A Rhetorical Research On Sophism

Sophism is a common linguistic phenomenon in verbal communication. It started in ancient Greece and ancient China. Sophism was first created as a method in argument. In order to win the argument, speech contestants tried to prove their own viewpoints from a negative angle. However, sophism was later employed as a tool to retort the well-accepted, correct ideas and defend the wrong views. They were strongly opposed by those who believed in facts rather than mere argument, like Socrates and Plato, and were labeled as "sophists" and their skills and techniques of argumentation "sophism". Ever since then, the specious argument through which the truth value of a certain proposition is either overthrown or established by means of false evidence or questionable logic, has been labeled as "sophism" and the way to establish such a false conclusion is thought to be sophistry.There are many studies on sophism. Some researchers probed the thinking mechanism of sophism from a philosophical perspective. Philosophical research has been done on the thinking pattern of sophistry. However, it appears that there are seldom studies conducted from the linguistic perspective. Sophism, in essence, is the use of language in spite of its aims or the thought behind it. The author thinks that the present research conducted from linguistic perspective will bring out fresh understanding of sophism. In addition, this thesis will take sophism as a linguistic phenomenon directly and such a direct research may be of some help for further study on sophismThe present research, from a pragmatic perspective, will investigate the rhetorical use of languages in sophism and we will probe its linguistic mechanism and its pertinent cognitive, social and cultural elements.