In Plato's Sophist, the Eleatic Visitor's first six definitions of the sophist culminate in the conclusion that the sophist, although not having truth, has ‘a kind of doxastic knowledge, δοξαστικὴν … ἐπιστήμην, about everything’ (233c10‒11). Does the sophist really have epistêmê and, if so, what are the implications for epistemology in the Visitor dialogues? Translators tend to render δοξαστική as ‘seeming’, entailing that the sophist does not really have epistêmê, but this translation cannot be right. δοξαστική means ‘having to do with forming or using beliefs derived from appearances’, doxai. The sophist, then, is accorded an epistêmê.
This paper aims to contribute to the investigation of Plato's later epistemology by examining what follows if we take this puzzling passage literally. In Part I, I defend translating δοξαστική as ‘able to formulate judgements’. In Part II, I argue that the Visitor and Theaetetus agree that the sophist has an epistêmê. I do not accept the view that Plato undercuts their agreement. In Part III, I consider implications of their agreement, looking at epistemological consequences of admitting sensibles among the ‘things that are’. This admission provides a basis on which even the sophist and other non-philosophers can have epistêmê. As a result, what I call ‘the Bridge Problem’ (= BP), raised by many critics of the Republic, does not arise. In the Republic, Socrates sets epistêmê over ‘things that are,’ sc. intelligibles, and doxa over ‘things that are and are not’, sc. sensibles and their accidents (477a‒b). But if cognitive powers cannot bridge the gap between intelligibles and sensibles so as to cognize both, it becomes mysterious how philosophers or dialecticians can apply their knowledge to a city or how non-philosophers can have craft knowledge. It lies beyond the boundaries of this paper to discuss whether so-called ‘Two Worlds’ (= TW) dialogues themselves contain what is needed to solve BP.Footnote 1 In any case, by admitting sensibles into ‘being’, the Visitor and Theaetetus allow epistêmê of statesmanship to guide a city and craftsmen to have epistêmê. In Part IV, I suggest that on this basis Plato rehabilitates craft knowledge and even leaves it open that the sophist may contribute if guided by a knowing ruler.
I. ΔΟΞΑΣΤΙΚΗ ΕΠΙΣΤΗΜΗ: KNOWLEDGE HOW TO FORMULATE DOXAI
The Visitor and Theaetetus agree that the sophist has a technê (221d). They clarify this expertise as one by which the sophist makes his followers think that he knows everything. In 233a5‒6 the Visitor speaks of the sophist as someone who disputes without knowing the subject matter, and at 233c6‒8 the two agree that, although sophists appear wise in everything to their students, they are not so. It is a puzzle, then, what the Visitor means when he concludes that the sophist has a kind of knowledge (epistêmê): ‘Accordingly’, says the Visitor, ‘the sophist has been revealed by us as having a kind of δοξαστική epistêmê about everything, but not truth’ (233c10‒11). Given that δοξαστική is semantically connected to δόξα, many—including Schleiermacher, Campbell, Cornford and Notomi—translate δοξαστική as ‘apparent/seeming’. Others—such as White, Rowe, Ammann and Esses—opt for ‘belief-based’. Movia and Crivelli go for both. None of these translations is correct.
δοξαστική cannot mean ‘seeming’ or ‘apparent’. As LSJ indicate, this adjective is derived from the verb δοξάζω, which means ‘to form or hold a doxa’. –ικός adjectives formed from verbs express the capability of performing the action denoted by the verb.Footnote 2 δοξαστικός means ‘capable of forming doxai’. The only translation I have found that conveys this sense with no undercutting qualification is Fronterotta's ‘capace di produrre opinioni’.Footnote 3 The earliest well-attested appearance of δοξαστικός is in Isocrates’ Against the Sophists (17). There we read that oratory is the work of a soul that is brave and doxastikê. The orator does not have a ‘seeming’ or ‘apparent’ soul. He has a soul able to form doxai, ‘judgements’, which for Isocrates are the best cognitive states we can reach about practical matters. Plato uses and even coins many –ικός verbal adjectives. In our dialogue, εἰκαστική and φανταστική are rendered by translators as ‘image-making’ and ‘appearance-making’. A technê that is ἀπατητική (264d6) is not ‘based on or arising from deception’; it is a technê of producing deception. If the Visitor wanted to say that the sophist's epistêmê is ‘apparent’ or ‘seeming’, he would call it δοκοῦσαν (cf. Phlb. 51a5, Grg. 464a3–4, Tht. 176c6, Leg. 691a6, 886b7) or δόξουσαν (Soph. 236a5–6). All these considerations tell also against ‘reputed’, found in Cornford and others, for that presupposes δοξαστήν (cf. Phdr. 248b5).
Among other dialogues, δοξαστικός appears only in the Theaetetus. The person who can explain all the parts of a wagon ‘has added an account to true doxa and instead of doxastikos has become expert and epistêmon about the being of a wagon’ (207c2). The descriptor, ‘based on beliefs’, could not apply to this person. Rather, he had been performing the action, δοξάζειν, forming or using beliefs about the wagon, but now he has knowledge. Aristotle provides support: ‘there being two parts of the soul that possess reason, it’—namely, phronêsis—‘must be the excellence of one of the two, that is, of that part which forms opinions’, τοῦ δοξαστικοῦ (Eth. Nic. 1140b25‒6, transl. Ross-Urmson). τὸ δοξαστικόν is the part of the soul that does the work of δοξάζειν, as the αἰσθητικόν is the part that perceives (De an. 413b30). Cherniss translated Plutarch's δοξαστικῆς (An. Procr. 1017A) and δοξαστικόν (1024A) as ‘opinionative’, that is, productive of doxa.
Translations that amount to ‘belief-based knowledge’ fail for two reasons. First, ‘belief-based’ is not a definition of δοξαστικός. Second, ‘belief-based knowledge’ is a false idea. It cannot be knowledge, the content of which is beliefs, since beliefs are not knowledge. Beliefs cannot provide the ground of justification that a cognitive state is knowledge because they can be of the false, while knowledge is always of the true (Resp. 533c3‒5, 476d, 479d, and the gist of the Theaetetus). We need more, at least grounding in a fact: ‘belief-based knowledge involves immediate acquaintance with the fact believed, as in everyday observation.’Footnote 4 One might think that the sophist has knowledge about beliefs, but the ground of such knowledge would be truths about the beliefs. Socrates will speak of technai and epistêmai that use doxai about changeable things (Phlb. 59a‒b), but the contribution to knowledge is made not by doxa but by perceptions from which doxa is formed (Phd. 96b7‒9; cf. Resp. 523c5, Tht. 201b9, Soph. 263a2). From the statement of Alexander of Aphrodisias that ‘we are said to know, εἰδέναι, both the things that we grasp through perception and judgement and the immediate premises’ (apud Simpl. In Ph. 12.18‒20), Burnyeat commented on δι’ αἰσθήσεως καὶ δόξης: ‘This phrase had better be a hendiadys, on pain of allowing the absurdity of knowledge gained through δόξα.’Footnote 5 Belief comes through persuasion, but knowledge resists persuasion (Ti. 51e). ‘Belief-based knowledge’ is a non-starter.
II. THE SOPHIST'S EPISTÊMÊ
One might object that I am ignoring clues that the sophist cannot have epistêmê. First, we already saw the Visitor lump the sophist together with someone ‘lacking knowledge’ (233a6), and he concludes that the sophist does not have truth (233c11). On the way to this conclusion, he argues that sophists appear to dispute knowledgeably on any subject (233c1‒4) and ‘therefore appear wise with respect to everything’ (πάντα … σοφοὶ … φαίνονται, 233c6). Βut because this is impossible, sophists are not so (οὐκ ὄντες γε, 233c8). Are not what? The predicate up until now has been ‘wise with respect to everything’. Cornford, White and Gill give us ‘not wise’ tout court at 233c8, but that rendering drops πάντα. It does not follow, as Rosen observed, ‘that, if the sophist does not know everything, then he knows nothing. This is an illegitimate inference …’Footnote 6 The sophist needs to know some truths, for example who and where the young men are (222a), and, as a ‘teacher’ of antilogic (232b8‒9), he must know about language and forms of argument. At 233c10, then, the qualifier ‘about everything’ (περὶ πάντων) needs to qualify both ἐπιστήμην, 233c10, and ἀλήθειαν, 233c11. The sophist has δοξαστικὴν ἐπιστήμην about everything but not truth about everything. We are left with no incongruities when we understand the sophist's epistêmê in the sense of ‘knowing how’ as the cognitive basis of technê, as often in Plato. The sophist knows how to manipulate language so as to produce and use doxai about any subject, and about said subject he may know some facts.
Rosen's observation deserves to be carried further. Despite announcing ‘has been revealed’ (233c11), the Visitor has not demonstrated that the sophist has no epistêmê of subjects about which he disputes. It is invalid to infer from ‘no one can know, ἐπίστασθαι, everything’ (233a3), that the sophist lacks epistêmê (ἀνεπιστήμων ὤν, 233a6) every time he disputes with a person who has it (πρός γε τὸν ἐπιστάμενον, 233a5). Of course, since he disputes about everything (233c5), the sophist will probably face this cognitive disadvantage often. At the end of the dialogue, though, the Visitor defines sophists as ‘unknowing’ imitators simpliciter (οὐκ εἰδότες, 267b8; οὐκ ἐν τοῖς εἰδόσιν, 267e5‒6). He has dropped without argument the ‘about everything’ qualifier he had granted in 233. If it is dropped because the final definition is a new definition, then it is only stipulated that the sophist is an unknowing imitator simpliciter. In the comparison made in 235e‒236c between sophists and makers of copies who alter proportions, it was not established that those artists imitate without any knowledge. Theaetetus seems to realize that ‘not knowing’ in 267 is merely stipulated, for he summarizes ‘we posited, ἔθεμεν, that he does not know’ (268c1), not ‘it has been revealed’. The sophist has not been validly denied epistêmê about some subjects that he imitates or disputes, and it is not proved that he lacks epistêmê about methods of disputation. Room is left for the sophist to know how to formulate doxai that make ‘our soul form false judgements’ (ψευδῆ δοξάζειν, 240d3).
One may retort that the Visitor has not established premises from which to infer that the sophist does have an epistêmê. It is a good bet, though, that the Visitor assumes a tacit premise—namely, if one has technê, one has epistêmê. By introducing the paradigm of the angler, who they agree has technê, the Visitor prompts Theaetetus to consider the sophist too as having technê. As noted above, the sophist's technê is affirmed at the beginning of the First Definition (221d1‒6), and it remains throughout the Sophist and into the Statesman (cf. 291c4). Even a banausic technê has its corresponding epistêmê (Plt. 258d8‒e1). Technê and epistêmê are often interchanged in Plato, and often in the Visitor's mouth.Footnote 7 Explaining the recurring interchangeability of technê and epistêmê, Snell called epistêmê the theoretical side of a practical ability, for it directs the repeatable activity of an expertise.Footnote 8 Conversely, technê is epistêmê of a determinate practical subject matter, applied so as to produce concrete results (Ion 537d–e, 538b4‒6, Tht. 146d–e). The Visitor invokes this conception when he contrasts the person who has musical technê and knows with the unmusical person, who does not understand, μὴ συνιείς (Soph. 253b1‒3).
The Visitor at four other places speaks as though the sophist does have epistêmê. First, he pins down ‘noble sophistry’ as a kind of teaching (229b‒231b). Successful teaching implies knowledge. Second, the Visitor asks, what ‘if someone should say that he knows how, ἐπίστασθαι, not to speak or contradict, but by one expertise to make and do all things?’ (233d9‒10). ἀλλά contrasts this hypothetical assertion of universal know-how to a claim already made. That claim was made at 232b, that the sophist has expertise in contradicting. Third, in the Statesman, stating that after the sophist it is necessary to examine the statesman, the Visitor asks ‘whether they should posit’, θετέον, that ‘this one also’, καὶ τοῦτον—that is, the statesman—is ‘one of those who have epistêmê’ (Plt. 258b2‒5). καὶ τοῦτον implies that they had considered the former one too, the sophist, to have epistêmê.Footnote 9 Fourth, as we noted, the Visitor compares the sophist to sculptors and painters of large works (235e5‒6). These artists alter proportions of their subjects so that the parts will appear correctly proportioned to viewers at a distance. The Visitor says that these artists ‘say goodbye to truth’, χαίρειν τὸ ἀληθὲς ἐάσαντες (236a4), or (more idiomatically) ‘pay no heed to’. This idiom suggests that these artists have some cognition of the true proportions, which they choose not to apply. They know a field of design principles so as to produce proportions ‘as is fitting for appearance’ to people from whose position ‘an accurate portrayal will not be perceived as accurate’.Footnote 10 For the analogy to work, the sophist too needs to invent images knowing that they look like their originals.
The Visitor's descriptions of the sophist as sorcerer, γόης (234c5, 235a1, 235a8, 241b7, Plt. 291c3, 303c4), and conjuror, θαυματοποιός (Soph. 235b5), suppose that the sophist imitates by intent. Dividing the technê of imitating, μιμητική, into two, the Visitor assigns the sophist the technê of ‘producing appearances’, τέχνην … φανταστικήν (236c4). Having a technê, the sophist should have an epistêmê analogous to that of these artists and magicians. As Rosen pointed out ([n. 6], 176), to treat the sophist's representations as intentional ‘means that the sophist can see enough of the “original” or intrinsically true situation to know that his claims to knowledge are false’. The Visitor's stipulation that sophists imitate but do not know (267c–e) undercuts his own artist analogy. I suspect again that the solution is that the sophist's ignorance of a given subject area is not ignorance of everything.
As the Visitor seeks to define sophistry, he assimilates it to divination and rhetoric, which in turn he says count as epistêmê and/or technê. The Visitor includes sophistry under the technê of the magician, which is associated with epistêmê of divination (μαντική, Plt. 290c). He folds sophistry into rhetoric in the Sophist when in his first definition he fixes a ‘persuasion-making technê’ of catching humans. This comprises subskills of persuasion, with the sophist's art falling into the part of persuasion that is plied ‘in private’ (222c5‒d5). In other dialogues, magic falls within the mantic technê (Symp. 203a1), and Eros is magician, sophist and philosophizer (203d7‒8). As does noble sophistry (Soph. 230e‒231b), the mantic technê (Cra. 405a7‒b4) and magic (Resp. 413d7) help to purge souls. With sophistry's being a kind of magic, and magic a species of the technê/epistêmê of divination, sophistry turns out to be a technê and epistêmê. Although these features do not recur in the final definition, each shows a side of the sophist that Theaetetus and the Visitor recognized, and none of them is shown as false.Footnote 11 In the Statesman, persuasion is worked by rhetoric, itself an epistêmê (304a1, 304c10‒d6). Although rhetoric needs to be directed by the ruler's epistêmê if it is to persuade the citizens to be just (304a1‒2, 304e1), sophists who are not directed by the rulers yet have technê (291c4). We cannot deny that the Visitor treats sophistry as an epistêmê.
Against my case, however, one could suppose that Plato uses ‘loose terminology’ when he applies epistêmê words to non-philosophers (Moss [n. 1], 191). Or, given the Republic's cleavage between objects of doxa and objects of epistêmê, one could with Apelt take the sophist's epistêmê to be posited ironically.Footnote 12 These moves aim to insulate TW epistemology against possible counterexamples. I make two rejoinders. First, it begs the question to assume that theory in other dialogues controls the Visitor dialogues. Second, one has to explain away too many passages. All through the corpus we encounter epistêmê of things in our world, from craftsmen's epistêmê in the Apology (22d) to epistêmê of the countryside in the Laws (763b2). Socrates does not stick with a restricted scope of epistêmê even throughout the Republic: he ascribes epistêmê to Guardians in training (540a6), flute players (602a1), and other craftspeople (424b‒c) who have not studied dialectic and thus do not have epistêmê of Forms. When the Visitor asks ‘how could someone without epistêmê make a sound objection against the person with epistêmê?’ (Soph. 233a5‒6), one supposes that the sophist's interlocutor in most cases is not a dialectician. Fine notes that we should not discount uses of epistêmê and doxa outside of theoretical passages, since ‘[h]ow Plato uses the terms when he is not theorizing about them provides some guidance at least about what he takes the concepts … to be … and, in turn, imposes constraints … on his conception of them’.Footnote 13 Non-philosophers’ epistêmê is insufficient for happiness, not because it is not epistêmê but because it is not ‘of’ the highest goods.
In the Gorgias, rhetoric and sophistry are not expertise because they lack knowledge of the nature of what they work on (463b‒465e). Picking up Socrates’ criticism, Lesley Brown argues that the Visitor's analysis is simply wrong, and ‘Plato cannot have intended the reader to think that the sophist has a technê’. Brown contends that sophistry lacks the Platonic requirements for a technê—namely, a unique goal, reasoned procedures and single subject matter—and that not all the Visitor's dichotomies are properly divided, because the sophist is not a genuine kind.Footnote 14
I do not find that the ‘authorial voice’ signals rejection of the Visitor's treatment of sophistry as a technê. To Socrates’ question at the beginning of the dialogue, the Visitor answers that his fellow Eleatics thought that sophist, statesman and philosopher are three kinds, γένη (217a7‒b2). He goes on to identify the γένος of the sophist as the subject of the ensuing investigation (218d4‒5). By choosing the angler as a model of sophist and by asking Theaetetus whether the angler is an expert, the Visitor introduces the notion that the sophist has a technê (218e4‒219a7). The sophist's technê is reaffirmed (for example 236c4, 240c–d, 241b7, 264d6) and remains at the close; from 265a5 τέχνη stands behind the –ική adjectives of the final definition, among which δοξαστικῆς (268c9), ‘able to produce doxai’, is restated. The sophist has a ‘proper nature’, οἰκείαν φύσιν (264e3‒265a1), from which it follows that ‘sophist’ is supposed to be a kind. Sophistry is a technê in the Statesman (291c4).
Outside the Visitor dialogues too, sophist is a kind and has a technê. Socrates speaks of the ‘kind’ of sophists (Cra. 398e2, Ti. 19e2), and he considers antilogic, which lies at the core of the sophist's expertise, a technê (Resp. 454a2, Phdr. 261c10–d7). Aristotle allows that πειραστικὴ ἐπιστήμη, ‘knowledge of putting people to the test’, may be had even by ‘someone who does not know, so that it is clear that peirastic is epistêmê of no defined subject’, οὐδενὸς ὡρισμένου (Soph. el. 172a28). Peirastic is like sophistry's elenctic skill in being a know-how that cuts across subject areas. Aristotle speaks of sophistical arguments as a genos that the sophist must study, of the sophist as having a technê (Soph. el. 165a27‒37), and of eristic, part of antilogic in the Visitor's division (Soph. 225c9), as a technê (Soph. el. 183b36‒184a4).
The objection lodged by Brown and others, however, is not that the Visitor does not consider the sophist to belong to a kind and have a technê, but that we can see from descriptions of kind and technê in other dialogues that the Visitor is wrong. Again we have the contentious assumption that Socrates’ words in one dialogue express authorial views that undercut views of a different leading interlocutor in a different (and presumably later) dialogue. Why can we not have ‘a revision in Plato's own thinking’ (Beere [n. 10], 154)? In the Sophist, the Visitor voices the historic discoveries that saying is more than naming (Soph. 262c–d) and that false statement is possible on a right understanding of ‘not being’ (Soph. 237a). As Brown herself has noted, he also makes the ‘path-breaking … move … to attempt to give a formula which delimits everything that is’.Footnote 15 I find it strange to suppose that Plato puts path-breaking material in the Visitor's mouth and saddles him with assumptions about technê that overthrow both dialogues’ projects. I say ‘both’ because, on Brown's principle that each professional kind is biconditional with one distinctive technê or epistêmê ([n. 14], 162‒4, 167), statesmanship too is problematized as technê or epistêmê. Socrates even undercuts that principle in the Republic when he allows that someone may practice more than one technê, even if not optimally (370b4‒5). Moreover, if TW is true, the statesman's required virtues (Plt. 294a8, 294e10, 296c10, 296e3‒4, 297a–b, 301d1‒2) seem attainable only by a philosopher, since they must be based on knowledge, not on opinion (300c–e, 301b). The Statesman identifies no knowledge or expertise that statesmanship has but philosophy lacks; at most, statesmanship directs people while other theoretical arts such as calculation do not (259e‒260c). Since the Visitor admits that sophistry and statesmanship are ‘kinds’ hard to distinguish from philosophy (Soph. 217b1‒4), yet persists in treating them as technê/epistêmê, we cannot show that Plato prompts us to deny them the status of expertise. I suspect that Plato is still pushing his vision of philosopher-statesmen (cf. Resp. 473c11‒d6, Ep. 7 326a‒b), according to which statesmanship must be an epistêmê. The difference in the Visitor dialogues is that this vision is more accommodated to daily life than in the TW dialogues. If even sophists can have some epistêmê, BP is overcome, and a state guided by knowing rulers and built by knowing followers may be possible.
Barney summarizes the Socratic conception of technê as ‘a specialised kind of knowledge that leads to reliable practical success and provides some benefit’.Footnote 16 Socrates in the Gorgias and elsewhere lays out the following requirements for an undertaking (ἐπιτήδευμα, Grg. 463a6) to qualify as a technê:
(1) Knowledge. If one has technê, one can give an account of the nature of its object and procedures and of the cause of the effect (Grg. 464b‒465a, 500a–b, 501a).
(2) Distinctness. A technê or epistêmê is defined by a proper subject area (μάθημα or πρᾶγμα) and product (ἔργον, implied at Grg. 453e‒454a, explicit in Chrm. 165c‒166a, Ion 537c–d).
(3) Teleology. The undertaking should be ordered toward a goal (Grg. 503e‒504a).
(4) Benefit. The undertaking should benefit the practitioner and objects/clients (Grg. 511e‒512a; cf. Resp. 341d).
(5) Reliability. A technê does not err (Resp. 341e‒342b; cf. Chrm. 171b‒172a), although a practitioner who works on embodied objects may not secure benefit every time (Chrm. 164b‒c).
Requirement (1) is not necessary for (5), for a ‘routine’, τριβή, not based on knowledge can be plied the same way every time as long as the practitioner remembers the procedure (Grg. 501a).
For his part, the Visitor does not set forth a theory of technê, although he adduces many crafts as examples. What he does say is consistent with (3) and (5). He weakens (2), for although he says that technai and epistêmai get their names from the ergon, work or function (Soph. 218c2; cf. 221b2), and from the subject over which they are set (ἐπί τῳ, Soph. 257c10‒d1; cf. Plt. 284a5), and that there can be no contamination among technai (Plt. 268a), he does not stipulate that every ergon must be the product of one and only one technê. In addition, the Visitor does not accept (1). On the picture we get in the Republic, (1) entails that only someone who knows intelligibles will have technê, since to give an account of the nature requires knowledge of the Form (cf. Resp. 476b6‒7 with 490b1‒3). Because only dialectic attempts to grasp fully the being of each thing, only the dialectician would seem able to have technai (Resp. 533a8‒c8, 534b3‒4, Phdr. 277b‒c). Moreover, on TW, to achieve a benefit, not by knack and chance but by craft and reliably, the practitioner must assess benefit, and that requires knowledge of good and evil—again, knowledge proper to the dialectician alone (Resp. 534b‒c).Footnote 17 Hence, BP. The Visitor on the other hand admits technai based on knowledge of sensibles, such as the arts of making things pleasing (Soph. 223a1) or beating time for rowers (Plt. 260e2; cf. selling, Soph. 224 and Plt. 260c). He can admit them because, as we shall see, he does not hold TW epistemology; people can know without knowing dialectic. Since we do not know that earlier dialogues control, we cannot conclude that Plato means us to think the Visitor's treatment of technê mistaken.
Consider too that (2) is not rigorously carried through in Plato. Brown problematizes her own critique when she observes that it is not clear in Plato by what method a technê is to be defined or ‘what role subject-matter has in the delineation of a technê’ ([n. 14], 168). Practitioners of different arts can share a given subskill, as philosopher and sophist can use image-making and antilogic, and they can produce some of the same outcomes. Even Eros and Hades, says Socrates, are both sophist and philosopher (Symp. 203d7‒8; Cra. 403e‒404a). As we saw, Socrates puts orators and sophists in the same kind in the Cratylus (398e2), and in the Theaetetus he grants orators a technê by which they can persuade people to form judgements (δοξάζειν) about what the orators wish (201a8‒b6). Sophists do the same, for refutation can persuade (Soph. 259a2‒3).
Trickier is the question: does the Visitor's account admit (4), namely that sophistry produces benefit? We might think that, if sophistry does not benefit, it is not a technê. The first three definitions put money-making under the sophist's technê. Money-making is not named in the final definition, but it is nowhere rejected; the Visitor's bifurcation of arts into acquisitive and productive does not entail that producers do not make money. The sophist may benefit himself at least in that way; even Socrates considers wealth as such a good (Ap. 30b, Resp. 357c). Moreover, the noble sophist benefits himself if he improves his associates. This raises the question: does sophistry benefit others? Observing that the sophist is described as an ‘ironical’ or ‘insincere imitator’ (268a8) for concealing the ignorance he fears he has, Robinson concludes that he acts from ‘bad faith’ and therefore that Socrates’ brand of elenctic activities cannot form part of sophistry as defined here.Footnote 18 Arguing that ‘sophistry noble in lineage’ (231b8) of the sixth definition fits a Socratic philosopher more than a sophist, Notomi holds that the sixth definition's content is excluded from the final definition by the method of division.Footnote 19 On these accounts, ‘noble sophistry’ will fall outside the final definition, and thus sophistic refutation will not benefit in the way in which Socratic refutation does.
In my view, the sixth definition does contribute to the final definition of the sophist. ‘Noble sophistry’ resembles Socrates’ enterprise but is not identical to it, for it is repeatedly defined as professional teaching, while Socrates admits only rarely to ‘informing’ someone (for example Ap. 35c2, La. 195a7).Footnote 20 ‘Noble in lineage’ marks out this elenctic practice as a privileged species of sophistry. No term in the final definition debars elenctic sophistry from doing its designated work, not even ‘insincere’, for refuters who conceal their ignorance may by exposing contradictions disabuse others of false conceits of knowledge. That work, forcing someone to contradict himself, remains in the final definition (268b4‒5; ἐναντιοποιολογικῆς, 268c8), but ‘eristic’ from the fifth definition does not. It is not established, then, pace Zaks, that sophistry cannot include a ‘noble’ kind that benefits others as well as the sophist.Footnote 21 Against Notomi, the contribution of noble sophistry to cleansing (230d3) places it within ‘productive’ technê of the final division, because, as Zaks has showed, cleansing is a first step in production.Footnote 22 On the Visitor's account, the sophist's technê stands.Footnote 23
From what Platonic interlocutors say, we may identify the sophist's expertise as the skill of persuading uncritical people to form beliefs about all things, including the belief that the sophist is just and wise in a domain (Soph. 267c‒268c, Hp. mi. 363c‒d). While philosophers can be viewed as madmen (Soph. 216d2), sophists, likened to magicians and wonder-workers, succeed in winning over many with their skilful and charming (234b1) imitations. Sophists may well do better than philosophers at (5) above, that is, securing an outcome.
Like peirastic epistêmê, sophistry produces its product, doxai based on resemblances, across subject areas. It is not a first-order expertise. It is a second-order expertise about how to manipulate propositions about things or systems. The sophist's technê influences our souls to form false judgements (240d1‒4). The sophist ‘produces judgements, and he trains us in the art of persuading others to accept our judgements’ (Rosen [n. 6], 310). Socrates’ technê of midwifery is a second-order expertise, producing cognitive effects by working with people's doxai on a range of subjects. Plato admits second-order technai, which are not defined by a first-order subject area and product but rather by their capacity to engender and examine doxai about first-order domains. As knowledge of producing and using doxai, sophistry is a second-order technê.
In order to create doxa through exploiting contradictions by the technê of antilogic (ascribed to the sophist from the Fifth Definition, 225b‒233b, all the way to ἐναντιοποιολογικῆς, ‘contrary-speech-producing [expertise]’ [White], 268c8), the sophist needs knowledge of equivocity of words and equipollent arguments. The Visitor explicitly contrasts lawyers’ antilogic, practised ‘at random and without technê’ (225c1), with the sophist's antilogic wielded with technê (ἔντεχνον, 225c7). Just as a conjuror, θαυματοποιός, could explain how he performs his tricks, so the sophist, whom the Visitor puts into the kind of conjurors (235b5), should be able to give an explanatory account of how he can form and implant doxai. He has epistêmê, know-how, to clear away prior resistant doxai through antilogic (cf. ‘forcing the interlocutor to contradict himself’, 268b4‒5), to imitate good and true things such as justice and virtue (267c2‒3), and to teach others to dispute about the same (232b8‒9).
III. EPISTÊMÊ IN THE VISITOR DIALOGUES
Now we need to probe what follows from the sophist's having epistêmê of formulating doxai. The Visitor and Theaetetus agree on many things about epistêmê that are affirmed by Socrates in earlier dialogues. Epistêmê is a:
• power, δύναμις, Soph. 248c–d; Plt. 261d1
• state or condition, πάθημα, implicit at Soph. 228e6, where ignorance is this
• concomitant of γνῶσις, ‘knowledge’, Soph. 248c–d, 253b3
• body of knowledge that is learned, Soph. 257c10–d1
• resident of the top of the cognitive hierarchy, along with phronêsis and nous, ‘understanding and intellect’, Soph. 249c7, and superior to doxa, Soph. 267e1‒3
• cognitive grasp of kinds, Soph. 253c‒e, and of what we would call immanent universals, including actions denominated by verbs, Soph. 226b8‒9
Against the backdrop of his discussions of false doxa, the Visitor leaves it unstated but apparently axiomatic that epistêmê cannot be false. Although he does not voice the Socratic requirement that one with epistêmê give an account of what she knows (Phd. 76b5‒6, Symp. 202a5‒7), the Visitor's search for accounts of things under investigation are consistent with it.
On the other hand, the Visitor's account of epistêmê is not entangled in BP raised by many students of TW dialogues. I cannot say whether Plato intended to defuse BP; the characters in TW dialogues do not bring it up, so that Jessica Moss can infer that ‘Plato himself evidently thinks it no problem at all’ ([n. 1], 123). Sometime after the Republic, however, Plato confronts a version of BP. Parmenides says that, if one posits that Forms exist ‘themselves by themselves’ (Prm. 133a9), even the gods’ epistêmê, which is the ‘most accurate’, could not know us (134d9‒e1). In the Philebus, Socrates and Protarchus agree that technai and epistêmai about changeable things are necessary ‘if any of us is going to find his way home’ (62a–b). Some technai use doxai about changeable things (58e5–59a8). Changeables do not ground ‘the most accurate truth’ (59a11‒b1), and they do not supply to epistêmê ‘the most true’ object (59b7‒8). Socrates’ qualifiers leave room for non-superlative truth about changeables.
One way to avoid BP is to supply an ontology that avoids the epistemological consequences that stir up BP. The Visitor and Theaetetus introduce such an ontology by admitting not-being into Being (Soph. 258c3‒4; cf. ‘We forced not being to be’, Plt. 284b8). Their definition of ‘beings’ as things that have power, δύναμις, admits bodies as well as intelligibles (Soph. 247d‒248c), changeable as well as unchangeable things (249d3‒4), into ‘being’.Footnote 24 This removes the ontological gap in TW dialogues between that which is fully ‘being’ and that which ‘is and is not’ (Resp. 477a3‒7). With sensibles and their accidents admitted into Being, craftsmen can have epistêmê, and philosophers can apply epistêmê to city affairs. Although the Visitor does not explain how particulars are related to kinds, his move to allow them to be objects of epistêmê is consistent both with universals’ being immanent and with particulars’ being beings.Footnote 25 Epistêmê of number, for example, can be set over numbers by themselves and numbers in sensibles (Plt. 299e1‒3). The epistêmê of kingship grounds rulers’ governance of the city by technê (Plt. 284c1‒3, 297a–b, 301d1‒2), not possible if epistêmê cognizes only Forms. The new ontology moreover allows sophistry to escape the stock interdiction against a technê of not-being (cf. Sext. Emp. Math. 1.265), for similitudes are not not-being.
Ex altera parte, ‘beings’ can now be objects of doxa, something problematic for TW epistemology. Timaeus refused to allow a reasoned account of the object of doxa (28a1‒3). The Visitor, on the other hand, presents ‘Theaetetus sits’ as a true account. It expresses a true doxa because Theaetetus’ sitting qualifies as ‘being’. The account ‘states the things that are, as’ or ‘that they are’, τὰ ὄντα ὡς ἔστιν (Soph. 263b4). Because separation between Being and Becoming, maintained by the Friends of the Forms (χωρίς, Soph. 248a7) and in TW dialogues, is no longer on the table, cognitive faculties are no longer distinguished by the ontological status of their objects. In the Visitor's analysis of knowledge, craft and the city, BP does not arise. The fact that even the sophist has some knowledge helps us see this.
IV. CRAFT KNOWLEDGE
The Visitor does not resurrect the Craft Analogy of virtue as presented in the Socratic dialogues, for, setting courage and moderation in antithesis in the Statesman (306‒11), he denies the Unity of Virtue and Virtue is Knowledge theses. He calls for knowledge of justice and virtue at the end of the Sophist, but he does not argue that virtue is knowledge. For virtue one needs breeding, character, right government and other things mentioned in middle-period dialogues. As in early dialogues, however, Plato focusses on the notion of epistêmê as the cognitive ground of a craft, and he retains the Craft Analogy of politics. In the city that the Visitor describes, rulers, like doctors or sea captains, must combine technê with doxai to apply their epistêmê to embodied things (Plt. 300c9‒d1, 309c). As in early dialogues, where even poetry was a technê (Ion 532c‒d), there are not now theoretical barriers to non-philosophers’ technê and epistêmê. Although the definition of the statesman was sought mainly for practice in dialectic (Plt. 285–7), and few will acquire rulers’ epistêmê (292e‒293a, 297b–c), one wonders whether with this more confident picture of epistêmê in the state Plato hopes to spur change. As Hathaway said, ‘Plato seems to flirt, even in late dialogues, with the to him tantalizing possibility of an architectonic craft-knowledge that fits all our actions and other crafts into a system of coordinated means to a determinate end …’Footnote 26 In the Laws, non-philosophers have epistêmai (639b, 689b2, 901d6, 968e2). As we saw in the Philebus, Socrates admits inexact epistêmai of things that come to be and pass away. That which had been agreed about epistêmê in the Visitor dialogues holds.
In late Plato, epistêmê is ‘of’ kinds or universals, the ontological status of which is not clarified but which are not separated from embodied things. It produces results reliably, although failure and imprecision may attend occasions of its employment. It cannot be false. Plato's willingness to allow an epistêmê even to the sophist shows that epistêmê is not now only of Forms. Thus, no longer mysterious as it was in dialogues that denied epistêmê of sensibles, craftsmen's ‘knowledge how to’ forms part of what the city needs for a good life.
In Part II, I suggested that a sophist could benefit others. That seems possible when we consider that in the Statesman ‘that part of rhetoric which is in partnership with kingship persuades people of what is just’, for the ruler's epistêmê ‘should control the [epistêmê] which is capable of persuading’, that is, rhetoric (Plt. 304a1‒2, 304c7‒d3). Like other technicians (cf. Chrm. 171d‒175a, Euthyd. 288e‒290d) and like the orator, could not a sophist ‘of noble lineage’ use the elenchus for benefit if directed by the ruler's epistêmê, or if like Eros and Hades he were also a philosopher? None of the terms in the final definition (Soph. 268c8‒d2) entails harm-doing. By shifting from the art of acquiring to the art of making in the Sixth Definition, the Visitor turns the spotlight on value added. Even Socrates in the Phaedrus (266‒9) allows that sophists know things about their craft by which they achieve its ends. If the sophist learns (Resp. 493b1, 493b5) what is reputed in a rightly governed city to be just, he might add value by disputing about weighty matters (Soph. 232c) so as to enchant hearers with ‘noble doctrines’, as poets can do with hymns (Leg. 664b4‒6).
At this point in his career, Plato is working on the relation of language to reality. ‘Sophist’ appears nowhere in the Philebus and only once in the Laws, of atheists (908d7). Plato is no longer making sophistry a target. I suspect that one reason is because Plato recognizes that in our embodied state we can have craft epistêmê, but epistêmê of axiological realities like the Good remains an ideal. The necessity to show incorporeal things by logos (Plt. 285e‒286a, 287a3) problematizes the distance between philosopher and sophist.Footnote 27 Hard to distinguish from each other, philosopher and sophist both grapple with the slippage inherent in logos.
