONTRASTING ARGUMENTS Antilogoi or Antithesis I’ve been thinking about this too, Sylvia. I think we shouldn’t confuse it in letters.We can say nothing to the purpose in one way letters. I’ve already written two sides, and it was all just arguing one way then the other. Ted Hughes, Letters of Ted Hughes In chapter 1 we saw that Desmond Conacher identifies Gorgias’s Helen as a case of making the weak argument strong, and then attributes a similar strategy to Euripides in a line from the Antiope. Euripides writes:“If one should be clever at speaking, one should be able to establish a case (agôna) consisting of two arguments for every proposition” (quoted in Conacher 1998, 51). The thinking here seems to be that if one can construct two such opposing arguments (the inference being that they are at least contraries), then one will strengthen an otherwise weak argument.1 As we saw in that early discussion, this need not follow at all, and we have good reasons for separating the strategies or at least allowing that, while the construction of opposing arguments might be a way of making a weaker case strong, it by no means exhausts the strategy, nor is the same argumentative move involved. THE CONCEPTS OF ANTILOGOI AND ANTITHESIS Heidlebaugh notes the interest expressed by the Sophists in contradiction,contraries , and oppositions (2001, 35), and Kerferd judges that at the heart of the Sophist movement is antilogic: the practice of “opposing one logos to another logos” (1981, 63).2 Less clear among contemporary scholars is a sense of what was at stake in such “opposition,” and this is what we must first clarify.3 In chapter 3 we saw Protagoras argue on both sides of an issue in the long speech from Plato’s Protagoras, and he is famously reported by Diogenes Laertius to have been the first to claim that “on every issue there are two logoi opposed to each other” (DK 80 A1). Such an assertion may have committed him to no more than the belief that no issue is decided in advance but must be weighed in the light of competing arguments. The Protagoras example would seem to support this. Nor on Diogenes’ terms is Protagoras apparently 100 Sophistic Strategies of Argumentation committed to a position that the opposing arguments will be of such equal value that the issue is undecidable.4 Diogenes does, though, proceed to say that Protagoras made use of such opposed arguments when arguing by the method of questioning, which addresses the matter of whether the same person will issue opposing arguments.5 A possible illustration of this is a recent fragment provided by de Romilly from a commentary on the Psalms, believed to be by Didymus “the Blind.”6 It reads:“To you who are present, I seem to be seated; to those who are absent, I do not: whether I am or not is not clear” (de Romilly 1992, 100).The speaker here is stating contradictory claims, that he both is and is not seated.And the‘argument’ for this would seem to be the different perspectives of those considering the claim (that is,whether or not they are present). Schiappa settles on a Heraclitean reading of the two-logoi claim, representing a claim about the relationship between language and reality,since Heraclitus was the “most significant and celebrated theorist of opposites” (2003, 93).7 None of this really suggests how the strategy might have been employed, especially by a single person. A critic of the two-logoi strategy, or opposing arguments, was Plato; an advocate, as we have seen suggested in earlier chapters, was Antiphon. Plato is referring to adversaries in court who speak on opposite sides: “Whoever does this artfully [will] make the same thing appear to the same people sometimes just and sometimes, when he prefers, unjust” (Phaedrus 261d).The concern is clearly that, irrespective of the truth of the matter, the advocate will make the one thing appear just or unjust as they choose.The matter lies with the choice of the speaker, not with reality.This, we have seen in earlier chapters , clearly marks a deeper disagreement between Plato and the Sophists. But as before it is a position that assumes that a reality stands behind the discourse, rather than being found through it.Antiphon’s approach in his Tetralogies (and, we have seen, in On Truth) assumes otherwise—that the matter cannot be...

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