The Socratic Method: A Practitioner's Handbook

by Ward Farnsworth

If you were questioned by Socrates, he would eventually convince you that nothing you say is good enough. After getting the hang of Socratic thinking, you may reach the same conclusion yourself. Any statement you make about a big question can be revealed as wrong, incomplete, or otherwise inadequate in some way. This discovery can ultimately lead to a sense of skepticism (see chapter 16). But most immediately it leads to aporia (pronounced ap-or-ee-ah). Aporia is a kind of impasse; literally it means “without a way.” It is the state reached when your attempts to say something true have all been refuted and you don’t know what else to do or think. Sometimes it is described as a state of mind—a sense of disorientation and perplexity; but strictly speaking those states are a reaction to the impasse. They are what you feel when you run out of resources for answering a question.