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From greenlightwiki.com:
Here are some ideas about the Basic Properties Of Sophistry: the things that distinguish sophistry from other forms of reasoning and rhetoric--what gives sophistry its distinctive "smell" or "signature".
A haphazard list
Completely general nullification: A common form of sophistry is to attack an idea or line of reasoning by saying something that is true of absolutely any attempt to make sense of things. For example, "There might be an evil demon who has your brain hooked up to electrodes and is only making it seem like the stuff you see really exists." Or simply, "Never think that you could not be wrong." A more subtle one is to criticize an idea for being "relative" to some real-world context. These arguments nullify all cognition regardless of subject matter. An exception in which such an argument might be more than mere sophistry would be in the context of a dicussion of epistemology.
Disregard of context: The sophist is concerned entirely with rules: criticizing rules or demanding that rules be followed, regardless of how well the rules apply to the present situation. Implicitly, the sophist sets you up in a cognitive world where there is no possibility of intelligent judgement of particular circumstances. Instead, you are supposed to make appeal to rules which you are not allowed to abandon except by appeal to some higher rule. The rules must apply to all contexts (all "possible worlds" in analytic-philosophy-speak).
Equivocation: Rules of word-manipulation replacing intelligent judgement of the things that the words refer to.
Demand for a priori criteria: The sophist typically demands that you be able to state rules by which you will interpret all future evidence and make all future decisions. The sophist then analyzes these rules for flaws, in that they could lead you into delusion in imaginary situations. The rules must be completely stable. If the sophist asks you for a reason why you might do something in one situation, and gives you another situation where the preconditions of that rule apply but you wouldn't exercise that rule, the sophist claims victory. The sophist claims to have humiliated you because he has exposed that you were making decisions without fully articulated a priori criteria. That shows that you're not rational. Not only that, you're changing the rules from one situation to the next. That shows that you're cheating.
Demand for justification before making a move: Of course, this is not always sophistry. In some special areas of life, such as courtroom trials, we demand that a "burden" of specific kinds of evidence be met as a precondition for taking some action. Sophistry tends to extend this need for justification far beyond the areas where it's feasible and useful. Skeptical sophistry tends to push a sort of cognitive hyper-humility, or freezing out of fear of ever being "wrong"--or even being right but not fully justified. If you were to reason as the skeptic suggests that you should reason, you'd never be able to do anything in real life, because you'd never have sufficiently articulated and proven a priori principles to get started, nor evidence to justify your actions according to those principles, nor time to think this stuff through to the demanded degree.
Judging from outside reasoning itself: criticizing without offering content, just attacking or appealing to meta-criteria. The sophist presents himself as a judge of reason itself, while disguising his arguments as an appeal to rationality.
Concern with rationality over truth and goodness: Every moment of life is to be like a courtroom trial, where your reasoning is judged according to how solidly established your conclusion is and whether you arrived at your conclusion by the correct rules. Results do not matter, and guesswork--the real-life way of making progress--is strictly forbidden. The sophist tries to shame you for not being "rational" (where "rationality" has been re-referenced so it refers to nothing beyond skill at winning sophistical argumentation games). Skeptical sophists are filled with cautions: when it comes to thinking, they seem to imply, you need to be very very very very very very very careful, lest you slip up and believe something "irrationally".
Difficulty of refutation: The sophist, whether arguing skeptically or positively, always offers an argument that is difficult to refute. You know the conclusion is stupid, but it's hard to say what the problem is or "beat it" at its own game. This is because sophistry doesn't break the rules by which we discuss and arrive at shared understanding or shared decisions. Rather, it abuses those rules by lifting them out of the concrete, real-world context that makes them meaningful and useful. To see what's going on, you have to put aside the system of rules and look directly at the real, concrete reality. The sophist can then accuse you of "cheating."
--Ben Kovitz
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