Pursue the Probable, Not the Truth
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Socrates — τὰ πραχθέντα… τὰ εἰκότα κατηγορίᾳ ἀπολογίᾳ… εἰκὸς διωκτέον… χαίρειν τῷ ἀληθεῖ.
The wolf's doctrine reaches its most shameless formulation. What the artful speaker must attend to, Tisias says, is to eikos, 'the probable.' And this is pushed to a startling extreme: sometimes one must not even mention 'the deeds that were actually done,' ta prachthenta, if they did not happen 'probably' — if the truth would strike the jury as unlikely. Instead one states 'the probable things,' ta eikota, whether prosecuting or defending, in accusation, katēgoria, and defense, apologia, alike. Always, in every speech, 'the probable is to be pursued,' to eikos diōkteon — and, in the phrase that makes the whole attitude unmistakable, one should 'bid a long farewell to the truth,' chairein tōi alēthei. The Greek idiom chairein, 'to say farewell, to dismiss,' is exactly our 'good riddance': the truth is to be waved off, sent away, as an irrelevance. For attending to the probable throughout, Tisias concludes, is what 'provides the entire art.' Rhetoric, on this view, is the systematic cultivation of the plausible in open and deliberate indifference to the true.
Socrates continues voicing Tisias's doctrine. The thing to attend to, it says, is the probable. Sometimes one must not even state the deeds that actually happened, if they did not happen in a probable way, but only the probable ones — in accusation and in defense alike. Always, in speaking, the probable is what must be pursued; and one should bid a long farewell to the truth, for attending to the probable through the whole speech is what supplies the entire art.
This passage states, more nakedly than anywhere else in the dialogue, the doctrine Plato most wants to defeat, and it is worth grasping both its genuine insight and its fatal flaw. The insight is real and even sophisticated: Tisias has noticed that truth and plausibility come apart. Sometimes what actually happened is improbable — the truth is stranger than fiction — and a jury, reasoning from what usually happens, will disbelieve a true account precisely because it is unlikely. An innocent man with a damning-looking but coincidental set of circumstances may be convicted; a guilty man with a plausible cover story may be acquitted. Tisias is right that the courts run on probability, and right that probability can diverge from truth. From this he draws the practical maxim: forget the truth, master the probable. And here is the flaw Socrates is about to expose, though the passage already hints at it. To 'pursue the probable' reliably — to know what a jury will find likely, and to construct a plausible account that will hold together under an opponent's attack — you must understand how things really are, because the plausible is precisely what resembles the true, and only someone who knows the true can gauge and manufacture its resemblances with any control. The very next example, the assault case, will show that probability can be flipped to either side, so that 'the probable' by itself determines nothing; what determines which probability-argument prevails is a deeper knowledge that Tisias's doctrine cannot supply. But there is also the moral dimension, carried by that chilling idiom, 'bid farewell to the truth.' It is one thing to observe that persuasion works through plausibility; it is another to make indifference to truth a positive principle, to wave the truth away as beneath the orator's concern. This is the point at which a description of how rhetoric works becomes a prescription for how to abuse it — the point at which the art of persuasion becomes, avowedly, an art of deception in the service of winning. Plato's whole dialogue is the answer to this 'good riddance to truth.' Against it he sets the vision of rhetoric as psychagōgia, soul-leading, and of the orator as a physician of souls whose persuasions are administered from knowledge, for the good of the patient. To dismiss the truth is, in that light, to abandon the very thing that makes rhetoric anything but manipulation — to reduce the leading of souls to the driving of prey. Tisias's cheerful farewell to truth is the wolf showing its teeth; and the refutation that follows will show that the wolf, in bidding truth good riddance, has also thrown away the only thing that could make even his own predatory art reliable.
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