The Courts Care Nothing for Truth
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Socrates — σεμνύνειν… οὐδὲν ἀληθείας μετέχειν… δικαστηρίοις ἀληθείας… ἀλλὰ τοῦ πιθανοῦ.
Here is the wolf's whole philosophy in a sentence, and it is the exact antithesis of everything Socrates has built. There is no need, the sophists say, 'to make such solemnity,' semnynein, of rhetoric, no need 'to lead it up on a long circuit' of philosophy — no need, that is, for the science of souls, the knowledge of truth, all the arduous labor Phaedrus just called 'no small task.' Why? Because — 'as we said at the very start of this discussion' — the man who means to be a competent orator 'need share nothing of the truth,' ouden alētheias metechein, 'about just or good matters,' or about the natures of the people he addresses. And the blunt reason is given: 'in the law courts,' en tois dikastēriois, 'absolutely no one cares anything' for the truth of these things, 'but only for the plausible,' tou pithanou. This is the doctrine of Tisias and Gorgias restated at its most naked, and its logic is brutally simple. Rhetoric operates in the courts and the assembly; those venues run on persuasion, and persuasion runs on what juries find plausible, not on what is true; therefore truth is simply irrelevant to the orator's craft, and all this philosophy is wasted labor. The plausible is sovereign; the true is beside the point.
Now Socrates voices the wolf's case — the sophists' creed at its baldest. They say there is no need to make such solemn business of rhetoric, or lead it up on a long philosophical circuit. For, as was said at the very start of this discussion, the would-be competent orator has no need to share in the truth about just or good matters at all. In the law courts, they claim, absolutely no one cares in the slightest for the truth of these things — only for what is plausible.
This passage states the enemy's thesis at maximum strength and maximum bluntness, and it is important to feel how genuinely powerful — even how partly true — it is, because Plato's refutation earns its force only against a strong opponent. The observation at its core is simply correct: law courts and assemblies are in fact swayed by what seems plausible to the audience, not by some direct apprehension of the truth. A jury cannot see the past crime; it can only weigh which account seems more likely. An assembly cannot see the future consequences of a policy; it can only judge which prediction sounds more convincing. Persuasion really does operate in the medium of the plausible, to pithanon, and an orator who ignored what his audience finds believable, insisting only on the unvarnished truth, really would often lose. So far the wolf is right, and any honest theory of rhetoric must grant it. Where the wolf's argument goes wrong is in the inference it draws: that because persuasion works through plausibility, the orator can therefore dispense with truth entirely. This is the leap Socrates will sever. He has already laid the groundwork, back in the discussion of deception: the plausible is not free-floating; it is anchored in resemblance to the true, and to control plausibility reliably — to make the plausible go where you want across many cases — you must know the truth from which the plausible takes its shape. But there is a second, deeper answer that the whole dialogue embodies, and it concerns the word semnynein, 'to make solemn.' The sophists mock Socrates for dignifying rhetoric, for making a grand philosophical business of what is really just a knack for winning. And Plato's entire response is to insist that rhetoric deserves exactly this solemnity — because speech is psychagōgia, the leading of souls, and the leading of souls is the most serious thing there is. To treat rhetoric as a mere technique for winning in court, indifferent to truth, is to treat the human soul as something to be manipulated rather than led toward its good. The wolf's contempt for 'making it solemn' is precisely the contempt of the predator for the sheep — the refusal to see the soul one works on as anything but prey. So the clash here is not merely epistemological, about whether truth is needed for persuasion; it is moral, about what rhetoric is for and how it regards the human beings it addresses. The sophist sees an audience to be captured; Socrates sees souls to be healed. The plausible-versus-true debate that follows, and the dissection of Tisias's probability argument, are the intellectual working-out of a difference that is, at bottom, a difference of reverence.
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