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1 SOPHISTIC ARGUMENT ContrastingViews Plato was correct to regard them as masters of illusion who presented men not with the truth but with fictions, images, and “idols,” which they persuaded others to accept as reality. Marcel Detienne, The Masters of Truth in Archaic Greece In his Elements of Logic (1836), RichardWhately conjures up an illogical antagonist with whom to contest his points, particularly on the efficacy of the fallacies .This device constitutes a kind of running dialogue between himself as the epitome of reason and a champion of unreason.The antagonist is simply called “the Sophist.” He acts deliberately to obscure and disguise expressions, while hoping they appear as simple as possible (161). “Sophistry,” Whately writes,“like poison, is at once detected, and nauseated, when presented to us in a concentrated form” (162), but the wily Sophist dilutes his deceptions, thereby making them more virulent.When he cannot prove his point, he distracts his audience so as to avoid the need for a proof (193), and he generally stands to represent all that can be understood by the term‘unreason’.This is a devastating portrait. It makes of the Sophist a thoroughly unpalatable character . Our question, though, has to do with the origin of this idea and whether it accurately approximates any historical Sophist who would have acknowledged the title.Whately’s depiction is a common one, influenced in no small part by the tradition that comes down to us from Plato and Aristotle and sees them as the philosophers, logical in thought and purpose, resisting the encroachments of the Sophists, illogical in all respects. AGAINST THE SOPHISTS In spite of the rehabilitation that the Sophists have enjoyed in recent studies (Kerferd 1981; Schiappa 1991, 2003), the negative judgments of Plato and Aristotle have tended to be endorsed by argumentation theorists.1 A major text that aims to capture the current state of affairs in the study of argument (van Eemeren et al. 1996) conveys what is indeed the standard story on the 10 Sophistic Argument and the EarlyTradition Sophists. Referring to the Sophists of fifth-century Greece, the authors tell us that they “were itinerant scholars who taught lessons in argumentation and social and political skills” (30). But the argumentation that they taught presumably was bad argumentation. The authors transfer the advocacy of relativism , often attributed to the fifth-century Sophists as a group, to a particular standpoint in argumentation that they call a sophistic standpoint. Of this, they write: “objectively speaking, there can be no such thing as good argumentation . If one person convinces another with his arguments, this is because the other person accepts what he says.The first person is, in other words, agreed to be right, but that does not necessarily mean that in objective terms he actually is right” (ibid.). What appears here to be a description of sophistic practice is on closer scrutiny a prescription. Behind the account stand the assumptions that good argumentation must have standards outside of social agreement and that the Sophists recognized no such standards. Both assumptions may prove questionable . But what is notable here is that a particular conception of argument, and indeed good argument, is being projected onto the Sophists and used to find their practice inadequate. In this respect the authors follow in the steps of Plato and Aristotle. One argumentation theorist who is cognizant in his work of the controversy surrounding Plato’s and Aristotle’s interpretations of the Sophists is Douglas Walton. This is significant because in many respects Walton’s own dialectical model of argument has much in common with the Sophists’ interest in likelihood and plausible inference, as he himself recognizes (1998a, 15–16; 1995, 4).The problem, as Walton suggests it, is that the denouncing of the Sophists by Plato and Aristotle was so widely accepted as correct that any interest in a logic based on presumption and opinion was in turn regarded as less than respectable.This,however,does not promptWalton to go back and investigate the argumentative practices of individual Sophists (beyond a recognition of Antiphon’s predilection for the argument from likelihood [1998a, 15]). Instead he directs his attention to salvaging the disfavored aspects of dialectical argument. Again, while Walton acknowledges the recent controversies surrounding Plato’s andAristotle’s interpretations of the Sophists, he does not himself pass judgment except to accept their condemnation of eristic argument. Eristic argument, in their terms, is a form of argument that aims at victory at any cost.2...

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