The art of disputation
Sophists have claimed that there are two sides to every question and an important part of their teaching consisted of argumentative techniques designed to give logical teeth to any position that had to be defended. Arguing on both sides of a question became a hallmark of Sophistic virtuosity. A compendium of such two-fold arguments which survives from those times is attributed to Protagoras. In his work, clustered around general topics like good and bad, just and unjust etc. are a series of arguments designed to show that judgements involving these terms are never absolute but relative to the one who makes them. Sophistic argumentative technique was called eristic, which meant ‘contentious argument’.
Another term was ‘antilogic’ or the art of contradiction. Contentiousness, opposition of one argument by another, such as characterizes legal and political debates, came thus to summarize what the sophists taught. They claimed to be able to teach how to make the weaker argument stronger, that is, to make it appear that the worse of two contending arguments was actually the better. This is connected with the claim, also ascribed to a number of sophists, that there is no truth, or no falsity. If truth is not a criterion to be used to judge between arguments, then rhetorical and other devices can be used to achieve what all arguments aim at: victory. Sophistic arguments are characterized by their lack of seriousness and depth. Aristotle defines eristic as that which aims at victory rather than truth. Both Plato and Aristotle were careful to distinguish their own practice from those of the sophists. Relating them to the sphere of emotion, they distinguished this from their own doctrines which were addressed to reason. The emotions, or passions as they are sometimes collectively called are assimilated to the senses, of which they form a sub set removed even further from the real seat of agency, reason. The emotions are antithetical to reason but must be brought under control. In the Republic Plato identifies them with the mass of people, the many who must be brought under the control or rule of reason.
The clash of opposed or contradictory arguments which seems to characterize the nature of sophistic teaching and practice is however at odds with another claim that is made on their behalf, or at least on the behalf of some of them, including Protagoras. This is the claim that there is no contradiction. No beliefs or judgements expressive of beliefs really contradict any other belief or judgement. If no contradiction is possible then what happens when people lose or win their debates? If there is no contradiction, and all judgements and beliefs are true, then there can be no such thing as refutation, undermining the very practice that the sophists excel in and offer to teach. How a Sophist might have responded to this we will consider later.
Sophistry and Science
Most of the works that individual sophists wrote are now either lost or preserved only in quotation or limitation: sentences, a few speeches, the shadows of doctrines attributed to them by their more fortunate contemporaries and successors. One characteristic that is noticeably common to all of them is alack of interest in the cosmological speculations of the Milesian type. Sometimes this disinterest is seen as a complete break with the cosmological tradition. There seems to be no critique of Ionian type cosmology. We can however detect in the doctrines of some sophists the rudiments of a link between their rejection of science and their new interest in politics and ethics and the teaching of practical abilities. The link between these thinkers and those who preceded them is Democritus, who is both a natural philosopher and someone with an interest in psychology and ethics. The earliest sophists (Protagoras and Gorgias) both reject the claims of all the pre-Socratic philosophers when he asserted
‘Nothing exists’; even if this was a largely rhetorical claim, its rejection of the entire philosophical
tradition is tongue in sheek. Protagoras’ ‘Man is the measure of all things’ makes a claim which in its general reference to ‘all things’ recalls the global claims of the physical philosophers but balances this with something peripheral to the concerns of the physicists: man. The centrality of man signals the subject of the new wisdom. Philosophical speculation shifts from the cosmos to man and society.
