It’s pretty conventional, in mainline western-civilization thinking at least, to have a high regard for the combination of knowledge and judgment we’d call “wisdom.” In fact, if you were to rate English words by their positive connotation for most people, “wisdom” would probably come out somewhere near the top of the list. At least so I would guess; I can’t find any evidence that anyone has actually done this.
The thing is, though, that one person’s wisdom might be another’s folly or error. You can easily imagine an argument between someone dedicated to “wisdom” as in wisdom of the ages (that is, lore handed down through time) and someone else dedicated to a more operational idea of “wisdom” as figuring out what works in reality.”
But what’s going on there is just an attempt to use a clever rhetorical technique to win the argument. Both sides of the dispute have the same goal, which would be “capturing” the word with the highly positive implication — wisdom in this case — so that it applies to their position and not to the other. They agree on one thing, although they might not even realize it: the word “wisdom” is a good thing.
Keep in mind that the two sides are not talking about the same thing when they use the word. It’s the word itself that’s important. In rhetoric that’s called anthorism. The goal of anthorism in this case is to accuse your opponent of misophosy, the hatred of wisdom. I mean, only a bad person would hate something as inherently good as “wisdom,” right? That’s a sign of somebody who just can’t think straight!
Just for good measure, that last sentence is a rhetorical technique too. This one is called schesis, and it means running down your opponent by insulting the way they think. Or, more precisely, characterizing how they think by posing juxtapositions of words — words you may have already attempted to hijack anthoristically.
This is a keyhole view of why Plato took a very dim view of rhetoricians. To Plato, rhetoricians were people who taught these techniques to anybody who would pay the tuition. It’s the idea that if you approach an argument (in the broadest sense) as a contest you want to win, then you can game the system by being very clever about the words themselves, ignoring any real consideration of the meaning they convey. The “system” you’re gaming is pretty fundamental; it’s the collective flow of human thought.
I don’t know whether Plato ever called for a pause in rhetorical research until the risks to society were settled, but he clearly considered rhetoric to be the nuclear weapons or AI of human communication. He was a staunch advocate of nonproliferation. And by the way, that previous sentence is trying to convince you of something; identifying the rhetorical techniques it uses is left as an exercise for you! (which is of course another rhetorical technique)
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