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With this established, some people have gone to opposite extremes. It is reported that one of the Sophists held that all beliefs are themselves what determine convictions. He did not acknowledge that things possess realities fixed in themselves, with which belief sometimes agrees and sometimes disagrees. Rather, he made the truth concerning anything whatever a person believes it to be, making realities dependent on beliefs.
No person of sound reason holds this view in such unrestricted and universal terms. It is simply of a piece with the report that the Sophists denied realities, acknowledging neither any reality nor any knowledge of reality, and that they had a leader called Sūfistā, as some speculative theologians relate.
Others have maintained that no rational person is known to have expressed this view, nor is any group known by this name. Rather, it is a word Arabized from Greek, meaning “specious wisdom.” By this they mean false discourse that may resemble the truth, such as a person might imagine because of an impairment of his reason or temperament, or because the matter is unclear to him; and they regarded