sophistry

Noun

Meaning

The art or process of reasoning; logic.

The practice of a sophist; fallacious reasoning; reasoning sound in appearance only.

Synonyms

Antonyms

Hypernyms

Phrases with the word

Examples

Abuse of words has been the great instrument of sophistry and chicanery, of party, faction, and division of society. John Adams

Fire is to represent truth because it destroys all sophistry and lies; and the mask is for lying and falsehood which conceal truth. Leonardo da Vinci

It took the whole of Creation To produce my foot, my each feather: Now I hold Creation in my foot. Or fly up, and revolve it all slowly – I kill where I please because it is all mine. There is no sophistry in my body: My manners are tearing off heads – The allotment of death. Ted Hughes

Sophistry is only fit to make men more conceited in their ignorance. John Locke

Second, and far more serious, are particular examples of a sophistry and sleight of hand in the misuse of metaphor, and more importantly a distortion of metaphysics in support of an evolutionary programme. Simon Conway Morris

In Sartre's style of argument, German metaphysics met French sophistry in a kind of European Coal and Steel Community producing nothing but rhetorical gas. Clive James

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