It contains arguments which are capable of bearing opposed meanings, and it has sections dealing with Good and Bad, Decent and Disgraceful, Just and Unjust, True and False, together with a number of untitled sections. " Dissoi Logoi (twofold arguments) is the name, taken from its first two words, that has been given to a tract which is attached to the end of the manuscript of Sextus Empiricus. ![]() Johnson-Sheehan, "Sophistic Rhetoric." Theorizing Composition: A Critical Sourcebook of Theory And Scholarship in Contemporary Composition Studies, ed. Rather-and this is the heart of dissoi logoi-at least one other perspective is always available to serve as an other to the stronger argument." Sophism assumes that the stronger logos, no matter how strong, will never completely overcome competing logoi and earn the title of absolute truth. Quite differently, Sophists acknowledge that one side of the argument might in a particular context represent the 'stronger' logos and others the 'weaker,' but this does not preclude a weaker logos from becoming the stronger in a different or future context. In contrast, Western culture's implicit assumption that argument is about truth or falsity urges one to assume that one side of the argument is true or more accurate and that other accounts are false or less accurate. "In essence, dissoi logoi posits that one side ( logos) of an argument defines the existence of the other, creating a rhetorical situation in which at least two logoi struggle for dominance.(Richard Lanham, A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, 2nd ed. It is from this accommodation to antithetical structure that Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence descends: we arrange social issues into diametrically opposed questions, arrange a dramatic display of their conflict, and (since the law cannot afford aporia as a conclusion to social disputes) accept the jury-audience's verdict as a defining truth, a precedent for future disputation." ![]() A form of this analytical technique has recently been revived under the name of 'Deconstruction.' Or, the parties could agree to accept one position as superior, even though it manifestly depended on human argument and not Divine Truth. Both sides depended, ultimately, on language and its imperfect correspondence to the 'outside world,' whatever one might think that world to be. ![]() Such an argumentative procedure could force any question into an Aporia by pointing out that each side was true within the terms that it had chosen to develop the argument.
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