How would you know someone is being a "sophist"?

[sidetrack]

Recently I posted a question that I oddly didn’t get any replies to here

forums.catholic-questions.org/showthread.php?t=875800

onto here

answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20140520131631AAfJMSA

b/c it felt important to me.

I had some interesting responses and I’ll admit some I didn’t understand .

This one got my attention for call

Word games. Forgiveness must be accepted. Refusing it makes the sin unforgivable. Cut through the sophistry and deal with what forgiveness is and isn’t.

This has nothing to do with omni-this or omni-that. Dont’ be so literal.

Ah .Those times when you do something not good quality well done,which you don’t understand how it was done

I responded

-You think I’m being literal?.How?.Isn’t it important to factor in how I’m talking about beings who can do anything ?. -Could you please tell me how I’m being a sophist?. Part of me feel that I …gotta have a common understanding w/you on what forgiveness is/means.

From little I know Sophist originally meant a kind of travelling philosopher sect which would travel thru Greece serving on juries and generally being relativists with little concern for any real validity which law had and were big on attention-grabbing methods like rhetoric.Socrates and Plato didn’t like them for their disregard for reason.

Even if I did do that,can anyone explain when and how would you know that someone is being a sophist?.

 

[phil_at_dayboro]

I have no answer at all… But I think it is a sophisticated intelligent question that is worth following,

 

[DoubtingPeter]

Guess there’s not many philosophers on the forums…

soph·ist
ˈsäfist/Submit
noun

a paid teacher of philosophy and rhetoric in ancient Greece, associated in popular thought with moral skepticism and specious reasoning.

a person who reasons with clever but fallacious arguments.

 

[Petaro]

I believe it has deteriorated to a derogatory term for overly subtle or “sophisticated” arguments that use complex framework of reasonings that are designed to decieve.
It is similar to Jesuitical casuistry both words innocent in themselves. Jesuitical just meaning of the Jesuits or their form of reasoned arguments; with casuistry being a form of reasoning from examples to a general principle; but again deteriorating to infer a flawed over subtle argumentation set to deceive.

 

[NekoNecro]

A sophist these days is basically anyone who has a better argument in a debate than a religious devotee, but whom the religious follower cannot submit and agree with on principle.

You’ll know someones a Sophist when they have a better argument than you, it’s just an insult these days but oddly complimentary at the same time, since you’re acknowledging the “Sophist” has a better and more compelling case than yourself.

 

[Charlemagne_III]

I’ll just cut to the chase.

A sophist is someone who resists the truth even when it slaps him in the face.

 

[St_Francis]

A sophist is someone who uses logical fallacies or other poor forms of debate to reach a conclusion.

Your problem with your original question is that you are saying the only situations which can exist are 1. that either the Holy Spirit can forgive everything, including a final rejection of forgiveness, or 2. He can’t forgive everything.

You are leaving out that man has some (name removed by moderator)ut into the situation–we have free will, after all. If the Holy Spirit sends us forgiveness but we *refuse *the forgiveness, then God accepts that refusal.

If the forgiveness is refused at the end of life, and a person dies in a state of refusal, nothing more can be done because the person is dead: his soul has entered into a state of eternity where things are unchanging, and thus the person is unable to change uis mind as he was when he was still living.

 

[PseuTonym]

can anyone explain when and how would you know that someone is being a sophist?

I can give an example of why you might strongly suspect that some posts in some thread (that all come from the same messenger) provide an example of sophistry. Maintaining a strong dividing line between message and messenger, I wouldn’t even consider what is required to label the messenger as a sophist. However, I wouldn’t consider each separate post in isolation. I would consider the separate posts within a single thread and by a single messenger as collectively forming one message.

Here’s my example:

1. At least one of the posts gives the strong impression of attempting to invoke some principle, and of relying upon the principle to reach some conclusion.
2. Efforts to elicit information about the principle itself are unsuccessful efforts. It’s up to readers to guess for themselves, filling in the details of what was really an outline of a project for constructing an argument that was never presented in any detail.
3. When somebody starts from evidently true premises, applies what seems to be the principle, and reaches evidently false conclusions, then still no information about the principle is provided by the person who used it in an effort to persuade everybody that a particular conclusion is true. Instead, it is insisted that the principle was misapplied or misunderstood, or the person who applied it is subjected to personal ridicule. However, no information about the principle is provided to allow an independent judge to confirm that, yes, the principle was misapplied, or the principle was misunderstood by the person who attempted to demonstrate that the principle is unreliable.
4. There is an explicit denial – by the messenger who invoked the principle in an effort to reach a true conclusion – that the issue is the reliability of a principle. Instead, it is asserted that the attempt to demonstrate that the principle is unreliable was actually merely an analogy or comparison. It is also asserted that the allegedly analogy isn’t truly an analogy or isn’t a good analogy, or that the alleged comparison isn’t a good comparison.