But Socrates also supplies a surefire method for “recovering” that knowledge lost at birth—to grasp truth as if we knew it all along. That is, through questioning and applying reason to the answers. This is the Socratic method, which Socrates used first to test our ignorance (“What is friendship?”) and then to present a solution to our ignorance. The Greek name for Socrates’s method is elenchus, which means a test or trial. Later, Plato elaborated the method into a formal procedure, a kind of sustained mental workout for the soul to prepare it to receive the truth, called the dialectic.
