IGNORANCE, SHAME AND LOVE OF TRUTH: DIAGNOSING THE SOPHIST'S ERROR IN PLATO'S <em>SOPHIST</em>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the past several decades, philosophers have shown substantial interest in Plato’s dialogue the Sophist. Much of this interest has focused on the sections of the dialogue which provide an account of being and not-being, and of true and false speech. The sixth definition of the sophist, however, which is developed at 226b–231e, has received less attention. Moreover, there have been even fewer sustained attempts to connect the sixth definition of the sophist to the final definition of the sophist given at the end of the dialogue. According to the sixth definition, the sophist is a soul-cleanser, and his expertise lies in refuting people in order to cleanse them of a false belief in their own wisdom. It is the thesis of this paper that the sixth definition sheds important light on the final definition. More specifically, the sixth definition helps us to grasp more precisely the nature and cause of the sophist’s error—namely, that the sophist has a disguised disregard for the truth, and this disregard is rooted in the sophist’s concern for protecting his own status as one who is thought to be a wise person. Understanding the sophist’s error enables us not only to grasp a key part of the dialogue’s final account of the sophist, but also to appreciate more fully the dialogue’s subtle portrayal of the attitudes and emotions involved in the search for truth. In particular, the sixth definition helps us to see how the sophist forms a kind of exception to the principle, laid down at 228c, that “no soul is willingly ignorant of anything.” The sophist is willingly ignorant,
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.041 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".