Sophistry

A sophist is either a philosopher who works for money, or a philosopher you don't like.

Sophistry is a modern term and occasional snarl word connoting the use of rhetorical trappings that involve deception, obfuscation, or equivocation. In other words, it is a fancy way to sound authoritative even when you're wrong. Sophists often use logical fallacies to bolster (heh) their arguments, relying on the audience's lack of familiarity with logic to push conclusions onto them that would otherwise not be accepted. Those who deploy sophistry may come across as great debaters and intellectuals, but really utilise deceit to make a point.

Within the ranks of the Roman Catholic Church, the highly educated Jesuits gained a reputation for sophistry and casuistry.

Origins
The term "sophistry" is derived from the Sophists of Ancient Greece, a loose coalition of nomadic educators who taught life-skills to anyone with enough money to pay. They didn't have a defined school of thought or unified set of beliefs; in fact they occupied a similar role to modern Motivational Speakers. They traveled Greece holding seminars on public speaking, rhetoric, and persuasion to anyone who would pay them. Regardless of whether you were wrong or right, a Sophist could teach you how to sound right.

They tended not to concern themselves with difficult ideas like Truth or Right and Wrong, instead leaning toward cynicism, relativism, and style over substance. Because of their tendency to live on the fence and charge quite a lot of money to teach other people how to think badly, both Plato and Socrates considered them to be pretentious and generally detrimental to society.

Independently, a similar line of philosophy arose in ancient China around the same time; the word-for-word translation of their philosophy is the School of Names. The three best known today are, , and ; the latter two were contemporaries. They earned the ire of other philosophers, so much so that the Legalist produced an extended rant about them.

Etymology and modern usage
The term "Sophist" comes from the Greek word for "wisdom", and is therefore a little ironic in retrospect. Nowadays it is mostly used as an ad hominem argument. People often use it to mean someone lying with pretense or style, but this isn't technically correct. It is sophistry to play Devil's Advocate, and people don't usually do that with sincerity. Debate contests are sophist affairs as well, with sides being assigned a position they need to support regardless of what they believe is true, but you wouldn't call that lying.