Conversations with Socrates Would Have Been Unbearable

Socrates is well-known as a philosopher.  The thing is, we do not really know anything about his school or positions.  All that we can discern is found in the often-contradictory accounts of his positions by other philosophers such as Aristophanes, Xenophon, and Plato.

The Socratic Dialogue

The Socratic dialogue is a genre of literary prose, developed in Greece from the turn of the fourth century BCE.  The earliest examples come from Plato and Xenophon, both students of Socrates, and all involve Socrates himself as a character.  Socratic dialogue presents a discussion of ethical and philosophical contentions between two or more characters, often representing specific perspectives.  It is a means to illustrate the application of the Socratic method.  Socrates is often the main participant, but his presence as a character in the dialogue is not essential to the form.

The Socratic method is a series of philosophical arguments between parties in the dialogue, dispassionate, unemotive, and clinical, built on taking turns to put forward contentions and then tearing them down through critical analysis of the underlying presuppositions.  It begins by questioning the seemingly obvious, then defining things to oblivion.  The idea is that better hypotheses eliminate weaker ones, until reason prevails and we arrive at the truth.  The method is inimical to rhetorical devices and idiomatic speech.  Socrates at the dinner table would have been a pain to talk to.

The Mechanism, Step by Step

The Greek term for the core technique is elenchus, and it follows a recognisable sequence every time.  First, the interlocutor advances a thesis, a definition of what something is, not merely an example of it.  Second, Socrates secures agreement to a set of further premises the interlocutor independently accepts as true.  Third, he demonstrates, through valid inference, that these premises entail the negation of the original thesis, or contradict one another outright.  Fourth, the interlocutor is compelled to concede that the initial claim was false, or insufficiently defined to survive scrutiny.

Plato’s dialogue Euthyphro shows this mechanism in full.  Euthyphro claims piety is “what is dear to the gods.”  Socrates does not simply disagree.  He walks Euthyphro through the Greek gods’ own well-documented disagreements with one another, forcing the admission that what pleases one god may offend another, meaning the same act could be simultaneously pious and impious under Euthyphro’s own definition.  Euthyphro’s confident opening claim collapses under its own weight, not because Socrates argued him out of it, but because Socrates showed him the contradiction already sitting inside his own premises.

Aporia: The State the Method is Trying to Produce

The cumulative effect of a properly run elenchus is aporia, a state of puzzlement, an impasse in which the interlocutor recognises he does not actually know what he claimed to know.  This is not incidental discomfort.  It is the entire mechanism.  Plato later reframed the method as intellectual midwifery in the Theaetetus, describing Socrates as helping others give birth to ideas they already carried, rather than depositing new ones into them.  The method never installs a belief.  It exposes what was already unstable underneath a belief someone had never bothered to test.

Applied correctly, the method demands four disciplines most modern imitators skip entirely.  First, demand a definition, not an example.  Someone who answers “what is courage” with “running into a burning building” has given an instance, not a definition, and the conversation must return to the actual question before proceeding.  Second, secure agreement to premises one step at a time, never bundling several claims into a single question the other party can accept without examining each part.  Third, follow the logic to its actual conclusion, even where that conclusion contradicts the interlocutor’s original claim, rather than softening the contradiction to preserve comfort.  Fourth, resist the urge to supply the correct answer once the original claim collapses.  The method’s value lies in the interlocutor reconstructing a better answer himself, from the wreckage of the one that failed, not in receiving a replacement handed to him.

Modern applications confirm the method still works when applied honestly.  Dr. Aaron Temkin Beck, the psychiatrist who founded cognitive behavioural therapy, built Socratic questioning into his clinical training materials, instructing therapists to use questioning rather than indoctrination so that a patient’s changed belief becomes his own discovery rather than external instruction.  Research on this application has found Socratic questioning produces more durable cognitive change than direct challenge does.  American law schools adopted the label just as widely, though critics have documented the method there frequently degrading into managed conversation, where the professor already knows the answer and merely steers students toward it, discarding the risk of aporia that makes the original method work at all.

This Method Got a Man Executed

In 399 BCE, a jury of five hundred Athenian citizens voted to put Socrates to death for impiety and corrupting the youth.  The method had a body count before it ever had a formal pedagogy attached to it.  This was not an accident of poor delivery.  The elenchus was designed to make the person being questioned unable to continue pretending, and Athens, in the end, decided it would rather remove the man asking the questions than sit through the discomfort of answering them honestly.  Anyone applying this method properly today should expect a smaller version of the same reaction, because the method has never been comfortable, and comfort was never the point.

---

Terence Nunis, DTM | Division Advisor, District 80 Division M | Club Advisor, AIA Toastmasters | Past President & Founder, Awesome Toastmasters