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sophism

noun

Etymology

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

  1. derived from σόφῐσμᾰ
  2. derived from sophisma
  3. derived from soffime
  4. inherited from sophim

Definitions

  1. The school of the sophists in antiquity

    The school of the sophists in antiquity; their beliefs and method of teaching philosophy and rhetoric.

    • 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.
    • Empiricism has its roots in Greek and Roman sophism and skepticism, and continues through Kant and American pragmatism.
    • 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. A flawed argument, superficially correct in its reasoning, usually designed to deceive.

    • The hope of improvement is a quality at once so strong and so excellent in the human mind, that I, for one, disapprove of any sophism—or, if you will, argument—that tends to repress it.

  3. An intentional fallacy.

  4. ›+ 3 more definitions

    1. Sophistic, fallacious reasoning or argumentation.

    2. Wisdom and knowledge.

    3. Archaic spelling of Sufism.

The neighborhood

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sense glosses and etymology drawn from English Wiktionary · source · CC-BY-SA