  Similarly, the claim to make the weaker logos the stronger has nothing to do with relativism, either individual or social. Since, as we have seen, relativized beliefs are not in conflict with one another, arguments in favor of them are not in conflict either, and hence neither the beliefs themselves nor the arguments in favor of them can be weaker or stronger than one another. Aristotle’s evidence in the Rhetoric passage cited above indicates that the context of the claim is that of forensic oratory, and specifically that the arguments in question are arguments from what is likely or plausible, e.g., on the one side that it is not likely that a weakling would assault a strong man, since he would expect to be beaten up himself instead, and on the other side that it is not likely that a strong man would assault a weakling, since everyone would assume precisely that it was likely that he would do so, hence he would know that he would almost certainly be found guilty, hence in those circumstances it is unlikely that he would actually commit the crime. In any case of this kind, where it is assumed that the facts cannot be established with certainty, considerations of what is plausible may, given sufficient ingenuity, be adduced on either side, and similar arguments can be adduced in the context of political deliberation, where the future outcome cannot be certain and the decision has to turn on the balance of probabilities. It is likely, then, that this slogan was a sales pitch for Protagoras as a teacher of forensic and deliberative rhetoric. How ambitious the claim was is hard to determine. It is hard to believe that he ventured to claim always to make the prima facie weaker case carry the day (which is equivalent to the claim to make every case whatever carry the day), but equally implausible that he merely claimed to make the weaker case stronger than it was before he devised arguments in its favor. Perhaps he simply claimed that he was capable, in the appropriate circumstances, of devising arguments which would turn the weaker case into the stronger one. If so, the claim was both reasonable and, despite Aristotle’s strictures, not necessarily morally discreditable. E.g., the prosecution may have a strong case that Leon committed a theft, since a number of eye-witnesses identified him as the thief, but if the defence can show that he has an identical twin brother, Pantaleon, who was in the vicinity, and further that Pantaleon is a known thief, whereas Leon has an unblemished record, the case that Leon is innocent, which was previously the weaker, is now the stronger, and the defence is not necessarily guilty of any sharp practice (even if Leon was in fact guilty of the crime). (Of course, a defence counsel who secured an acquittal on these grounds while knowing independently that Leon was guilty would deserve Aristotle’s disapproval.)