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Sophism can mean two very different things: Nowadays, it is a confusing or illogical argument used for deceiving someone. In ancient Greece, the sophists were a group of teachers of philosophy and rhetoric who at least initially were well-respected.
The term sophism originates from Greek sophistes, meaning "wise-ist", one who "does" wisdom, one who makes a business out of wisdom (sophós means "wise man").
The earliest meaning of sophist seems to have been someone who gave sophia ("wisdom") to his students. It was a highly complimentary term, applied to early philosophers such as the Seven Sages of Greece.
In the second half of the 5th century B.C., and especially at Athens, "sophist" came to be applied to a group of thinkers and speakers who employed rhetoric to achieve their purposes, generally to persuade or convince others. Most of these sophists are known today primarily through the writings of their opponents (specifically Plato and Aristotle), which makes it difficult to assemble a complete view of the sophists' beliefs.
Many of them taught their skills, apparently often for a fee. Due to the importance of such skills in the litigious social life of Athens, practitioners of such skills often commanded very high fees. The practice of taking fees, coupled with the willingness of many sophists to use their rhetorical skills to pursue unjust lawsuits, eventually led to a decline in respect for practitioners of this form of teaching and the ideas and writings associated with it.
Protagoras is generally regarded as the first of these sophists. Others included Gorgias, Prodicus, Hippias, Thrasymachus, Lycophron, Callicles, Antiphon, and Cratylus.
Socrates disapproved of the sophists for ethical reasons, and consciously adopted a radically different approach to the teaching of wisdom. He accepted no fee, and adopted a self-effacing posture, exemplified by Socratic questioning (i.e., the Socratic method). His attitude towards the Sophists was not uniformly oppositional, however. Diogenes Laertius wrote that Protagoras invented the “Socratic” method (Jarratt, 1991, p. 83; Sprague 5). In one dialogue, Socrates stated that the Sophists were better educators than he was (Guthrie 399), and he even sent one of his students to study under a Sophist (Guthrie 401).
Plato, the most illustrious student of Socrates, depicts Socrates as refuting the sophists in several Dialogues. These texts depict the sophists in an unflattering light, and it is unclear how accurate or fair Plato's representation of them may be. Another contemporary, the comic playwright Aristophanes, lampoons the sophists as hairsplitting wordsmiths, and even counts Socrates among their number.
Plato is largely responsible for the modern view of the "sophist" as someone who uses rhetorical sleight-of-hand and ambiguities of language in order to deceive, or to support fallacious reasoning. In this view, the sophist is not concerned with truth and justice, but instead seeks power. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle all challenged the philosophical foundations of sophism.
It seems that some of the sophists held a relativistic view on cognition and knowledge. Their philosophy contains criticism of religion, law and ethics. Though many sophists were apparently as religious as their contemporaries, some held atheistic or agnostic views.
In some cases, such as Gorgias, we have original rhetorical works that are extant, allowing us to judge the author on his own terms. In most cases, however, our knowledge of sophist thought comes from fragmentary quotations that may be lacking context. Many of these quotations come from Aristotle, who also seems to have held the sophists in slight regard, notwithstanding his other disagreements with Plato.
Owing largely to the influence of Plato and Aristotle, philosophy came to be regarded as distinct from sophistry, the latter being regarded as rhetoric, a practical discipline. Thus, by the time of the Roman Empire, a sophist was simply a teacher of rhetoric. For instance, Libanius, Himerius, Aelius Aristides and Fronto were sophists in this sense.
The sophists’ rhetorical techniques were extremely useful for any young nobleman looking for public office. In addition to the individual benefits that Sophistic-style teaching conferred, the societal roles that the Sophists’ filled had important ramifications for the Athenian political system at large. The historical context in which the Sophists operated provides evidence for their considerable influence, as Athens became more and more democratic during the period in which the Sophists were most active (Blackwell).
The Sophists certainly were not directly responsible for Athenian democracy, but their cultural and psychological contributions played an important role in its growth. They contributed to the new democracy in part by subjectivizing truth, which allowed and perhaps required a tolerance of the beliefs of others. This liberal attitude would naturally have precipitated into the Athenian assembly as Sophists acquired increasingly high-powered clients (See Sprague 32). Contiguous rhetorical training gave the citizens of Athens “the ability to create accounts of communal possibilities through persuasive speech” (Jarratt 98). This was extremely important for the democracy, as it gave disparate and sometimes superficially unattractive views a chance to be heard in the Athenian assembly. Subjectivized truths and communicatively enabled individuals were wonderful for the burgeoning democracy, and, in a sense, they were democracy itself.
In modern usage, sophism, sophist, and sophistry are derogatory terms.
A sophism is a specious argument used for deceiving someone. It might be crafted to seem logical while actually being wrong, or it might use difficult words and complicated sentences to intimidate the audience into agreeing, or it might appeal to the audience's prejudices and emotions rather than logic. The goal of a sophism is often to make the audience believe the writer to be smarter than he/she is.
A sophist is a user of sophisms, i.e. an insincere person trying to confuse or deceive people. Sophists will try to persuade the audience while paying little attention if their argument is logical and factual.
Sophistry means making heavy use of sophisms. The word can be applied to a particular text or speech riddled with sophisms.