Plato’s Sixth Definition of the Sophist
In Sophist 230B–231E, the Stranger describes a “noble” form of sophistry that resembles Socratic questioning: it exposes false confidence and clears the soul for learning. Yet Plato distinguishes this purifying refutation from combative questioning that merely imitates wisdom or seeks victory in argument.
Reader · Edited What are Plato’s six definitions of the Sophist?
Socrates The passage at Sophist 230B–231E is the culmination of the dialogue’s first six attempts to define the sophist. The Stranger has described him as a paid hunter of wealthy young men, a merchant and retailer of intellectual goods, a seller of his own instruction, a competitor in verbal disputes, and finally a purifier of souls.
The sixth definition is the surprising one. The Stranger describes cross-examination as a kind of intellectual cleansing: it exposes a person’s false confidence in his own wisdom and removes opinions that obstruct learning. In that respect, the activity resembles Socratic questioning more than the usual image of the sophist. The Stranger even hesitates to call its practitioners sophists, worried that the name would give them too much honor; he compares the resemblance to that between a wolf and a dog—similar in appearance, but radically different in character. (atlas.perseus.tufts.edu)
The important distinction is therefore not simply between people who ask questions and people who do not. It is between two purposes: questioning that purifies the soul and makes learning possible, and questioning that exploits verbal conflict or creates the appearance of wisdom. Plato’s irony is that both can look similar from the outside. The Stranger provisionally calls the first practice “noble sophistry,” while admitting that the classification is disputed. (atlas.perseus.tufts.edu)
This prepares the next movement of the dialogue. At 231C–E, the Stranger gathers the multiple definitions together, and shortly afterward asks why the sophist has appeared as so many different things. The problem is that these definitions have not yet identified the single feature that unifies them. The later answer will be imitation: the sophist seems wise in many subjects because he can reproduce the appearance of genuine expertise without possessing the underlying knowledge. That problem leads Plato into the deeper investigations of appearance, falsehood, and “not-being.” (plato.stanford.edu)
So the passage does two things at once: it completes the initial hunt for the sophist, and it complicates the hunt by showing that a genuine philosopher—or at least a Socratic examiner—may be mistaken for one. The question it leaves us with is whether intellectual criticism is aimed at winning an argument, displaying superiority, or freeing someone from an obstacle to understanding.
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