The Socratic Method: A Practitioner's Handbook

by Ward Farnsworth

The “devil’s advocate” originally referred to the person in the Catholic Church whose job was to point out flaws in a candidate for sainthood.

The one-witness principle. Another rule for Socratic practice: numbers count for nothing. Having a majority in favor of an opinion, or for that matter having the whole world in favor of it, doesn’t matter. The views that matter are those of the parties to the dialogue. A single witness to the truth is enough.

The one-witness idea serves several purposes. First, you can’t be expected to say what you think if you’re worried that the world won’t like it. The single-witness idea tries to keep such social pressure out of a dialogue by rule. Second, Socratic dialogue is supposed to rely on reasoning by the parties to it and nothing else. The one-witness rule keeps them from treating anyone else as a source of authority.

This is good general practice in a dialogue: try to help your partners, real or imagined, get clear about what they mean; and when their meaning isn’t clear, assume they’re smart, that they mean well, and that they’re saying things that make more sense rather than less.

That is a good test of Socratic progress: the extent of one’s inclination and ability to come up with strong objections to one’s own views, and indeed to do it better than one’s opponents can.

When he challenges a position, he generally challenges it in its strongest and most appealing form, and sometimes that means doing the other side’s job for them. Socrates, in short, runs toward the hard problems for his position. To state the point as practical advice for dialogue: consider the best case for your adversary or partner, not the best case for you.

The Socratic instinct in the self can operate the same way. In its caustic moments the Socratic function does some of the work of the fool or court jester in Shakespeare. Its job is to be offensive when the ego overrates itself. It pokes at self-importance and hubris when they need mockery; it looks long and hard for the emperor’s clothes and doesn’t find them. And it shows surprise and chagrin when the emperor is enraged.

We might call getting out of the cave a Socratic good: something assigned not much value (or maybe negative value) by those who haven’t done it, but regarded as very valuable once they have.