hair-splitting vs sophistry

hair-splitting

noun
  • the act of finding exceedingly small differences which are probably neither important nor noticeable to most people. 

sophistry

noun
  • Plausible yet fallacious argumentations or reasoning. 

  • The actions or arguments of a sophist. 

  • An argument that seems plausible, but is fallacious or misleading, especially one devised deliberately to be so; a sophism. 

How often have the words hair-splitting and sophistry occurred in a corpus of books? (source: Google Ngram Viewer )