Chapter 35 Technique No. 7: Don’t take clever words as sophistry

Clever speech means responding skillfully, showing people's wit and intelligence with the ingenuity of their speech.The so-called sophistry refers to the use of correct reasoning methods on the surface and form, but in fact it violates the laws of logic and makes specious conclusions.It can be disguised as a coincidence, to confuse the real with the fake. History is full of anecdotes and anecdotes of rhetoric and sophistry.Take clever words as an example. "Warring.Chu Ce recorded such a story: A stranger entered the palace and offered the king of Chu the medicine of immortality.

The guard asked: Can this medicine be taken? Aliens said: Can. So, the guard took the medicine and took it. When the king of Chu heard about this, he was very angry, and immediately ordered the guards to be pulled out and killed. The guard argued to the king of Chu, saying: I asked this stranger beforehand, can I take this medicine, and he answered yes, so I took it.This shows that I am innocent, but the one who is guilty is the stranger who offered the medicine.Besides, what he offered was the medicine of immortality. I took the medicine of immortality. If the king kills me, the medicine of immortality will be fake.In this way, when the king killed the innocent person, he allowed the stranger to deceive the king.

When the king of Chu heard this, he thought about it and felt that the guard's words were reasonable, so he spared the guard's death. From this story, it can be seen that the reason why the guard was saved from being killed lay in his superb coping skills.His clever words grasped two key points: one is the dialogue with other people, and the “can” in the dialogue is a vague concept with multiple meanings. , the meaning of permission.But when the guard responded to the king of Chu's questioning, he put aside the former meaning and took the latter meaning, exonerating himself from the guilt.The second is that since the medicine offered by the foreigner is the medicine of immortality, the guard will not die if he eats it. If the King of Chu kills him, it means that the medicine is fake, and it also shows that the King of Chu was deceived.Who, even a tyrant, would openly kill innocents to prove he was cheated?In the face of such clever words, the king of Chu had no choice but to take the lead.

Another sophistry example. During the Warring States Period, the famous sophist Gongsun Long put forward the fallacy that a white horse is not a horse in his "On Jianbai". The shape is not suitable to follow, and the shape is inappropriate, and now it is considered to be nothing. The meaning of this passage of Gongsun Long is: saying white refers to color, saying horse refers to shape, color is not shape, shape is not color.Therefore, when talking about color, you should not talk about shape together, and when talking about shape, you should not talk about color together. It is wrong to talk about color and shape together to explain things.Therefore, there is no white horse in the world.

When Gongsun Long said this, it was obviously sophistry.Because the white horse we are talking about does not simply refer to color, nor does it simply refer to shape, but refers to the coexistence of color and shape.Of course, such sophistry is far from being a rhetoric. From the above two examples, we can see that the essence of eloquence is to use wit to solve problems skillfully and logically.The essence of sophistry is to use wit to cleverly cover up one's own fallacies that violate the laws of logic.We must distinguish eloquence from sophistry, and not mistake eloquence for sophistry, so that real eloquence can exert its special magical effect in speaking.