Plato's Sophist: A and a doctrine defense of negative expressions sense and truth Of of JASON XENAKIS

HAT is Plato doing in the Sophist besides trying to provide a definition of the perhaps "persuasive" notion of a sophist? How are we going to characterize his dicussions of "negative " expressions" ( 2 3 6e ff., 2 6 ob ff.), of communion If.), of logos (26oa ff.), of truth (262e ff.), and of thought (263d ff.)? I shall begin with an examination of the orthodox interpretation of the dialogue according to which Plato is here operating with Formism. ("Theory of Forms" is a question-begging and misleading title if Forms are reifications.) What is there in the Sophist, one may ask, which may have led Cornford and Ross, for example, to suppose that Plato is so working here? For obviously he does not do so in any overt fashion, as even the adherents of the Formistic interpretation recognize; in fact, the only time Formism appears to be (not used but) considered it is criticiz- ed (248a ff., cf. 2S2a). Is it perhaps the fact that Plato employs certain words which elsewhere in his writings form part of the language of Formism, such words as But clearly this is not a sufficient justification for so interpreting the Sophist. Surely we are not going to say that every time Plato uses these words he is necessarily talk- ing "about Forms." Nor are we going to say that a later use of them on his part commits him inevitably to Formism. Also, mere use of an ordinary word does not as such commit its user to a philosophical theory affiliated with it. But e180q and i8?a were such common words. Plato did not coin them. He merely gave them in some of his writings an extraordinary job; their ordinary meaning being, perhaps, primarily perceptual, but they also had a conceptual meaning (e.g. "kind"). And if Formism did not originate with him - after all the dialogues never present it as a novelty - he cannot be said even to have redefined old words, let alone to have coined new ones. At any rate he uses the words, in that second, ordinary sense, in as early a discussion as the discussion about piety - or holiness - in the Euthyphro (s d ff.). Everybody agrees that that discussion is not "ontological." See too, perhaps, Meno 72a ff., Th. I48d6, i8ic-d, and, without trying to beg the question, Soph. 22oe6 and 264c2, and also 2 2 8c which contains a "participation" word.

29 Further, nor is Plato signaling in any way that he is doing "ontology" with these words in the Sophist. For example, in contrast with Parmenides i 3Sbc (cf. Cra. 439c ff.), he is not saying that the independent, extra- mental existence of is a necessary presupposition of thought and discourse, but merely their "interconnection" (259e-6oa). Nor is he trying to prove the existence of e'L8-1or the existence of as objects. Instead, he is wondering, e.g., whether "combine" with one another. And that need not be "ontology." It could be incipient logic. He could be doing the same sort of thing he is doing in the uncontroversial Euthyphro, specifically in the passage i i e- i 2 in which Socrates says that piety - i.e. an an forms "part" of righteousness - or right- ness ; that is, to use modern jargon, that the former entails the latter but not vice versa. If we are going to maintain that the Communion discus- sion in the Sophist is an "ontological" discussion, why not maintain the same thing about the Euthyphro discussion? Both dialogues discuss the relation between certain and both use a perhaps physical vocabulary to express that relation - though the Sophist uses "non-physical" words as well. Yet surely neither dialogue raises any "ontological" questions about this relation, just as they refrain from any such questions about any of the terms of the relation, about the of motion, rest, piety, etc. When, for example, Plato says in Sophist 25" 5"a-cthat rest "partakes of, " but is not, sameness, he need not be taken to be intending a relation between two Entities, "the Form of Rest" and "the Form of Sameness"; he very well could be taken to be saying instead that, though "rest" and "sameness" go together ("rest is-identical-with itself," "rest is rest" - cf. the principle of identity), they are not synonyms ("rest" =A "sameness"). The "relational" vocabulary could be regarded rather as a logical tool for conceptual elucidation than as a set of terms purporting to indicate "ontological connections. " And a very Janus tool it is: it pertains to harmonies - or disharmonies - within a sentence (26i-3) as well as be- tween predicates - "rest", "motion"; it involves singular terms - "Theae- tetus" - as well as non-singular ones; it involves "nouns" and "verbs" as well as and 'taeoct; and so forth. Futhermore, the frequently used words yevoS and and perhaps some other words of the "relational" group, do not form part of the early, Formistic vocabulary, and yet Plato uses them here in the Sophist inter- changeably with words of that very vocabulary, as Cornford himself, among others, admits with reference to the former word. But this is significant, for unlike the "old" words, these "fresh" ones have no Formistic history, so that it requires an enormous assumption to construe 30