Reason's Dark Champions: Constructive Strategies of Sophistic Argument

By Christopher W. Tindale

A complex and complete picture of the theory, practice, and reception of Sophistic argument

Recent decades have witnessed a major restoration of the Sophists' reputation, revising the Platonic and Aristotelian "orthodoxies" that have dominated the tradition. Still lacking is a full appraisal of the Sophists' strategies of argumentation. Christopher W. Tindale corrects that omission in Reason's Dark Champions. Viewing the Sophists as a group linked by shared strategies rather than by common epistemological beliefs, Tindale illustrates that the Sophists engaged in a range of argumentative practices in manners wholly different from the principal ways in which Plato and Aristotle employed reason. By examining extant fifth-century texts and the ways in which Sophistic reasoning is mirrored by historians, playwrights, and philosophers of the classical world, Tindale builds a robust understanding of Sophistic argument with relevance to contemporary studies of rhetoric and communication.

Beginning with the reception of the Sophists in their own culture, Tindale explores depictions of the Sophists in Plato's dialogues and the argumentative strategies attributed to them as a means of understanding the threat Sophism posed to Platonic philosophical ambitions of truth seeking. He also considers the nature of the "sophistical refutation" and its place in the tradition of fallacy. Tindale then turns to textual examples of specific argumentative practices, mapping how Sophists employed the argument from likelihood, reversal arguments, arguments on each side of a position, and commonplace reasoning. What emerges is a complex reappraisal of Sophism that reorients criticism of this mode of argumentation, expands understanding of Sophistic contributions to classical rhetoric, and opens avenues for further scholarship.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
• Release date: Oct 15, 2012
• ISBN: 9781611172331

Christopher W. Tindale

Christopher W. Tindale is a fellow of the Centre for Research in Reasoning, Argumentation, and Rhetoric and a professor of philosophy at the University of Windsor. He is the author of numerous essays and several books on the nature and practice of argument, including Rhetorical Argumentation and Fallacies and Argument Appraisal.

Book preview

REASON’S DARK CHAMPIONS

REASON’S DARK CHAMPIONS

Constructive Strategies of Sophistic Argument

CHRISTOPHER W. TINDALE

STUDIES IN RHETORIC/COMMUNICATION

THOMAS W. BENSON, SERIES EDITOR

© 2010 University of South Carolina

Cloth edition published by the University of South Carolina Press, 2010

Ebook edition published in Columbia, South Carolina,

by the University of South Carolina Press, 2012

www.sc.edu/uscpress

21   20   19   18   17   16   15   14   13   12      10   9   8   7   6   5   4   3   2   1

The Library of Congress has cataloged the cloth edition as follows:

Tindale, Christopher W. (Christopher William)

Reason’s dark champions : constructive strategies of Sophistic

argument / Christopher W. Tindale.

p. cm. — (Studies in rhetoric/communication)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-57003-878-5 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. Sophists (Greek philosophy) 2. Reasoning.   I. Title.

B288.T56 2010

183'.1—dc22

2009034561

ISBN 978-1-61117-233-1 (ebook)

For my former colleagues in the Department of Philosophy and the Department of Ancient History and Classics at Trent University, in appreciation of many years of collegial support

The Sophist runs away into the darkness of that which is not, which he has had practice dealing with, and he is hard to see because the place is so dark.

Plato’s Sophist 254a

CONTENTS

Series Editor’s Preface

Acknowledgments

PART 1 SOPHISTIC ARGUMENT AND THE EARLY TRADITION

Introduction

The Category Sophist: Who Counts?

The Figure of Socrates

1   Sophistic Argument: Contrasting Views

Against the Sophists

Figures of Influence

Positive Views of Sophistic Argument

Resistance to Revision

2   Making the Weak Argument the Stronger

A Problem of Translation

Eristics and the Euthydemus

Antiphon the Sophist

Protagorean Rhetoric

3   Plato’s Sophists

Platonic and Sophistic Argument and the Sophist Dialogues

Public and Private Argument

Plato’s View of Argument

A Question of Method

Imitation and Method: Eristic and the Peritrope

The Veracity of Plato’s Testimony

4   The Sophists and Fallacious Argument: Aristotle’s Legacy

The Sophists and Fallacy

The Sophistical Refutations

Fallacy in the Euthydemus

Lessons from the Euthydemus

Contrasting Refutations

PART 2 SOPHISTIC STRATEGIES OF ARGUMENTATION

Introduction

Rhetoric and Argumentation

Rhetoric and Sophistry

Extending Sophistic Argument: Alcidamas and Isocrates

5   What Is Eikos? The Argument from Likelihood

The Meaning of Likelihood

Examples from Antiphon

The Range of Eikos Arguments

Evaluating Eikos Arguments

Contemporary Appearances: Walton and the Plausibility Argument

6   Turning Tables: Roots and Varieties of the Peritrope

What Trope Is the Peritrope?

Defining the Peritrope

Reversal Arguments in Gorgias and Antiphon

Socratic and Sophistic Refutations Again

Contemporary Reversals

Evaluation

7   Contrasting Arguments: Antilogoi or Antithesis

The Concepts of Antilogoi and Antithesis

History of the Antilogoi

The Dissoi Logoi

Antithesis and the Counterfactual

Examples of Antilogoi: Gorgias, Antiphon, Prodicus, Thucydides, and Antisthenes

Purpose and Evaluation

Contemporary Echoes

8   Signs, Commonplaces, and Allusions

Modes of Proof

Arguing from Signs

Commonplaces

Allusions

More Recent Echoes

9   Ethotic Argument: Witness Testimony and the Appeal to Character

Ethos

The Appeal to One’s Own Character

Witnesses

Funeral Speeches

Promotion of Character

Attacking Character

The Use of Ethotic Argument and the Modern Ad Hominem

10   Justice and the Value of Sophistic Argument

Truth and Morality: Reasoning in the Dark

A Human Justice

Sophistic Argument and Justice

Two Kinds of Sophist

Sophistic Argument in the Present

Notes

References

Index

SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE

In Reason’s Dark Champions, Christopher W. Tindale traces the reputation, the theory, and the practice of the Sophists and of sophistic argument from the Greeks of the fifth century B.C.E. to the present. Professor Tindale seeks to advance the rehabilitation of the Sophists, especially by examining their actual modes of arguing in their own works, in those they influenced, and in the reports of others about their argumentation. Sophistic argument has suffered from the charge that it is merely eristic—speech undertaken to win at all costs or simply to elicit admiration. Similarly sophistic argument has been charged, since Plato and Aristotle, with developing skills to make the weaker argument appear to be the stronger. But, argues Tindale, the Sophists would not acknowledge the assumption behind this charge—that in the sorts of matters that sophistic argument is designed to treat, such as jury trials, there is a knowable, absolute truth, access to which sophistic argument is designed to obscure. The Sophists, claims Tindale, developed their argumentative methods to weigh probabilities and likelihoods in a world of argument where probability is the best we can hope for. Hence the skill of turning arguments about is at least worthy of serious consideration on its own terms. Even Plato, who was in search of the truth of the Forms, observes Tindale, wrote in a letter that no serious philosopher will attempt to put the truth into words. The nature of the medium, the subject, and the audience all render such an effort pointless.

Professor Tindale traces in detail sophistic strategies of argumentation as they are used by the Sophists themselves, with extended development of argument based on likelihood, arguments based on reversal, arguments based on antithetical reasoning, and ethotic argument (argument based on witness testimony and the appeal to character).

Professor Tindale concludes his examination of the contributions of the Sophists to argument by noting that sophistical reasoning makes possible rhetoric itself, which is indispensable in any discussion of choices about justice—hence all argumentative reasoning is rhetorical. At the core of such argument is an acknowledgment of the importance of audiences, who through rhetoric may become equal partners in a constructive process that can improve the quality of intellectual communities and the quality of reason itself. In Reason’s Dark Champions, Christopher Tindale has done much to advance just such a project.

THOMAS W. BENSON

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book is the result of almost a decade of thinking and writing, over which time many audiences have contributed to its improvements. Parts of chapter 3 were first presented in a paper to the Ontario Philosophical Association in 2002, and sections of chapters 1 and 4 were presented at the International Pragmatics Association meeting in Italy in 2005. Sections of chapters 2 and 4 are drawn from talks presented at the Classical Association of Canada meetings in 2005, 2006, and 2007. The material on allusion in chapter 8 had its first airing in a paper presented to the International Society for the Study of Argumentation in Amsterdam in 2006, and some of the discussion of commonplaces in the same chapter is drawn from a paper to the Ontario Society for the Study of Argumentation in Windsor, Ontario, in 2007. An earlier version of chapter 5 was read to the Department of Philosophy at the University of Windsor in 2007. And chapters 3 and 5 were discussed in a seminar at the University of Copenhagen in 2008. I am grateful to all the audiences involved for their interest and critical comments.

My interest in the Sophists generally and an appreciation for their perspectives were honed during three senior philosophy seminars dedicated to their ideas at Trent University, including one in my final year there in 2005. I was fortunate in having groups of outstanding students who approached the subject matter with enthusiasm and creativity. Many of the ideas that have found their way into the final version of this book were first tried out in those seminars.

Two anonymous reviewers for the University of South Carolina Press made some useful suggestions that have helped me to clarify the intent of the project; I am grateful to them for these. Several other individuals also deserve particular mention here. My thinking on the Greeks’ interest in commonplaces and topoi has benefited enormously from ongoing conversations with my Bielefeld colleague Andreas Welzel. And Christian Kock contributed a number of important insights during my visit to Copenhagen, as well as impressing upon me the importance of taking seriously the argumentative riches of the Rhetoric to Alexander. My colleagues at Windsor’s Centre for Research in Reasoning, Argumentation and Rhetoric provided ongoing critical support during the final stages of this project. I would mention in particular Tony Blair, Hans Hansen, and Ralph Johnson. I am fortunate to be a fellow of this fledgling institution. Though they may balk at the label, they are fine Sophists all.

SOPHISTIC ARGUMENT

AND THE EARLY TRADITION

PART 1

INTRODUCTION

The negative connotations that attach to the term sophistry have a long and abiding tradition. The use of the term in contemporary debates is invariably accompanied by a critical and dismissive tone. Yet the Sophists whose practices are thought to have given rise to this negative notion have received far more constructive treatments in recent literature and even a few positive accounts that trace back to figures such as G. W. F. Hegel (1892) and Grote (1888).¹ Still, for all the rehabilitation of recent decades, Sophistic argument, insofar as it is discussed, tends to retain its negativity. Sophistic argument is closely linked (when not treated as synonymous) with eristics and false refutations. Aristotle bears part of the responsibility for this. His analysis of sophistical refutations in the work of that title grounds the historical treatments of fallacy such that a sophistical argument is simply a fallacious argument.² And the precursor for this thinking is, of course, Plato and his treatment of Sophists in the Dialogues, particularly the Euthydemus. Yet even a cursory consideration of the influence of the Sophists among their contemporaries and the respect accorded them by a range of important figures gives the lie to any largely negative depiction of their argumentative strategies. And even the Platonic presentations of sophistic patterns of reasoning are more ambiguous than the general animosity he conveyed toward them would suggest.

This book is not a study of any individual Sophist, since there has been a wealth of recent books with this aim, most done very well: for example Schiappa (2003) on Protagoras, Consigny (2001) and McComiskey (2002) on Gorgias, and Gagarin (2001; Antiphon 1997) on Antiphon. I intend, rather, to make a further contribution to the general rehabilitation of the Sophists but one that specifically attends to the nature and variety of sophistic argument. The Sophists, we learn, engaged in a range of argumentative practices, the goals of which were quite different from the principal ways in which Plato and Aristotle understood and employed reason. By looking at some of the extant fifth-century texts and the ways sophistic reasoning is mirrored in the thinkers around them, from historians to playwrights and even philosophers, we can build a far more constructive picture of sophistic argument, one that also has relevance to contemporary studies of argumentation.

The book is divided into two parts. Part 1 looks at the reception of the Sophists in their own culture and the subsequent tradition. It explores the depictions of the Sophists that populate Plato’s dialogues and the argumentative strategies attributed to them and considers the nature of the ‘sophistical refutation’ that forms the foundation for the tradition of fallacy. Part 2 turns to specific argumentative practices, beyond the interest in so-called eristics and refutations, looking at how Sophists employed such strategies as the argument from likelihood, reversal arguments, arguments on each side of a position, and commonplace reasoning, among others. In each case the argument strategy is explored through examples from the texts.

THE CATEGORY SOPHIST: WHO COUNTS?

The category of Sophist will be expanded in part 2 to include figures beyond the central group. But here we might consider that group and the reasons we have for collecting them together. The principal fifth-century Sophists³ are known as such because of their influence and the testimonies accorded them. Thus Protagoras and Gorgias stand out as dominant figures in the core group. While the paucity of fragments makes it difficult to use Protagoras in illustrating sophistic argumentation, the types of strategies attributed to him, such as the use of opposing arguments or two-logoi, make him an important figure to consider even if it is just in exploring how he set arguments on both sides of an issue. Beyond this the way his argumentative practices seem mirrored in other writers such as Thucydides and Euripides and Sophists such as Antiphon emphasizes the importance of his place in any study of sophistic argument. Gorgias is less difficult to draw upon. The extant fragments, including speeches such as the Helen and Palamedes and more theoretical disquisitions such as On Not-Being, provide a wealth of material for our study. Likewise Antiphon, the best represented of any fifth-century Sophist in terms of the material available, provides through that material exemplary illustrations of argumentative strategies as they were taught and employed in actual trial speeches. Other members of the major group, such as Prodicus, Hippias, and Thrasymachus, are of less direct value, although the distinctive approaches to reasoning that Plato presents in his portrayals of the latter two are useful in themselves in setting the contrast between reasoning that Plato considered appropriate for the ends he championed and reasoning that he did not. The argumentation of Prodicus is less vividly portrayed, although his Choice of Heracles, which comes down to us courtesy of Xenophon, illustrates the sophistic interest in antithesis as an argumentative strategy.

These constitute the core group of actual Sophists from which material will be drawn for the study.⁴ Others are known more through the testimonia than for any fragments that remain.⁵ But if part of the Sophists’ fame lay in their influence, then the work of those influenced also becomes important for illustrating some of the strategies. Beyond this group there are certain anonymous texts, such as the Dissoi Logoi, that serve further to tell us how specific types of argument were understood and used. And finally a case will be made in the introduction to part 2 for expanding the range of materials available to the study by including the work of some of the more important students of the core group, such as Alcidamas and Isocrates.

THE FIGURE OF SOCRATES

The hot potato of Sophist studies is undoubtedly the place that should be accorded the figure of Socrates. In the Apology Plato takes pains to distance Socrates from other fifth-century thinkers, perhaps to counter Aristophanes’ damaging depiction in Clouds. But that agenda seems less apparent in later dialogues such as the Sophist itself. Still most commentators appear reluctant to categorize Socrates in a way that is so contrary to his historical reputation. As Kerferd observes: The very idea of including Socrates as part of the sophistic movement is at best a paradox and to many absurd (1981, 55). To a certain extent, the question is moot from our point of view, since he wrote nothing and thus there are no direct examples of how he argued. On the other hand, the Socratic elenchus is a method of refutation, and the famed sophistic argument of the tradition is a false refutation. So any considered study of refutation arguments must make some effort to distinguish the two.

While writers such as Kerferd (1981, 56–57) and Guthrie (1971, 33–34) have been reluctant to include Socrates fully under the label Sophist, providing more ambivalent treatments, stronger cases for doing so have been made. And as we will see, a study of sophistic argumentation will tend to support the case for inclusion. In various dialogues Plato has Socrates play the Sophist, whether by giving lengthy speeches that were the preferred discourse of the Sophists or, as in the Meno, by expressly speaking as Gorgias would in order to give his interlocutor (Meno) the kind of performance to which he is used and which he understands (Meno 76c). But on each of these occasions the serious contrast is maintained between sophistic and nonsophistic procedures. The Sophist itself, however, involves the development of a definition that, once complete, indicts the Socrates of the Socratic dialogues in a central way.

C. C. W. Taylor (2006) has recently made the case that the core definitions of the Sophist have the effect of distinguishing Socrates from the philosopher and identifying him with sophistry, albeit of a noble variety. Grote had said as much more than a century earlier, when he observed that the definition which he [Plato] at last brings out suits Sokrates himself, intellectually speaking, better than any one else whom we know (1888, 44). But Taylor gives substance to this observation through a detailed review of the various parts of the definition, from the hunting of young men⁶ to the crucial part that involves cleansing the soul through refutation or elenchus (Soph.230d–e).⁷ Granted, Socrates avoids falling under the fourth part of the definition since he does not sell his wares for a fee. But it remains a matter of debate whether their fee-taking propensity, to which Plato returns time and again, should really be seen as an essential, rather than a peripheral, part of what is important about the Sophists (and particularly the Sophist arguers), and at best it would exclude Socrates from the class of professional Sophists. Regardless the common interest in refutation as a method of argumentation draws Socrates firmly into the Sophist fold. It remains then only to inquire whether the uses of the method are sufficient to distinguish him in any interesting way. Plato’s own position on the matter became clear: beyond a certain point, the Socratic elenchus failed to serve the needs of his philosophical agenda. Whether this was due in any part to its similarity to sophistic practices is beyond the purview of this study.

Chapter 1 provides two conflicting views on sophistic argument, drawn from the tradition. The first is negative and reflects the views of people such as Aristophanes and Richard Whately through to contemporary argumentation theorists. The second is more positive and is drawn from such thinkers as Euripides and Thucydides, through Hegel and more contemporary writers such as Eduard Zeller. The chapter looks at the grounds for each perspective. Chapter 2 explores one of the chief arguments leveled against the Sophists in works such as Plato’s Apology and Aristotle’s Rhetoric—that they made the weak argument or cause to be or appear strong (it is the translators who create the problem of appearance in the texts). Here I discuss the seriousness of the charge and argue that it arises from a disagreement over the nature of reality and human experience in relation to it and the capacity of language to handle this. The charge is being made through Platonic or Aristotelian lenses, but there is a quite reasonable way of seeing what the Sophists were doing. Those Platonic lenses are given more thorough attention in chapter 3, which examines the presence of Sophists and sophistic strategies of argument in the Dialogues. They are present even when not expressly addressed and represent a fundamental threat to Plato’s project (as seen in the treatment of Protagoras in the Theaetetus). Repeatedly the contrast is made between speech making and its public value and dialectic and its private value. The emergence of rhetoric in the Gorgias is explored as well as the role of Socrates as a foil for sophistic reason, particularly the largely ignored negative role of the midwife simile. Many commentators are suspicious of Plato’s portrayals of the Sophist and so argue that we cannot place too great a value on them. I argue to the contrary that, given the enormity of the threat that Sophists represented to his philosophical agenda, it was in Plato’s personal interests to present them as accurately as he could for a firm dismissal of their positions. In light of the attention he gives to their interest in speech making and to argumentative practices so different from his own, it would seem odd to exclude him as a potential source for material and insight. Finally chapter 4 explores Aristotle’s contrast between a sophistical and a real refutation in light of the tradition of fallacy in Western logic. The nature of such a contrast is traced to Plato’s Euthydemus, and Aristotle’s treatment in the Sophistical Refutations is examined. The two types of refutation aim at different goals, both legitimate in their own terms. The tradition has valued one and marginalized the other.

The fragments of the principal Sophists and related authors are included in the Fragmente der Vorsokratiker of Diels and Kranz. References to these fragments are abbreviated DK B (with section A providing the testimonia). English translations are available in Rosamond Kent Sprague’s 1972 edition of The Older Sophists. Where specific translations of other key texts are used, particularly for Plato and Aristotle, I note these in the citation and provide the information in the references.

1 SOPHISTIC ARGUMENT

Contrasting Views

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), Richard Whately 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 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