sophism

plural sophisms

1. historicaluncountableThe school of the sophists in antiquity; their beliefs and method of teaching philosophy and rhetoric.

   Empiricism has its roots in Greek and Roman sophism and skepticism, and continues through Kant and American pragmatism.

   2003, Murray Leaf, “Ethnography and Pragmatism”, in Alfonso Morales, editor, Renascent Pragmatism: Studies in Law and Social Science, →ISBN, page 92

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   Within the framework of democracy a new ideology, born of sophism, took root and proclaimed the rights of the individual in all spheres, political as well as moral.

   1958, Sophie Trenkner, The Greek Novella in the Classical Period, page 15

   Sophistic teachers did not, in general, consciously aim at corrupting the young or turning them against their parents, but the radical skepticism and moral relativism of later sophism indirectly achieved something like this.

   2009, Richard M. Berthold, Dare to Struggle: The History and Society of Greece, →ISBN, page 75

   Synonyms: sophistic

2. countableA flawed argument, superficially correct in its reasoning, usually designed to deceive.

   The hope of improvement is a quality at once so strong and so excellent in the human mind, that I, for one, disapprove of any sophism—or, if you will, argument—that tends to repress it.

   1831, L[etitia] E[lizabeth] L[andon], chapter XIX, in Romance and Reality. […], volume I, London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, […], →OCLC, page 232

   Synonyms: sophistry, quibbling, pilpul, pilpulism

3. countableAn intentional fallacy.
4. uncountableSophistic, fallacious reasoning or argumentation.

   What! No demonstration of the Being of God! No abstract arguments! No proofs a priori! Are these, which have hitherto been so much insisted on by philosophers, all fallacy, all sophism? Can we reach no further in this subject than experience and probability?

   1779, David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion

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   30 Oct 1980, H. Dieter Zeh, letter to John Archibald Wheeler. I expect that the Copenhagen interpretation will some time be called the greatest sophism in the history of science, but I would consider it a terrible injustice if—when some day a solution should be found—some people claim that ‘this is of course what Bohr always meant’, only because he was sufficiently vague.

   Synonyms: sophistry, quibbling, pilpul, pilpulism

1. archaicuncountableArchaic spelling of Sufism.