#sophistry — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #sophistry, aggregated by home.social.
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#Knowledge is #justified #true #belief. That definition is about 2500 years old, and although #philosophers have been trying to come up with a better definition ever since, no one has. All claimed counterexamples are #sophistry.
A lot of my fellow #scientists and/or #atheists have trouble with the word "belief" because they associate it with faith—which in turn can be defined as belief *without* justification, or whose truth is unknowable. But it's really a lot simpler than that.
If I walk inside dripping wet, and someone asks me if it's raining, and I say it is because I've just been out in it, then I'm stating my belief. What you believe is anything you can honestly affirm if someone asks you, "Is such-and-such true?"
Belief can be simple and immediate or complicated and long-term. It can be trivial or profound. It can be true or false, justified or unjustified, testable or untestable. The honesty, that's the key. Knowledge, a proper subset of belief, has a much higher standard.
The above is an extended way of saying that if someone begins a loaded question with an aggressive, sarcastic "Did you know ..." then you are amply justified in truly believing they're full of shit.
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As I have always been convinced that abuse of Words, has been the great instrument of Sophistry and Chicanery — of party, faction and Division in Society.
John Adams (1735-1826) American lawyer, Founding Father, statesman, US President (1797-1801)
Letter (1819-03-31) to J. H. TiffanyMore info about this quote: wist.info/adams-john/36295/
#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #johnadams #equivocation #ambiguity #chicanery #deception #language #meaning #persuasion #rhetoric #sophistry #talking #terminology #wordplay #words #definition -
As I have always been convinced that abuse of Words, has been the great instrument of Sophistry and Chicanery — of party, faction and Division in Society.
John Adams (1735-1826) American lawyer, Founding Father, statesman, US President (1797-1801)
Letter (1819-03-31) to J. H. TiffanyMore info about this quote: wist.info/adams-john/36295/
#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #johnadams #equivocation #ambiguity #chicanery #deception #language #meaning #persuasion #rhetoric #sophistry #talking #terminology #wordplay #words #definition -
As I have always been convinced that abuse of Words, has been the great instrument of Sophistry and Chicanery — of party, faction and Division in Society.
John Adams (1735-1826) American lawyer, Founding Father, statesman, US President (1797-1801)
Letter (1819-03-31) to J. H. TiffanyMore info about this quote: wist.info/adams-john/36295/
#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #johnadams #equivocation #ambiguity #chicanery #deception #language #meaning #persuasion #rhetoric #sophistry #talking #terminology #wordplay #words #definition -
As I have always been convinced that abuse of Words, has been the great instrument of Sophistry and Chicanery — of party, faction and Division in Society.
John Adams (1735-1826) American lawyer, Founding Father, statesman, US President (1797-1801)
Letter (1819-03-31) to J. H. TiffanyMore info about this quote: wist.info/adams-john/36295/
#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #johnadams #equivocation #ambiguity #chicanery #deception #language #meaning #persuasion #rhetoric #sophistry #talking #terminology #wordplay #words #definition -
HECUBA: The clear actions of a man,
Agamemnon, should speak louder than any words.
good words should get their goodness from our lives
and nowhere else; the evil we do should show,
a rottenness that festers in our speech
and what we say, in capable of being glozed
with a film of pretty words.
There are men, I know,
sophists who make a science of persuasion,
glozing evil with the slick of loveliness;
but in the end a speciousness will show.
The imposters are punished; not one escapes
his death.
[ἙΚΆΒΗ: Ἀγάμεμνον, ἀνθρώποισιν οὐκ ἐχρῆν ποτε
τῶν πραγμάτων τὴν γλῶσσαν ἰσχύειν πλέον:
ἀλλ᾽, εἴτε χρήστ᾽ ἔδρασε, χρήστ᾽ ἔδει λέγειν,
εἴτ᾽ αὖ πονηρά, τοὺς λόγους εἶναι σαθρούς,
καὶ μὴ δύνασθαι τἄδικ᾽ εὖ λέγειν ποτέ.
σοφοὶ μὲν οὖν εἰσ᾽ οἱ τάδ᾽ ἠκριβωκότες,
ἀλλ᾽ οὐ δύνανται διὰ τέλους εἶναι σοφοί,
κακῶς δ᾽ ἀπώλοντ᾽: οὔτις ἐξήλυξέ πω.]Euripides (485?-406? BC) Greek tragic dramatist
Hecuba [Hekabe; Ἑκάβη], l. 1186ff (c. 424 BC) [tr. Arrowsmith (1958)]Sourcing, notes, other translations: wist.info/euripides/77262/
#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #euripides #hecuba #actions #evil #excuse #glibness #persuasion #propaganda #rationale #smoothtalker #sophistry #wordsanddeeds
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On nonsense: Forms thereof, falsifiability, pseudoscience, bullshit, youth culture, and other craziness
I'd begun worrying about the resilience of truth and countermeasures to bullshit particularly online well over a decade ago.
This is an early compilation of heuristics and resources which came up in discussion elsewhere recently, and may be helpful to others.
Among conspicuous omissions, Aristotle's "Sophistical Refutations" (Sophistikoi Elenchoi in the original Greek), one of the earliest recorded (or surviving) guides to countering bullshit:
https://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/sophist_refut.1.1.html
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For more on the Sophists, see the Stanford Online Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sophists/
I'd also recommend the HoP episode:
https://historyofphilosophy.net/sophists
Audio: https://hopwag.podbean.com/mf/feed/6qa8mu/HoP_014_Making_the_Weaker_Argument_the_Stronger___the_Sophists.mp3References:
J.M. Dillon and T. Gergel, The Greek Sophists (London: 2003).G.B. Kerferd, The Sophistic Movement (Cambridge: 1981).
#sophists #sophistry #philosophy #HistoryOfPhilosophy #podcasts