by Matthew Fouts

Created on: October 30, 2008

What the Sophists truly deserve recognition for is the fact that they had a keener grip than their successors concerning not only what can be done with language, but also what can be known about existence. I believe that subjectivism inherent in the Sophist tradition has implications for the understanding of language use that we are only now beginning to articulate again. In "The Conduit Metaphor: A Case of Frame Conflict in our Language about Language," Michael J. Reddy suggests a metaphor for communication which essentially says that there is no possible way for thought to be communicated from one person to another while preserving its essential nature. Reddy does this by presenting communication as a wagon-wheel shaped prison in which the prisoners can send instructions back and forth to one another in order to build things. They are never able to completely figure out what the other prisoners are trying to tell them, but with a conscious effort they are able to work together in order to create some kind of shared meaning.

I would argue that this is also the essential nature of Sophism. We, as human beings, can only know our world through sensory information. Since our senses are imperfect, our understanding of the world around us is necessarily flawed. Therefore, one must seek to understand all facets of an issue in order to obtain as comprehensive an understanding as possible so that we can work together to improve our society.

The negative connotation that has been attached to Sophism since Isocrates and Plato is undeserved. The condemnation of the Sophistic movement appears to have begun when the Sophists were associated with the defeat of Athens in the Peloponnesian war. The Sophist, Gorgias, is credited with having used his eloquent speech to persuade Athens to enter the war on the side of his native Sicilian town of Leontini. The resulting backlash led to a general fallout of the Sophistic tradition. The result of this is the fact that we have almost no existing sophistic texts from which to form our own opinion. Any post Peloponnesian works on the Sophists are tainted by Plato's refutation of the tradition.

Instead, we have had to contend with twenty-four hundred years of the Platonic idea, in one form or another, that there exists an absolute truth that is just beyond our grasp (perhaps it is guarded by Dumbledore from the Harry Potter novels). In the West, this concept has manifested itself most identifiably in the institution of Christianity.

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