ABSTRACT
The Sophist is widely taken to represent a laudable breakthrough in Plato’s thinking about language. For the first time, so the story goes, Plato fully recognizes that a sentence or statement [logos] is a different kind of thing from a name. It is a complex whole composed of a name and a verb or predicate [rhêma], each of which possesses a different linguistic function; it asserts rather than merely naming. It is the Eleatic Visitor’s brief discussion of these (roughly) syntactic points which, together with his explanation of not-being as difference, enables him finally to account for the possibility of false statement. Plato had struggled inconclusively with the paradox of false statement in the Euthydemus, Cratylus and Theaetetus: these earlier attempts were doomed by the lack of the syntactic insights of the Sophist.
