Sophistry and Philosophy: Epistemological Conflict
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Plato's conception of the world, a conception that has been foundational to western philosophy, is one wherein, simply put, truth exists objectively, separate from the languages that fein to describe it, and separate from the subjective sense perceptions and experiences that get incomplete glimpses of it:
But of the heaven which is above the heavens…It is such as I will describe; for I must dare to speak the truth, when truth is my theme. There abides the very being with which true knowledge is concerned; the colourless, formless, intangible essence, visible only to mind, the pilot of the soul. The divine intelligence, being nurtured upon mind and pure knowledge…she beholds justice, and temperance, and knowledge absolute, not in the form of generation or of relation, which men call existence, but knowledge absolute in existence absolute (Phaedrus).
This understanding of truth, being conflated here with a divinity higher than the Gods themselves, is one wherein the truth and knowledge are imbued first in the divine, and secondly in the nature of the objectively existing natural world that this divinity either creates or inspires, and are, therefore, not contingent on the existence of human beings, consciousness, and language (to some extent).
The sophists, in contrast, viewed knowledge, belief, and truth as social constructions made through discursive interactions between people and their understandings of the material world. However, amongst this group, considering Gorgias and Isocrates in particular, there seems to be two understandings of what this social construction means for the nature of truth: the fist, championed by Gorgias, being that truth is synonymous with belief, and is therefore an assertion of one’s opinion as reality, a claim that Plato seems to fear; and the second, inherent to Isocrates’ “Against the Sophists,” claims that knowledge is constructed discursively, but, when constructed honestly and in harmony with one’s understanding of the objectively existing world, is done for the sake of collective understanding rather than for utility or winning an argument. Starting with Gorgias, in his “Ecomium of Helen,” he makes an assertion that all arguments, from both or all sides, are grounded in the opinions of those who partake, and, while coming to some semblance of truth, the truth is a pragmatic fabrication: “All who have and do persuade people of things do so by molding a false argument. For if all men on all subjects had <both> memory of things past and <awareness> of things present and foreknowledge of the future, speech would not be similarly similar…on most subjects most men take opinion as counselor to their soul” (52, Gorgias). Gorgias’ illustration of the nature of arguing, and therefore the construction of truth, in this passage is one wherein usefulness is held in higher regard than truth, whatever truth might look like. Isocrates, however, in a critique of his follow sophists, suggests a blend, to some extent, of philosophy’s aim and rhetoric’s understanding of discourse (sections 17-19, Isocrates). In this way, Isocrates’ understanding of language’s active role in creating knowledge is similar to Aristotle’s, both of whom emphasize the relationship between philosophy and rhetoric, “Rhetoric is a counterpart of Dialectic; for both have to do with matters that are in a manner within cognizance of all men” (3, Aristotle), which situates both, rhetoric and dialectic (Plato’s syllogistic method for reaching truth) as mediums for knowledge creation. However, the difference between Isocrates, Plato and Aristotle is in the distinction each makes between truth and knowledge. This distinction isn’t made clear in Isocrates’ “Against the Sophists,” but, for Plato and possibly Aristotle, truth exists externally and knowledge is the attainment or internalization of truth, which, one could argue, has to happen discursively, through language, otherwise it is entirely subjective.
Connecting this ancient, and still unreconciled, debate about the nature of truth, belief, knowledge, and its relationship to language with contemporary post-truth rhetoric, what the post-truth paradox reveals, through irony, about the nature of truth in a post-truth world is very similar to Isocrates and Aristotle’s connections between philosophy, therefore the pursuit or creation of truth, and rhetoric. The post-truth paradox reveals how the structures of a language influence our ability to construct, or come to, knowledge, it reveals the impossibility of a post-truth world—for language must be imbued with socially constructed and agreed upon meaning to be affective, and all communication, to varying extents, is made up of varying and competing conceptions of truth expressed through symbols—because of languages’ necessary connection to the idea of truth (“we live in a post-truth world” is a claim towards truth), and, consequently, the post-truth paradox reveals that truth exists as long as it can be interpreted. So, in this conception of knowledge’s nature, the arts of rhetoric and dialectic, or the arts of discourse and syllogistic logic, are necessarily intertwined. This is in opposition to both Gorgias and Plato’s conceptions of truth and discourse, as I have illustrated them here, which suggest that truth and discourse are, generally, separate. Plato, in his conflation of truth and divinity, sees truth as above humanity and the constructions we use to attest to understand it, or make knowledge of it, and Gorgias, at least as he characterizes truth in his “Ecomium of Helen” is generally conflated with opinion, and therefore often inconsequential in debate, because, ultimately, a comprehensive sense of it, is out of reach.
Nevertheless, this debate about the nature of truth is one that persists throughout western history. Stanley Fish, for example, when writing “The quarrel between philosophy and rhetoric survives every sea change in the history of Western thought, continually presenting us with the (skewed) choice between the plain unvarnished truth straightforwardly presented and the powerful but insidious appeal of ‘fine language,’ language that has transgressed the limits of representation and substituted its own forms for the forms of reality” (“Rhetoric”) situates this debate as a central part of the history of western philosophy. Much of contemporary scholarship, in fact, contends with this debate and favors the latter understanding of truth and its relationship to language. Some examples of this are Berlin’s social-epistemic rhetoric, which I mentioned previously, Fish’s notion of interpretive communities (see Fish’s Interpretive Communities), and Bakhtin’s conception of “language as a world view” (271, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays) in his “Discourse in the Novel.” Therefore, this debate between the sophists and platonism about the nature of truth is a useful tool for contextualizing the history and pertinence of what the post-truth paradox and post-truth rhetoric are ultimately engaging with. While post-truth rhetoric is essentially what Plato feared, making false claims that resemble truth in order to achieve dishonest ends, it does make us aware of the way in which knowledge and truth, or at the very least perceived truth, can be shaped, constructed, and reconstructed socially. Meanwhile, the paradoxical nature of labeling rhetoric not aligned with truth “post-truth” reveals, in particular, the role that language has in simultaneously shaping, and being shaped by, socially constructed beliefs, ideologies, and therefore knowledge and truth.