The Socratic Method: A Practitioner's Handbook

by Ward Farnsworth

Socrates didn’t question people in order to teach us how to question people. He did it to teach us how to think.

Socrates sets out rules for engaging in dialogue. This chapter looks at some of them: trying to find the truth, rather than trying to win; examining people, not just claims; judging arguments on their merits regardless of who makes them; candor, or saying what you think; the one-witness principle—that is, treating the other party to the dialogue as the judge of what it has shown; the principle of charity; and not giving or taking offense.

Rules taken lightly. Some of the rules that Socrates offers can be described as “rules” only with unease, because Socrates himself has an uneasy relationship to rules. He makes them and breaks them. He tells his partners not to make long speeches, then he makes a long speech.1 He uses some bad arguments, giving rise to debate later about whether he did it on purpose.2 He seems earnest; he seems disingenuous. He brings irony to philosophy and then dies for philosophy. Either Socrates and Plato or both had a taste for fun, for slyness, for the side of the self that isn’t all direct and sober in the way that Socrates seems at first.

This ability to contain opposites is part of the Socratic spirit. Literary, philosophical, and other powers come from movement between polarities, not from either one of them alone. Philosophy in the Socratic style is an example. It is high-stakes and also playful, and therein lies much of its appeal. Emerson’s take:

But if some of the rules of Socratic dialogue sometimes seem made to be broken, they’re useful anyway. They contain wisdom. They are policies with reasons behind them, and understanding the reasons is a help toward better thinking. You just have to remember that the Socratic method also has another strain that sometimes takes its own rules lightly.

Seeking the truth (dialectic vs. eristic). The Socratic method, as originally understood, is a search for truth, not a debating exercise. The first of those approaches is sometimes described by Socrates as dialectic—as opposed to eristic argument carried out for sport or for the sake of winning.

socrates. Youngsters, as you may have observed, when they first get the taste in their mouths, argue for amusement, and are always contradicting and refuting others in imitation of those who refute them; like puppy-dogs, they rejoice in pulling and tearing at all who come near them.… But when a man begins to get older, he will no longer be guilty of such insanity; he will imitate the dialectician who is seeking for truth, and not the eristic, who is contradicting for the sake of amusement; and the greater moderation of his character will increase instead of diminishing the honor of the pursuit. Republic 539bd

Socratic dialogues can themselves seem eristic; readers sometimes come away with the sense that Socrates will make any argument to knock down the other side’s claim. Socrates or Plato or both of them were probably criticized for having that tendency, rightly or wrongly, since we see it come up in the texts. Critias makes that kind of charge against Socrates: