Sophism is a pre-Socratic school of thought in philosophy in ancient Greece. It comes from the Greek word sophos, which means “wise” or “skilled”. Originally, sophism was used to refer to anyone with expertise in a specific domain of knowledge or craft. A blacksmith, for example, can be referred to as a sophos in his occupation.

1. WHAT IS
SOPHISM?

2. SOPHISM is a
pre-Socratic
school of thought
in philosophy
in ancient Greece.
It comes from the Greek
word sophos,
which means “wise”
or “skilled”.

3. Originally, SOPHISM was used
to refer to anyone with expertise
in a specific domain of knowledge
or craft.
“sophoi”
in his
occupation

4. Overtime, SOPHISM came
to denote a class of itinerant
intellectuals called the “Sophists”
who speculated about the nature
of language and culture and
who employed rhetoric to achieve
their purpose, which is to
persuade others.

5. As a philosophical doctrine,
SOPHISM holds that
a person’s subjective reality
is the only reality that exists and
can be known. Hence, the Sophists
believe that “truth” is what people
thought it to be.

6. Full transcript of this presentation is
available at:
https://philonotes.com/index.php/2019/11/05/sophism/
A video version of this presentation is
available at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycaUPQHs_Dc

7. others that
something is true,
one needs effective
communication skills,
and it was these skills
that the Sophists
taught.
And for the Sophists, to convince

8. In fact, they
believed that
anything is true if
one can convince
someone that it is
true.
Nothing, they
said, is inherently
right and wrong,
but believing
makes it so.
Therefore,
for the Sophists,
truth is relative,
and thus no single,
absolute truth was
thought to exist.

9. The first and best-known Sophist
was Protagoras.
“Man is the
measure of all things—
of the things that are,
that they are, and of
things that are not,
that they are not.”

10. The famous line means several points.
 First, truth depends on the perceiver
rather than on physical reality.
Second, because perceptions vary with the
previous experiences of the perceiver, they
will vary from person to person.
Third, what is considered to be true will be,
in part, culturally determined because one’s
culture influences one’s experiences.

11. And lastly, to understand why
a person believes as he or she does,
one must understand the person.
For Protagoras, therefore,
each of the preceding philosophers
was presenting his subjective
viewpoint rather than the objective
truth about physical reality.