To me, the difficulty seems to lie not in defining sophistry but in detecting effective sophistry, because frequently you can’t just skim a text to see if it’s sophistic. Effective sophists are good at sophistry. You have to steelpersonishly recreate the sophist’s argument in terms clear enough to pin down the wiggle room, then check for internal consistency and source validity. In other words, you have to make the argument from scratch at the level of an undergraduate philosophy student. It’s time-consuming. And sometimes you have to do it for arguments that have memetically evolved to activate all your brain’s favorite biases and sneak by in a cloud of fuzzies.
“The surprise at the sentence level...” reminds me of critiques of Malcolm Gladwell’s writing.
I found the detection heuristic you describe much easier once I started thinking in terms of levels of abstraction and degrees of freedom. I.e. arguments with a lot of degrees of freedom and freely ranging between different levels of abstraction are Not Even Wrong.
To me, the difficulty seems to lie not in defining sophistry but in detecting effective sophistry, because frequently you can’t just skim a text to see if it’s sophistic. Effective sophists are good at sophistry. You have to steelpersonishly recreate the sophist’s argument in terms clear enough to pin down the wiggle room, then check for internal consistency and source validity. In other words, you have to make the argument from scratch at the level of an undergraduate philosophy student. It’s time-consuming. And sometimes you have to do it for arguments that have memetically evolved to activate all your brain’s favorite biases and sneak by in a cloud of fuzzies.
“The surprise at the sentence level...” reminds me of critiques of Malcolm Gladwell’s writing.
I found the detection heuristic you describe much easier once I started thinking in terms of levels of abstraction and degrees of freedom. I.e. arguments with a lot of degrees of freedom and freely ranging between different levels of abstraction are Not Even Wrong.