Rhetoric Society Quarterly

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Disproof without Silence: How Plato Invented the

Post-Truth Problem

Robin Reames

To cite this article: Robin Reames (2021) Disproof without Silence: How Plato Invented the Post-
Truth Problem, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 51:4, 325-335, DOI: 10.1080/02773945.2021.1947518

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RHETORIC SOCIETY QUARTERLY
2021, VOL. 51, NO. 4, 325–335
https://doi.org/10.1080/02773945.2021.1947518

Disproof without Silence: How Plato Invented the

Post-Truth Problem
Robin Reames

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
This essay shows how Plato uses methods of fourth-century rhetorical theory Foucault; onoma; Plato; post-
to build a theory of language-as-signification, which he constructed to over­ truth; rhêma
come the problem of lies and “false speech” in sophistic culture. By decon­
structing Plato’s theorization of signification, I question the historical process
by which the “sovereignty of the signifier” (in Michel Foucault’s terms) came
to be established, and I reposition Plato as a theorist in the rhetorical
tradition who, by redefining the key terms of onoma, rhêma, and logos,
created a theory of language that made lies all the more potent by reducing
them to “mere signification.” It is this understanding of language as merely
signifying and referencing the world that, I argue, lies at the root of the post-
truth problem in 21st-century politics. While Plato’s truth problem is char­
acterized by “silence without disproof,” our own post-truth problem is char­
acterized as “disproof without silence.”

As I write these words, theories are circulating online that an election worker in Atlanta skewed the
2020 election results in Biden’s favor by producing thousands of fake ballots; that Dr. Anthony Fauci,
the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, conspired with Bill Gates to
use the COVID-19 virus as a way of deliberately crippling the “booming Trump economy”; that the
Democratic party invented the virus in order to put a stop to Trump’s campaign rallies; and that the
COVID-19 vaccine contains microscopic 5G tracking devices. By the time this essay reaches the pages
of this journal, surely many more theories of this sort will have proliferated online regarding the novel
coronavirus and the 2020 elections, in the same way that in 2017 the survivors of the Parkland school
shooting were called “crisis actors,” as were the parents of children who died in Sandy Hook in 2013; or
in 2016 when Hillary Clinton was reputed to be behind an underground pedophilia ring that is
operated out of the basement of a pizza parlor in Washington, DC; or when the Russian interference in
the 2016 election was said to be a fabrication by the fake news media; or from 2008 onward, when
Barack Obama was believed not to be a legal citizen by birth. As most of us are now aware, it is the
endless proliferation of stories like these that earned “post-truth” its designation as “word of the year”
in 2016.
In the same way that lies and fake news proliferate today, so too do publications about the problem.
Since 2016, numerous books have been written about the so-called post-truth problem.1 The dominant
recommendation of these texts is that we more carefully scrutinize the sources of our news, and that
we collectively prioritize “fact-checking.” Before assuming that what we are reading or hearing is true,
various authors recommend, we should examine the business structures and journalistic standards of
the news outlets we follow; and we should visit sites like Snopes and Politifact, and use fact-checking as
a prophylactic against false facts and fake news. When these sites demonstrate that the stories that our

Robin Reames is an associate professor in the Department of English, University of Illinois at Chicago, 601 S. Morgan, Chicago, IL
60607-7101, USA. E-mail: rreames@uic.edu
1
See, for example, books by James Ball; Matthew D’Ancona; James W. Cortada and William Aspray; Evan Davis; Ralph Keyes; Lee
McIntyre, to name only a few.
© 2021 The Rhetoric Society of America
326 R. REAMES

friends and family members post on their Facebook pages or repost on Twitter are “pants-on-fire
untrue,” we will be shown the error of our ways and the truth will once regain its surety.
I explain why this solution is destined to fail. And it’s not for the obvious reason—that a will to
believe bullshit and fact-checking are mutually contradictory epistemic modes. Even if there was
a cultural shift that made fact-checking a routine part of our media consumption, this solution still
would not solve the political problem of lies in the post-truth world.
The dominant proposal offered by the defenders of journalistic integrity is doomed because it
fundamentally fails to comprehend the structure of truth that has dominated thought in the West since
Plato. This structure of truth can only conceive of truth as something that is stated or represented (and
therefore mediated); it is predicated on a correspondence between statements, representations, and
mediations that are exterior to their referent in the real world. Despite appearances, this structure of
truth has not been dislodged or unseated by the critiques offered by poststructuralism and deconstruc­
tion in twentieth-century thought. Moreover, it just so happens, this structure of truth pervades the
ways that both the conspiracy theorist and their debunker mutually think about the world.
The West’s structure of truth was invented by Plato, first and foremost as a theory of language
introduced for the first time in his Sophist dialog. It is there that the idea of language-as-statement and
of statements being either true or false, where truth and falsity rest on a distinction between being and
seeming, or reality and appearance, appears for the first time in the history of ideas in the West. That
Plato is the inventor of this irrevocable and now ubiquitous idea of language has been generally
acknowledged. But it has yet to be established how Plato created it. It is the larger aim of my recent
book Seeming and Being in Plato’s Rhetorical Theory to do precisely this: to reveal how the ideas of
language-as-statement and of statements being either true or false were invented by Plato, an inven­
tion made necessary by the Sophists of Plato’s day. In this essay, I draw out some of the larger political
consequences of the development of these theories—consequences that I largely avoided discussing in
the book, although they were never far from my mind. In using rhetorical theory to create the
monolithic model of truth-as-signification, Plato also inadvertently created for us the possibility for
its subaltern; this subaltern, in brief, is what has come to be known by the term “post-truth.” By
illuminating the genesis of the statement in Plato’s thought, this essay reveals how speakers came to be
detached from their words, and truth came to reside exclusively in language and not in the person
using the language. This detachment, in essence, is the heart of the post-truth problem.
In what follows, I offer some background regarding the sophistic culture to which Plato was
responding, drawing on Michel Foucault’s incisive reading of the sophistic model of truth. I then
explain Plato’s development of signifying language in the Sophist dialog to explain how that develop­
ment provided the basic architecture of our own post-truth problem.

Sophistic Culture in Plato’s Dialogs

The purpose of Plato’s development of rhetorical theory across several dialogs may have been well-
intentioned. But, as we’ll see, the road to post-truth is paved with good intentions. His theory of
rhetoric was ultimately a form of resistance to sophistic political culture in his own time—a supposedly
failsafe method for defining the ontological difference between true and false; in so doing Plato
invented what we now have come to think of as the difference between truth and falsehood as such,
or what would come to be known as the correspondence theory of truth.2 This recognition requires
a certain understanding that, although prior to Plato there was no doubt a general awareness that
speech could be either true or false, there was nevertheless no fixed means of measuring truth versus
falsity where speech was concerned.
The problem of false speech is a manifest preoccupation across Plato’s portrayals of Socrates’s
interactions with various sophists—for example, in the all too familiar interaction with Gorgias, where
Socrates expresses concern that the sophist may be able to speak convincingly about an issue where he
2
See Heidegger, Being and Time, 1.6.44.
 RHETORIC SOCIETY QUARTERLY 327

lacks actual knowledge, but ultimately fails to come up with any solution to the problem that sophists
like Gorgias quite capably persuade people of things that sound true but nevertheless are not (457c–
58b). This concern is not isolated to the Gorgias alone. Again and again, across several of Plato’s
dialogs, Socrates engages interlocutors with some version of the same question: “Would you agree that
there is such a thing as false speech?” While his interlocutors readily agree that there is, the task of
defining what makes false speech false consistently proves to be an impossible feat for Socrates.3
Indeed, in dialogs like Republic, Cratylus, Theaetetus, Protagoras, Gorgias, Phaedrus, and more, it’s
clear that a general agreement that there is such thing as false speech in no way guarantees that false
speech can be defined.
Prior to Plato, falsity was not even conceived of as the natural opposite of truth. Rather, what we
would now call falseness (pseudos) was the natural opposite of correctness (orthos), while truth
(aletheia) was more commonly put in opposition to hiding or obscuring (lethe, or aletheia without
the alpha-privative; Figure 1).4
It is here, in this primal conflict between Plato and the Sophists, that the concepts are first
“crisscrossed” (Heidegger, “Plato’s Doctrine of Truth” 178) such that in the history of interpretation
truth would come to be the opposite of falsity, and the defining characteristic of the knowing human.
This combat with sophistic culture is nowhere more pronounced than in Socrates’s dealings with
the Sophist Protagoras. Protagoras’s verbal arts are an unusual source of epistemic anxiety for Socrates,
and again and again, Plato portrays Socrates as trying but ultimately failing to come up with a suitable
method for distinguishing between true and false speech where Protagoras is concerned. Throughout
his depictions of Protagoras himself, as well as Protagoras’s doctrines and their epistemic conse­
quences, Plato demonstrates a marked determination to develop a theory of logos capable of distin­
guishing between true and false speech, predicated on a deeper distinction between truth and its
appearance, or being and seeming. These attempts proceed in fits and starts in the two dialogs that deal
with Protagoras most directly—Protagoras and the Theaetetus.
A capsule of the problem—why Socrates couldn’t distinguish between true and false speech—is
captured in Plato’s treatment of two of Protagoras’s doctrines: his “two-logoi,” or dissoi logoi, doctrine
and his “contradiction is impossible” doctrine. The two-logoi doctrine states that “There are two logoi
in opposition about every ‘thing’ (pantos pragmatos)” (Schiappa 90). As Edward Schiappa has convin­
cingly established, this doctrine is best understood “as a logical extension of the Heraclitean . . . theory
of flux and his ‘unity of opposites’ doctrine” (92). If the same tension of opposites and strife of
opposing forces that inheres in phusis inheres also in logos, then the principle that there are two
opposing logoi about every matter necessarily results. But this entails that “whatever you assert, I can
always deny, with equal correctness; but my denial can never be so correct as to rule out your
assertion” (Denyer 2)—in other words, this leads us to the “contradiction is impossible” doctrine.
Thus the two doctrines taken together suggest that although contradiction is inexorable, final

true hidden true hidden

correct false correct false

Figure 1. Truth and its opposite.

3
See, for example, Crat. 421a; Euthyd. 284b–286e, Rep. 376e–377a; Soph. 295c–d; Theaet. 145e–146c, 150a–161e.
4
See, Heidegger, “Plato’s Doctrine of Truth,” 172–82.
328 R. REAMES

contradiction is nevertheless impossible. Consequently, a logos will never be definitively true or false; it
will only be true or false according to the ever-shifting measure of human perception—or, as
Protagoras puts it in his most famous doctrine, the “man-measure doctrine”: “man is the measure
of all things; of things that are that they are, and of things that are not, that they are not” (DK80b1).5
In other words, in the absence of a theory of representational language, truth is a matter of success
in sophistic culture, and success is defined as victory in sophistic contradiction and eristic competition.
Such success was sought through the sophistic method of perpetual, ceaseless contradiction and
countercontradiction: a verbal method attested to by the surviving fragments of the Sophists, parti­
cularly Protagoras and Gorgias. The Sophists’ discursive practice of contradiction was a verbal means
of instantiating an ontology of flux, becoming, and never-ending strife over and against an ontology of
stable, pure Being. They posited a different theory of language (contradiction rather than assertion),
with a different ontology (unstable becoming rather than stable Being), and this naturally would carry
different political ramifications (power was gained through verbal victory rather than verbal correct­
ness, truth, or what Foucault would later call “power/knowledge”).
This may seem to be an archaic version of our own post-truth problem, but there are subtle,
important differences. Namely, sophistic contradiction was marked by an inseparability of the speaker
from the speech— by a commitment to one’s words once they’d been uttered, and by an agonism that
could only be resolved once one of the interlocutors was forced to contradict themself, which resulted
in the opponent’s eristic victory. This aspect of sophistic culture is portrayed for example in Socrates’s
interactions with Protagoras, in the dialog by that name. As these interactions demonstrate, the
Sophist Protagoras aims to contradict Socrates’s interpretation of Simonides’s poem, and he attempts
to do so by leading Socrates to contradict himself in his own interpretation, thus leading to Socrates’s
defeat (Prot. 333c–361a).6
This pre-representational way of thinking about language is described incisively by Michel Foucault
in his 1971 series of lectures on the Will to Know. Foucault describes what can be plainly seen in the
scenes between Socrates and Protagoras (among others): as Foucault describes, there is a certain
“materiality” of the Sophists’ discourse. By this Foucault means that certain statements are treated as
premises in a discussion, not because they are believed to be true, but because from a physical and
experiential standpoint, they have been uttered, put in circulation within the matter of the discourse.
The limits of the discourse are set not by grounding presuppositions, givens, or premises, but by what
has been said, by the lingering presence of the words themselves within their discursive arising, quite
apart from what they might be thought of as signifying. They have been uttered, and they remain there
“at the center of the discussion” waiting to be “repeated, [or] recombined according to the [inter­
locutors’] wishes” (Will to Know 59). There is no appeal to metalinguistic grammatical or logical rules
that govern the discourse; rather, “Each subject is bound to what is said by an immediate relationship
of belonging or imputation: either because he said it himself, or because he answered yes. There is
a commitment of the speaking subject to what is said” (Will to Know 60). What results is not “truth”
per se but “victory,” which is acknowledged as:

the silence of one of the two partners, who can no longer continue to speak and finds himself excluded from the
game of this materiality. It is not a matter of leading two subjects to think the same thing by speaking the truth; it
is a matter of excluding one of the speaking subjects from the discourse by transforming things at the level at
which they are said. (Will to Know 49)

The words of the Sophist manifestly are not demonstrated, Foucault insists. They are either “won or
lost” (Will to Know 60), and the loss is marked first and foremost by the simple phenomenon of
silence. Once an interlocutor is lured into self-contradiction, they concede defeat by speaking no
more.

5
Πάντων χρημάτων μέτρον ἐστὶν ἄνθρωπος, τῶν μὲν ὄντων ἔστιν, τῶν δὲ οὐκ ὄντων ὡς οὐκ ἔστιν.
6
See Reames 99–122.
 RHETORIC SOCIETY QUARTERLY 329

It is this context that is evoked in Protagoras’s maxims: contradiction is both inexorable and
impossible precisely because the speaker is physically bound to their own words inasmuch as
they are bound to the ontological structure of the universe. Their speech constitutes an “act of
commitment” to a statement that, the material structure of the universe dictates, naturally has an
opposing view. Their speech is only successful inasmuch as it is agreed or not agreed on by the
commitments of others. Bringing a speaker to a point of self-contradiction in their commitments
effectively silences them—silences, but does not disprove. Where we might characterize Plato’s
truth problem was silence without disproof, we might characterize our own as disproof without
silence.
Plato’s concern was that silence without disproof could lead to the most devastating political
disasters— war, tyranny, and enslavement. It is a search for a means of overcoming this sophistic
model of thought and its resulting politics that motivates the development of the rhetorical theory of
the statement. If an external measure, detachable from the materiality of discourse, could define speech
once and for all as either true or false, then Protagoras’s two-logoi, impossibility of contradiction, and
man-measure doctrines might just be toothless.

Onoma, Rhêma, and True and False Speech

So how does he do it? Consider for a moment what the outcome has been in the future history
of Western metaphysics. What do we typically mean when we say that someone’s speech is
either “true” or “false”? We mean by this that someone’s words do (or do not) accurately
represent or signify reality. The initial building blocks of this theory of language were cut first
and foremost from two terms: onoma and rhêma, commonly— but wrongly—translated as
“noun” and “verb.”
The birth of rhetoric in the West was marked by the invention of metalanguage of this sort:
theoretical terminology that names and categorizes linguistic phenomena, produced by an analysis of
a written text. Thomas Cole has argued that this process appears for the first time in Plato’s dialogs,
where interlocutors examine discourse that has been detached from its spoken performance, and on
the basis of that examination, produce a theoretical metalanguage about the discourse, or language
about language. While Cole emphasizes the prominence of the Phaedrus as an inaugural text for this
development, it is a phenomenon that appears throughout the dialogs. Plato has his interlocutors
discuss texts that were available in writing to both him and his readers, and on the basis of their
analysis develop theoretical metalanguage about the text. Not only the written speech in the Phaedrus
(meant to evoke in his readers’ minds the written speeches of Lysias), but also Simonides’s poem in
Protagoras, the Iliad in the Republic, a dialog in the Theaetetus and Menexenus (in both cases, the very
dialog that the reader is currently reading), and many more examples illustrate the same process:
through Socrates’s and his interlocutors’ discussions of texts that were available in writing both to him
and to Plato’s readers, Socrates engages in a critical evaluation of the language as language, which
results in a metalinguistic vocabulary.7
In what follows, I define Plato’s metalanguage of onoma and rhêma, and explain how out of these
two terms Plato invented the concept of language-as-statement and signification, and how this
rhetorical theory was meant to overcome the problem of false speech in sophistic culture, but also
how it created unintended side effects.
Plato’s main treatment of these two terms occurs in the Cratylus, Sophist, and Theaetetus dialogs,
which in itself is interesting from a literary-dramatic perspective. The conversation that takes place in the
Sophist dialog is portrayed as the chronological sequel to the conversations displayed in the Theaetetus
and the Cratylus, because it occurs on the following day, just on the other side of the same night. Even
though we are momentarily led to believe that Socrates is present for the conversation in the Sophist just as
7
For more on this development of rhetorical theory and its relationship to literacy and writing, see Cole, 91–94, 127–32; Ong, 9–10;
Reames 5–7; Schiappa, 109 and 186.
330 R. REAMES

he had been for the two conversations on the previous day, we learn that in fact this is Socrates’s namesake
who is present, and that Socrates himself is offstage dealing with his legal woes, for the Theaetetus ends
with Socrates leaving to hear charges against him that we the readers know will result in his death. But the
character Theaetetus is still present, just as he had been for one of the conversations on the previous day,
and an Unnamed Stranger from Elea assumes Socrates’s typical role as the lead interlocutor.
Moreover, all three dialogs display common themes: a conflict between sophistic methods of contra­
diction (methods of division and discrimination, etymological discussions, equivocations, eristic contest,
etc.), and they also display a resulting need to define a theory of logos that can rise above the uncertainty
provoked by such methods. Where resolution is lacking on day one, it is discovered on day two. In the
trans-dialog dramatic action, Plato allows the unnamed Stranger in the Sophist to answer the questions
Socrates had been unable to answer in either conversation on day one. In the Theaetetus (while struggling
with Protagoras’s doctrines) Socrates confesses that he had long been confounded by the problem of false
judgment, but in the face of his perplexity he was unable to develop a theory of logos to combat it.
Similarly, in the Cratylus, Socrates and his interlocutors attempted but failed to come up with a suitable
account of the correctness of names or of false speech. Whereas, in the Cratylus and Theaetetus, there is
no escape from the interminable contradiction and countercontradiction of sophistic eristics, in the
Sophist that sophistic method is reduced to nothing more than “imitation,” “appearance-making,” and
“word-juggling” (268c–d). In short, on day two, the Stranger is able to overcome all of the problems that
had been introduced on day one, all while Socrates has absented himself to face his fate.8
The dramatic unity of these dialogs works as a subtle clue that they are interanimating; it draws our
attention to what is shared in common among them; most notably, the explicit discussions of onoma
and rhêma. These two key terms become the building blocks of Plato’s theory of logos, which is itself
Plato’s concept of truth and falsity, and his ultimate method of resisting and overturning the Sophists.9
The meanings Plato assigns to these terms in his Sophist and Cratylus dialogs are entirely new,
differing from earlier uses in the literature prior to Plato, as well as from Plato’s own use of these
terms in other dialogs. And, as in other cases where Plato deliberately modifies existing language to
give it new meaning, such work is evidence of important theory-building.
Today, onoma and rhêma are typically translated as “noun” and “verb,” respectively. This transla­
tion is inaccurate, and the persistence of these translations hides the very work Plato has to do in order
to invent the theory of language-as-signification. In the literature prior to Plato, the term onoma
originally referred exclusively to the proper names of persons.10 By the fifth century BCE, it could refer
to the general concepts denoted by “term” or “word” for something as well as “name.” For example, in
Thucydides, onoma could refer to names of things other than people—systems of government are
called democracy, oligarchy, and so on (Thuc. 2.37.1); people are called Athenian, Macedonian, and so
on (Thuc. 2.64.3); towns, cities, and places have names (Thuc. 3.102.1, 4.701, 6.4.1–5, 6.64.2, 7.64.2).
As one commentator notes, “Onoma never has the sense of just ‘word’” (de Rijk 219)—it always carries
some connection to the narrower concept of “name.”
The term rhêma governed a wider range of uses, referring to words, speech, language, and phrases
in general (as well as serving as the verbal root of the discipline of rhetoric). Plato at times even uses
rhêma interchangeably with onoma as “terms and phrases” (Cra. 421e, 425a; Symp. 221e), and even to
indicate the naming of things (Laws 906c; Politics 303c; Rep. 462c; Soph. 237d;)—the very function he
elsewhere assigns exclusively to onoma.
We witness a radical break with these nontechnical uses of the terms onoma and rhêma in the
Cratylus and the Sophist. In both of these dialogs, Plato widens the meaning of one term (onoma) and
narrows the meaning of the other (rhêma) in order to build a theory of language that is capable of

8
For more on the dramatic relationship between these dialogs see Reames 149–50; Zuckert, 65–66.
9
See Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 60–61.
10
For the personal-appellative uses of onoma, see Aeschylus, Pers. l 284; Homer Od. 9.16, 364–66; 19.183; Sept. l 577; and Suppl. l 320.
Some texts contemporaneous to Plato seem to use onoma as a term for words in general. See, for example, Isaeus, De Menecle 20.9;
Isocrates, Areopagiticus 20.2; Xenophon, Mem. 2.2.1, 4.2.23; Hist. 6.12.3; Oec. 6.4.2, 6.12.3, 6.14.2, 7.3.4; and Cyn. 13.5.4.
 RHETORIC SOCIETY QUARTERLY 331

serving as a theoretical counterweight to dizzying sophistic contradiction and anti-logos by affixing

a representational function to language.
In these dialogs, onoma and rhêma are reconceived not as “name” and “words” nor as “noun” and
“verb,” but as [single] “word” and “phrase,” the longer combination of which forms the content of
a logos. It is clear that Plato is introducing novel definitions from the way he must offer extended
analogies in the Cratylus in order to explain the meanings of these terms. Socrates doesn’t just use the
terms, he discusses them at length. In that discussion, onoma is redefined as an elementary part (a
single word) of a more complex phrase, or rhêma, in the same way that a simple sound is an
elementary part of a more complex syllable (Bassett 302). The painting analogy at Cra. 424e illustrates
the point. The onomata are the simple colors prior to their mixing and composition in the larger logos
—rhêma is the midway point between the basic, isolated onoma and the complete logos, equivalent to
the mixed colors that have not yet fully composed a complete picture (“qui doivent donc être les
équivalents des couleurs composes,” Bassett 302). In the same way that the mixed colors are an
intermediate step between a single color and a picture, or a syllable is an intermediate step between the
basic sound and the word, the rhêma is not a “verb” but an intermediate step between the onoma and
the logos (Bassett 303).11
Why is this redefinition of Plato’s onoma and rhêma essential for this theory of logos and, by
extension, the invention of the statement and the overturning of sophistic thought? By emphasizing
the function of the term onoma as the singular linguistic unit that links up with the material world
most concretely (because of its original association with proper “names” and “naming”), and then by
developing a definition of rhêma as a string of onomata that ultimately composes a logos, Plato
constructs a theory of language that transfers the denominative properties of onoma to rhêma, and
ultimately, to logos as such (Figure 2).
Just as a painter knows how to combine discrete colors to create an overall pictorial representation,
Socrates says, “[S]o, too, we shall apply letters to the revealing of objects, either single letters when
required, or several letters, and so we shall form syllables, as they are called, and from syllables make
onomata and rhêmata, and thus, at last, from the combinations of onomata and rhêmata arrive [at
logos], large and fair and complete. And as the painter made a figure,” he continues, “even so shall we
make logos by the technê of naming, or rhetoric, or some other technê” (Crat. 424e–25a).12 Because
onoma is the term for a word that has a certain counterpart in the real world, by defining rhêma as
a collection of onomata that are merged together, and logos as a blending together of rhêmata, Plato
transfers the referential function of onoma to all logos as such.

onoma single word/name

+ +

rhêma combination of words/ names,

phrase

logos combination of phrases/

a complete discourse

Figure 2. Plato’s rhetorical theory of logos.

11
Also see W. M. Pfeiffer, 101; John Sallis, 264n33; Marieke Hoekstra and Frank Scheppers.
12
Translation modified.
332 R. REAMES

The same conceptual model reappears in the Sophist dialog (262d); but there the Stranger develops it
further into a complete theory of logos. It is in the Sophist that the larger consequences of defining logos as
merely a longer, more complex name are made explicit: namely, that speaking, saying, or “stating is
reduced to naming” things in the world (Fine 290, my emphasis). Because he has defined speech as an
expanded onoma—onomata interwoven as rhêmata—the Stranger is able to invent the idea that all logos
fundamentally functions in the same way as a single name does: by weaving together words, we say
something about the world. Or, as the Stranger puts it, “Whenever there’s speech it has to be about
something. It’s impossible for it not to be about something” (262e). In the same way that one cannot
name without naming something or someone, by tying logos to onoma, one cannot speak without
speaking about something. The Stranger has invented, for the first time in the history of ideas in the
West, what is now the well-worn idea of the propositional statement: a declaration that “state[s] a fact”
and “posit[s] a relation between the statement and an external reality that is capable of verifying the
statement” (Foucault, Lectures 62).
How is this a means of resisting or overcoming the problem of false speech and sophistic culture? In
the Sophist, the comparison between speaking and weaving is crucial. The Stranger describes this
concept of logos-as-weaving (the weaving together of onomata and rhemata to construct a logos) as the
conceptual opposite of negation, separation, and “constantly trotting out contraries”—evoking again
here Protagoras’s “two-logoi” and “contradiction is impossible” doctrines. In place of perpetual
contradiction, which the Stranger calls “the utterly final obliteration of all discourse,” the Stranger
proposes that “the weaving together of eidos is what makes speech possible for us” (Sophist 259e).13
How this invention overcomes the sophistic culture of contradiction is a slightly longer story. But
a synopsis is this: The Sophist is finally ensnared once the Stranger fuses the two-level model of logos
(onoma and rhêma that speak about something) with the two-level model of mimêsis (an image that
copies something), developed in the Republic and explicitly referenced in the Sophist. Finally the
Sophist’s logos can be defined, once and for all, as false.14
The topic of mimêsis is introduced briefly once at the very beginning of the Sophist (219a–b), and then
reintroduced again at the end of the dialog.15 These two subtle discussions of mimêsis that bookend the
Sophist hint at the importance mimêsis has for the theory of language that Plato is building in this dialog.
By weaving together the two-level concept of mimêsis (false impersonations or images) that was
developed in the Republic and binding this to his two-level concept of logos (logos as name), Plato not
only completes the rhetorical theory of mimêsis, which he had introduced but left unfinished in the
Republic; he also initiates the understanding that language, truth, and falsity function by means of
reference and correspondence, thus introducing for the first time, via the rhetorical theories of onoma,
rhêma, and mimêsis, the sovereignty of the signifier and the correspondence theory of truth. So the
Sophist only does with words—both written and spoken—what painters can do with pictures and what
onomata can do with things: make people believe that what they are hearing is true, that what is being
named exists, and that what has been spoken must be. In the same way that we as readers are misled at
the beginning of the Sophist dialog into believing that Socrates is physically there in the text because he is
named as one of the interlocutors, so too when Sophists use logos, they name things that are not real in
the world. Representational language—language that does not speak but speaks about—exposes the
Sophist as a creator not of actual likenesses but false appearances and bad imitations.16 Through this
theory, the Stranger ensnares the Sophist and evades the web of Protagorean paradox and contradiction.

13
διὰ γὰρ τὴν ἀλλήλων τῶν εἰδῶν συμπλοκὴν ὁ λόγος γέγονεν ἡμῖν. What is meant by this statement is uncertain and has been the
subject of longstanding dispute, particularly whether or not this is one of the places where Plato is developing his theory of the
Forms. For example, see Francis M. Cornford, 298; Reginald Hackforth, 57; M. T. Thornton, 582; R. Bluck, 181–87. Cornford admits
that “eidos is a vague word, sometimes meaning no more than ‘entity,’ ‘thing’” (302); we might add to this list “image,” “shape,”
“idea,” or “concept.”
14
See Paul Kalligas, 398.
15
219a–b, 232e–233d.
16
In the absence of the theory of language supplied in the later discussion of the dialog, even the discussion of mimêsis is caught in
the sophist’s web of contradictions. See Sophist 239d–240c.
 RHETORIC SOCIETY QUARTERLY 333

Precisely by applying his two-level model of mimêsis to the onoma and logos of the Sophist, the Stranger
can define false speech for itself—as a misnomer, a bad imitation, and a lack of correspondence.
The enigmatic examples of “Theaetetus sits” and “Theaetetus flies” offered at the end of the dialog
are merely demonstrations of how this works in practice. While both Theaetetus and the Stranger
would have agreed from the outset of the dialog that the first statement was true and the latter false,
they would not have been able either to define the statement’s falseness or to negate it without
ultimately being ensnared in the web of Protagorean contradiction, countercontradiction, and victory-
oriented contest. Now, however, they are able to articulate a theory of false speech outside the frame of
contradiction, and within the frame of correspondence and representation, because the whole logos
denominates the world in the same way that the single onoma “Theaetetus” does.
The logos of the Sophist no longer succeeds through eristic victory; rather, according to this new
definition, it succeeds by creating a phantasmatic imitation—a simulacra—not of things as they are in the
world, but of things as they are only believed or imagined to be. Falseness then is a matter of improperly
weaving together onomata and rhêmata, and therefore wrongly imitating the world: as the Stranger puts
it, “If someone says things about you, but says different things as the same or not beings as beings, then it
definitely seems that false speech really and truly arises from that kind of putting together of rhêmata and
onomata” (263c).17 Their definition of the Sophist’s false speech is complete: “Imitation of the contrary-
speech-producing, insincere and unknowing sort, of the appearance-making kind of copy-making. . . .
Anyone who says the sophist is of this ‘blood and family’ will be saying, it seems, the complete truth”
(268c–d).18 The nonobvious underside of this pronouncement, however, is the fact that language could
only become an imitation and a similacra of the world because it first had been detached from the speaker.
It is the statement that facilitates that detachment. Once speakers could be detached from their words, the
truth that resided in language was likewise separable from the speaker. One and the same phenomenon
thus gave rise to the Western philosophical tradition and its subaltern, the post-truth problem.
While the pronouncement of victory at the end of the Sophist suggests that the Stranger and
Theaetetus have succeeded in accomplishing their professed goal—trapping the Sophist—they have in
fact accomplished much more than this. Plato’s development, through the analysis of language as
language and the production of a metalinguistic vocabulary, of a correspondence theory of language
and truth has more profound consequences in the history of ideas than the momentary, political
expedience of defeating the Sophists and their sophistic culture. What we take to be fundamental and
essential to language—its referentiality—is in fact not an essential quality but an attributed one. Even
more problematically, because we think it is referential, we think it is merely referential. Thus, when
people speak, we’re unaware of the worlds their words are in fact creating. Instead, we blithely assume
that language is in fact detached from the world, precisely because it merely signifies it. So I can say
anything I want; my language is as detached from me as it is from the world it represents. Plato created
for us a bind that we are still struggling to extricate ourselves from today.
The reduction of the truth value of language to the “assertion” is precisely what makes language all
the more powerful and all the more dangerous. Our assumption that language is merely referential
circumscribes every response to the post-truth phenomenon. Donald Trump claims that anyone who
wants a coronavirus test can get one and that government officials have things under control; health
professionals say they cannot and do not. Alex Jones says that the Sandy Hook school shooting didn’t
happen; Politifact asserts that it did. 4chan says that Hillary Clinton is involved in a pedophile ring
operating from a pizza restaurant; Snopes says she isn’t. In every case, the truth value of the words is
delimited and restricted to its correspondence function—to events that either did or did not occur in
the world. This simple assumption forces us to miss entirely how the language is really functioning in
all its material, visceral, physical potency to infect us with beliefs that are in no way true. Once “the
word sinks down to become a mere sign” (Heidegger, Metaphysics, 183), its actual function to dictate

17
Translation modified.
18
I hope that this provides an answer to the question raised by Malcolm Schofield (80) of how the Sophist completes the theory of
language-as-imitation that is first approached in the Cratylus but finally abandoned. On this point, see also Annas, 109.
334 R. REAMES

everything we think about what is is still operational, and made all the more dangerous, precisely
because we think all along that we can wrangle it by seeking in it its signifié.
Signification creates the mistaken impression that we can disarm lies and falseness by looking to the
referent, to what the language represents in the world; that we can disarm a politician’s deception by
fact-checking. It is this mistaken notion that is signification’s greatest danger. Far from disarming the
dangerous power of the Sophists’ logos, Plato “weaponized” it by convincing us that it is “mere
language,” imitative and removed from the world—when in fact there is nothing “mere” about
language at all. In so doing, Plato concealed from us its greatest strength—its world-forming power
and the very dictation of Being as such.

Conclusion
Foucault famously claimed in his 1970 inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, published in English
as “The Discourse on Language,” that what is most powerful in the selection, control, organization,
and ordering of discourse is what seems to be most essential to it: namely, “the opposition between
true and false” (217). This basic opposition between true and false would seem to be an inherent and
therefore neutral property of language as such, thus neither based on nor productive of any “system of
exclusion” (“Discourse” 217). He gives voice to the obvious position:

How could one reasonably compare the constraints of truth with those other divisions, arbitrary in origin if not
developing out of historical contingency—not merely modifiable but in a state of continual flux, supported by
a system of institutions imposing and manipulating them, acting not without constraint nor without an element,
at least, of violence? Certainly, as a proposition, the division between true and false is neither arbitrary, nor
modifiable, nor institutional, nor violent. (“Discourse” 217–18)

Perhaps, he goes on to claim, pioneering the study offered here, it was in fact all of these things.
As his ensuing series of 1970–71 Lectures on the Will to Know meant to demonstrate, the history
of the idea of truth was arbitrary, modifiable, institutional, and—as we know—also violent.
Foucault’s aim was to show how the will to truth that defines the Western philosophical
tradition excluded, through its very formation, other forms of knowing, other forms of “knowl­
edge-connaissance.” It was the “exclusion of the Sophists, as an event of knowledge-savoir which
gave rise to a certain type of assertion of the truth and to a certain effect of knowledge-
connaissance which then became normative form” (Lectures 32). Although Foucault acknowl­
edges that the Sophist is precisely where this definitive event occurs, he largely avoids discussing
it, saying, “I do not think we have to go to Plato to find this act of exclusion, not even to the
Sophist (which provides its definition however)” (Lectures 32).
Indeed, the Sophist is without a doubt our best if not our only window into the crucial moment of
this historical development. It is here that the template of language-as-signification takes its shape—
the language ideology that would undercut all implicit and explicit theories of language in the West
from the late classical to the contemporary era. While signification makes disproof possible, such
disproof can only mask, rather than evacuate, the physical, material, primordial power of speech.
Worse, it creates the condition for the possibility of disproof that cannot silence falsehood.
Signification created the mistaken impression that we use language, that we are its masters, that
we order and control it as nothing more nor less than a means of representation and as a technique
of our power/knowledge. And this is what hides from us language’s most essential power—a power
that survives disproof. The signifying theory of language and its apparatus of rhetorical theories
designed by Plato as a prophylactic against the dangerous force of the Sophists’ language, when
mistaken for language as such, in its most basic and essential function, leaves the hearer exposed and
vulnerable, unarmed against the overwhelming, archaic power of speech. This, in essence, is how
Plato invented the post-truth problem.
 RHETORIC SOCIETY QUARTERLY 335

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