Abstract

By now there seems widespread consensus among scholars on rhetoric that Protagoras and Gorgias, the leading sophists of the fifth century B.C.E., made significant progress in building a theory of discourse that excluded any absolute standard for the judgment of truth. These ancient sophists thus anticipated today's prevailing school of rhetoricians, who hold that absolute standard for the judgment of truth can never be found ... because the individual mind can never transcend personal emotions, social circumstances, and historical conditions.1 This position prevented the two sophists from adopting, as it now impels us to set aside, the terms knowledge and truth in their classic objective sense since neither consciousness nor discourse can be supposed accurately to represent an absolute and non-contingent external reality. Robert Scott's famous 1967 article On Viewing Rhetoric as Epistemic, from which we often date the current renaissance of anti-foundationalism in rhetoric, repeatedly acknowledged Protagoras and Gorgias as pioneers. And the resonance has been repeatedly acknowledged since (Jarratt &9, Crowley 332, Meiland 51, Newman 47). Patricia Bizzell has pointed out, however, that something is missing from today's anti-foundationalist rhetoric: