sophism

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English

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Etymology 1

From Middle English sophim, from Old French soffime, sofime, sofisme, sophisme, from Latin sophisma (“fallacy, sophism”), from Ancient Greek σόφῐσμᾰ (sóphisma), from σοφίζω (sophízō) + -μα (-ma).

Noun

sophism (countable and uncountable, plural sophisms)

  1. (uncountable, historical) The school of the sophists in antiquity; their beliefs and method of teaching philosophy and rhetoric.
    Synonym: sophistic
    • 1958, Sophie Trenkner, The Greek Novella in the Classical Period, page 15:
      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.
    • 2003, Murray Leaf, “Ethnography and Pragmatism”, in Alfonso Morales, editor, Renascent Pragmatism: Studies in Law and Social Science, →ISBN, page 92:
      Empiricism has its roots in Greek and Roman sophism and skepticism, and continues through Kant and American pragmatism.
    • 2009, Richard M. Berthold, Dare to Struggle: The History and Society of Greece, →ISBN, page 75:
      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.
  2. (countable) A flawed argument, superficially correct in its reasoning, usually designed to deceive.
    Synonym: sophistry
  3. (countable) An intentional fallacy.
  4. (uncountable) Sophistic, fallacious reasoning or argumentation.
    Synonym: sophistry
    • 1779, David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion:
      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?
    • 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.
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Etymology 2

Noun

sophism (uncountable)

  1. Archaic spelling of Sufism.[1]

References

  1. ^ “sofi, sophism”, in The Century Dictionary , New York, N.Y.: The Century Co., 1911, →OCLC.

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