Deceptively plausible reasoning

Usage examples of sophistry.

He did not exactly suspect the secret objects of Muir, but he was far from being blind to his sophistry.

Yet regulated vivisection has been confounded with antivivisection by the union of zany cranks and trade-unionized men of medicine, who have not refrained from the coercion of patients, from the deception of the public, from the inoculation of legislators with mendacity, capsuled in sophistry, and from the direct or indirect corruption or intimidation of not a few public journals.

What then becomes of all their sophistry about Adams not being fool enough to forge an assignment that would not cover the case?

In this condition of apprehensive sobriety we are able to see that the contents of literature, art, music -- even in some measure of divinity and school metaphysics -- are not sophistry and illusion, but simply those elements of experience which scientists chose to leave out of account, for the good reason that they had no intellectual methods for dealing with them.

The fatal sophistry in the traducian account of the transmission of souls may be illustrated in the following manner.

Through it shine glints of Ovidian sophistry and the rich romantic colors of Moorish Spain.

London and Rouen, but the impecunious gallants bred on Arthurian romance and Ovidian sophistries in the entourage of the Countess of Champagne.

He deemed it cheap to retreat to such sophistry when the noble adventure could be justified within its own terms: man had thrown back the perimeters of ignorance and darkness by quintillions of miles and centuries of years, and that was adequate justification.

They were simple sophistries, fabricated to suit his needs, readily taking and bearing the imprimatur of common sense.

Century by the simple sophistry of denying the centrality of writers or the reality of characters or of the transcendent power of language and literature itself.

But where the public has once persuaded itself that certain subtle speculators aim at nothing less than to shake the very foundations of the common welfare of the people, it is supposed to be not only prudent, but even advisable and honourable, to come to the succour of what is called the good cause, by sophistries, rather than to allow to our supposed antagonists the satisfaction of having lowered our tone to that of a purely practical conviction, and having forced us to confess the absence of all speculative and apodictic certainty.

Does it strike you it IS base for me to get you well away from her, to smuggle you off here into a corner and bribe you with sophistries and buttered rolls to betray her?

Had not your confiscators, by their early crimes, obtained a power which secures indemnity to all the crimes of which they have since been guilty or that they can commit, it is not the syllogism of the logician, but the lash of the executioner, that would have refuted a sophistry which becomes an accomplice of theft and murder.

But, perhaps, they thought common sense or natural logic sufficient for this purpose, and artificial logic, which they meant, but did not express clearly by the word Assents, necessary as a guard only against sophistry.

The failure of philosophers to transcend their own mental limitations has reduced all their systems to circular arguments, and all their ontologies to Solipsism, however elaborately they have endeavoured to to cloak the fact with sophistries.