Sophistication often includes wrong judgment, but not any wrong judgment is sophistry. An isolated misjudgment that does not contain logical contradictions, although not in line with objective reality, cannot be said to be sophistry. However, if you take a wrong judgment as a topic and try to prove it is correct, or use it as an argument to prove that other judgments are correct, it constitutes sophistry. At this time, the wrong judgment becomes an integral part of the whole sophistry, and even becomes the core basis of sophistry. The German philosopher Hegel once gave an incisive explanation about what sophistry is. He said that sophistry is "relying on false basis in any way, or denying a true truth, shaking it, or making a false truth beautiful as if it were true", Lecture Notes on the History of Philosophy, Volume II, page 7. Hegel's "in any way" means that the sophist arbitrarily violates and tramples on the laws and rules of logic, while "relying on the wrong foundation" means that the sophist deliberately uses the wrong judgment in his argument. This actually summarizes two basic characteristics of sophistry.

Zhi Nuo in ancient Greece and GongSunLong in ancient China can be regarded as representative figures.

Zhi Nuo put forward several famous paradoxes, such as. 1, "Motion does not exist. The reason is that the displaced thing must reach the halfway place before reaching its destination. " 2. Achilles (a good runner in Homer's epic Heriat) said, "This argument means that the fastest runner can never catch up with the slowest runner. Therefore, people who walk slowly are always ahead. " 3. The arrow doesn't move. "If anything is static when it is in the same space as itself (without exceeding it), if the displaced thing always occupies such a space at present, then the flying arrow is static."

Gong Sunlong put forward famous propositions such as "Li Jianbai" and "White Horse is not a horse".