Demand for justification before making a move. Of course, this is not always sophistry. In some special areas of life, such as courtroom trials, we demand that a “burden” of specific kinds of evidence be met as a precondition for taking some action. Sophistry tends to extend this need for justification far beyond the areas where it’s feasible and useful. Skeptical sophistry tends to push a sort of cognitive hyper-humility, or freezing out of fear of ever being “wrong”—or even being right but not fully justified. If you were to reason as the skeptic suggests that you should reason, you’d never be able to do anything in real life, because you’d never have sufficiently articulated and proven a priori principles to get started, nor evidence to justify your actions according to those principles, nor time to think this stuff through to the demanded degree.
This post reminds me of the phrase “cognitive hyper-humility,” used by Ben Kovitz’s Sophistry Wiki: