I need to say, if this is not just an argument for but a demonstration of sophistry, you aren’t helping your case, seeing as you’re visibly grasping at straws.

It's not, mostly because I'm sincereposting here. In that, perhaps I'm being a shitty rhetorician, but I don't see the point of trying to do a form/content performance online. Also, the online medium doesn't allow for the kind of momentary opportunism that sophistry really thrives in. Hence why I originally mentioned it in the context of offline arguments/discussions, since online one is always communicating at a remove. I will however be lame and use ethos and cite some sources, rather than "visibly grasping at straws" in my reply.

The point that I have the most disagreement with you on is of course the most platonic...

It is permissive of being false, of “making the weaker argument the stronger” and so on. My position is that no such permissiveness is acceptable.

So, let's pause here. If by "weaker" and "stronger" you mean objectively or categorically, then that's just Platonism. I don't really want to go all in on an anti-Platonic debate, so if you're a Platonist let's just call it what it is and call this an impasse.

However, if you mean by "weaker" and "stronger" contingently determined categories, then I think we actually have common ground. In The Electronic Word Richard Lanham describes what he calls "The Q Question" - i.e. is a master of rhetoric a moral or "good" person. He suggests there are two defenses to this apparent problem (and by implication, the weaker/stronger slander).

1. Dodge the question and fall back on the idea of rhetoric as value neutral. This means that there are "good" and "bad" uses of rhetoric (i.e. one can support a "weaker" position and make it "stronger", etc.). Here's Lanham describing it as what he calls "The Weak Defense"

like Quintilian, we first deny the problem resolutely, and then construct something that I shall call "the Weak Defense." The Weak Defense argues that there are two kinds of rhetoric, good and bad. The good kind is used in good causes, the bad kind in bad causes. Our kind is the good kind; the bad kind is used by our opponents. This was Plato's solution, and Isocrates', and it has been enthusiastically embraced by humanists ever since.

So, in a nutshell, this is where you're positioning sophistry. It is essentially the "bad" kind of rhetoric that is ornamental, making the weaker stronger and fundamentally concerned with falsehood.

However, Lanham proposes an alternative, "The Strong Defense" that flips the ground. Basically, the very premise of a "weaker" or "stronger" rhetoric is constructed in a rhetorical space and thus is not a "truth" out there, but instead constantly being open to change and shifting positionalities. I'll cite Lanham again here, though I'll also give a tl;dr for folks below. The "No!" and "Yes!" are in reference to the Q Question - "Is a perfect orator a good man as well as a good orator"

It certainly explains why Quintilian, when he comes to address the advocate's dilemma in book 12, hides in another patch of up-market flummery. The law's answer to the "Q" question is generally taken to be "No!" And yet jurisprudence in the West from the Greeks onward has offered the opposite answer, a "Yes!" which I shall call "the Strong Defense," and which Samuel Johnson summarized with his usual absence of cant as, "Sir, you do not know it to be good or bad till the Judge determines it." The Strong Defense assumes that truth is determined by social dramas, some more formal than others but all man-made. Rhetoric in such a world is not ornamental but determinative, essentially creative. Truth once created in this way becomes referential, as in legal precedent. The court decides "what really happened" and we then measure against that. The Strong Defense implies a figure/ground shift between philosophy and rhetoric-in fact, as we shall see, a continued series of shifts. In its world, there is as much truth as we need, maybe more, but argument is open-ended, more like kiting checks than balancing books.

So, the sophistic position of the Strong Defense is that the weaker/stronger distinction literally is only determined after one engages in it. To put it in Lanham's terms, you have to make every argument for your sicko defendant even when you know he is guilty because if you cannot be proven wrong, then by the outcome you are not the "weaker" position. And indeed, in a real justice system, this would actually be the case (here's the point when we say death to AmeriKKKa all together and recognize that our system is nothing like the idealized version of law/justice Lanham and Johnson present). Rather than concerning ourselves with abstract conceptions of "Truth" beyond time (yes, even the eternal science of Dialectical Materialism), we can instead perform a "series of shifts" to arrive at a world where we actively re-evaluate our priors in the moment, "kiting checks" instead of "balancing books."

Fundamentally, the idea of the strong defense is that the very categories of "good/bad" "truth/falsehood" etc. are rhetorically determined and situated. The Marxist version of this, by the way, would be something like the dominant ideology of a culture follows from its material conditions. However, if we only concern ourselves with the dominant form of culture (truth), we blind ourselves to emergent and creative possibilities. This isn't to say they will all be right - they won't! I'm a ML for the most part, but if at some point after the revolution our anarchist comrades begin to make the case that we should dissolve the state apparatus and it's a compelling case rooted in strong arguments, why shouldn't we entertain the possibility and creatively imagine the death of the state. (Always :left-unity-4: folks).

I should say here again that we should never be open to fascism in any forms and, "shifting truths" again, as soon as we run into fascistic tendencies it's worth just throwing rhetoric aside and instead switching to violence, total violence (which I suppose is, in a way, a kind of rhetoric too). But when conversing in the real world, it's useful to retain a degree of ideological and rhetorical flexibility (the "openness" I was describing - emptying whatever beliefs you have to meet your audience at their level, even if it's the "weaker" level in your mind). Even if dialectical materialism is the eternal science (and personally, sincereposting again, I think it is!), if we're meeting someone at their level, why not instead appeal to a Christian moralism even if we personally don't believe in Christianity? Or an atheism if we don't believe in it? Fundamentally, your goal is to persuade someone to come to our side, so why not use every appeal and avenue in the book. So what if God is or isn't real? If we arrive with another comrade at our side, does it matter if they arrived through liberation theology or deep atheism? Just like an attorney, what's important is the result.

Again, this is what I mean by "emptying yourself and becoming water" - because while you may hold your deeply held convictions, from the sophistic position (which again, I'm not actually holding performing(edit) right now since I actually believe Lanham's argument) you do what must be done strategically, and in doing so you actively make what is true.

To be fair to Lanham, a pure weak defense or strong defense doesn't really work, and we should always be tactical. This is why I actually take your point re: empiricism and science. It doesn't make a whit of tactical sense to argue for flat earthism or anything like that, and so I don't think a deeply sophist thinker would actually defend it unless forced to in some form of "truth producing" game like a trial (i.e. defending a known pedo because your goal is ultimately to go through a process that leads to a conviction. Here, you're hoping to lose, but can't sandbag because that actually lets the pedo off).

To summarize, I think that if your categories of "weaker" and "stronger" are something closer to weaker and stronger (in the sense that weaker and stronger are contingent in the strongest sense), then I think that we are closer to agreement than perhaps your post would make. After all, in this case, rhetorical processes (and also material processes, let's be :marx-guns-blazing: for a moment) shape the categories of "weak" and "strong".

However, if your position is that no, there's absolute versions of "weak" and "strong," then you're on the side of the weak defense, and I just don't agree with that.

To quote Lanham again (because the analogy is entertaining)

Restricting rhetoric to style and delivery, Ramus solves the "Q" question by definition. Rhetoric is a cosmetic, and bad girls wear makeup as well as good ones, probably better.

If the art of rhetoric is merely the tools at our disposal, we impoverish ourselves from the creative and generative possibilities the Strong Defense opens up.

I sadly don't have time to write more, but I'm at least really enjoying our conversation (even with your barbs!). I'm entirely in earnest here, and would love to see your reply.