Sophistry, III

We begin to find a criticism of sophistry in Plato, but much of it is delivered by Socrates in his arguments with the famous Sophists. In these dialogues, it is left to the judgment of the reader who had the better of the argument: very often, Socrates claims not to have had, though readers often come to the conclusion that he was at least on firmer ground in his claims not to know than his opponents were in their claims to knowledge. These are worthy and valuable, and you will find commentaries on a few of these dialogues on the sidebar.

Aristotle's Rhetoric frames the sophists as intentionally deceptive in a way that Socrates usually does not. This is the ground from which Fr. Ripperger is operating. Aristotle only mentions the sophists a few times in that work, and in Book I he is raising them to clarify differences rather than to criticize, whereas Book II doesn't mention them by name at all. The criticism comes in Rhetoric III, in a discussion of synonyms and metaphors. These are intensely valuable to thinking, Aristotle rightly notes -- readers of the Hall regularly encounter the necessity of analogy to reasoning about the physical world. However, these things give rise to ambiguity, and ambiguity can also be used to deceive. The sophists are said to be deceivers in this way:

Language is composed of nouns and verbs. Nouns are of the various kinds considered in the treatise on Poetry. Strange words, compound words, and invented words must be used sparingly and on few occasions: on what occasions we shall state later. The reason for this restriction has been already indicated: they depart from what is suitable, in the direction of excess. In the language of prose, besides the regular and proper terms for things, metaphorical terms only can be used with advantage. This we gather from the fact that these two classes of terms, the proper or regular and the metaphorical-these and no others-are used by everybody in conversation. We can now see that a good writer can produce a style that is distinguished without being obtrusive, and is at the same time clear, thus satisfying our definition of good oratorical prose. Words of ambiguous meaning are chiefly useful to enable the sophist to mislead his hearers. Synonyms are useful to the poet, by which I mean words whose ordinary meaning is the same, e.g. 'porheueseai' (advancing) and 'badizein' (proceeding); these two are ordinary words and have the same meaning.... 

Further, there is a third consideration-one that upsets the fallacious argument of the sophist Bryson, that there is no such thing as foul language, because in whatever words you put a given thing your meaning is the same. This is untrue. One term may describe a thing more truly than another, may be more like it, and set it more intimately before our eyes. Besides, two different words will represent a thing in two different lights; so on this ground also one term must be held fairer or fouler than another. For both of two terms will indicate what is fair, or what is foul, but not simply their fairness or their foulness, or if so, at any rate not in an equal degree. The materials of metaphor must be beautiful to the ear, to the understanding, to the eye or some other physical sense. It is better, for instance, to say 'rosy-fingered morn', than 'crimson-fingered' or, worse still, 'red-fingered morn'. The epithets that we apply, too, may have a bad and ugly aspect, as when Orestes is called a 'mother-slayer'; or a better one, as when he is called his 'father's avenger'. Simonides, when the victor in the mule-race offered him a small fee, refused to write him an ode, because, he said, it was so unpleasant to write odes to half-asses: but on receiving an adequate fee, he wrote

"Hail to you, daughters of storm-footed steeds? "

though of course they were daughters of asses too. The same effect is attained by the use of diminutives, which make a bad thing less bad and a good thing less good. Take, for instance, the banter of Aristophanes in the Babylonians where he uses 'goldlet' for 'gold', 'cloaklet' for 'cloak', 'scoffiet' for 'scoff, and 'plaguelet'. But alike in using epithets and in using diminutives we must be wary and must observe the mean.

The latter of the emphasized points (emphasis added) is the one logician and poet Lewis Carrol makes in Through the Looking Glass: "‘When _I_ use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean–neither more nor less.’" From Aristotle's time, we have a refutation of that claim. 

Thus, the most basic point about sophistry in the negative sense that the world has today -- and has had since Plato and Aristotle's time -- is that it is rhetoric that is intended to deceive, rather than rhetoric that is intended to enlighten, illuminate, or improve. 

Probably the clearest example of sophistry in contemporary language for us is the Motte & Bailey Fallacy, which is well known to readers of the Hall or of AVI's place. That is not the one that Fr. Ripperger leads with, however. The next piece will explore his opening example.