Roberto da Silva Rocha, university professor and political scientist
sophistic cast
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In terms of debates, the discipline of homiletics, and by contagion the practice of sophistry, is still a resource to ignite the debate of those who do not seek the truth just with the intention of impressing the interlocutors with phrases and words that seem rational and correlated, Greek schools were divided between dialectics, heuristic or atomistic logic or ontology, and the school of prosaic discourse called rhetoric.
We must remember that arguing is not developing the debate in search of the truth, on the contrary, rhetoric aims to silence the antagonist, with all that this can mean to the detriment of the search for rationality and truth.
Rhetoric is simply the art of constituting a set of arguments to convince the other, without necessarily building a relationship with the logical chain, that is, it is the ability to construct a sequence of convincing arguments in a literal way.
Unlike rhetoric, dialectics seeks to build a priori theorems and propositions in a deductive or inductive way and demonstrate through contradiction all aspects of argumentation, exposing its weaknesses and demonstrating that the foundations resist refutations without worrying about hiding the weaknesses and falsities that hide the reasoning under analysis.
The Sophists, intellectual opponents of Plato and Socrates, argued that knowledge of essences was not necessary, when the argumentative artifices of language were available to convince the interlocutors of what one wanted.
It is in this sense that the sophist Protagoras affirms that man is the measure of all things, that is, that it is the human being himself who defines what is true or not based on his eloquence.
The Gorgias dialogue, written by Plato (Gorgias was one of the most successful sophists), evidences the sophistical characteristic of dealing only with the surfaces of what is spoken and described.
For Plato, while the dialectical process, essential to having valid knowledge, sought to delve into the essences of things, the sophists only sought to make things appear the way they wanted through rhetoric.
The sophists always tried to build a sophistical cast that consists of accumulating true premises almost always, but which do not keep any logical relationship with each other and whose conclusion does not have a synthesis relationship with the preliminaries but end up seeming logical because of the sound, the rhyme, the syllableation, of similarity of theme, of metonymy, of metaphors, of synecdoches then the elegant play on harmonious words hides the perfect lack of logical correlation between the premises and the conclusion, it is just an elegant play on words.
the Sophist begins like this: on the day of the tree I don't spend time with a tree; on the day of the dead I don't spend the day with a gravedigger; on valentine's day i don't need to spend it with a boyfriend.
The objective is to get away from the pertinence of Valentine's Day without a boyfriend, so the argument used is to build a reference between the ephemeral dates and the Valentine's date.
In fact, he wants to justify the absence of the boyfriend on Valentine's Day by comparing the situation of the single person with the situation of the tree without company and the gravedigger as compulsory company on the date of the dead.
Although this oral support is not coherent, it serves to cause a sensation by the preparation for the grand finale of the verbal apotheosis suggestive that everyone can be without company on ephemeris dates, including those who don't have a boyfriend.
The defect of the sophistical cast is that it uses an epic as if it were a legend or myth, they are narratives that, although empty, use the plastic form of language style of poetry and poem, beliefs and traditions to lend credibility that it cannot be derived from logic or rationality which is its weak point, although it cannot be true, it appears to be true.
Airplanes were used as a lethal weapon when hurled into the towers of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, but the use of airplanes was not prohibited as they are needed to shorten intercontinental voyages from weeks of ship voyages for some flight hours; automobiles were purposely thrown at pedestrians to kill people in premeditated actions on various avenues around the world, but automobiles were not condemned or considered lethal weapons and their elimination was not considered because they transport people better than horses and bicycles; so the firearms that can protect civilization from enemies and animal beasts in the distant and savage environment where a fierce bear or a lion could tear apart a vulnerable person can eventually be used for a massacre, in which case the weapon becomes the weapon. solely responsible and must be eliminated.
better than that with a more perfect sophistical cast we would have to think of something absolute with an unthinkable, insurmountable collection of idiocies, but it is always possible to overcome the skills of a fool when one wants to build attractive and convincing daydreams, global warming contradicting the second law of thermodynamics and the terraplanismo will always fill us with hopes about the ability to create eloquent and grandiose sophistical casts.
