Instead, after stumbling across some rhetoric books that extolled Socrates’ method of building an argument through gentle queries, he “dropped my abrupt contradiction” style of argument and “put on the humbler enquirer” of the Socratic method. By asking what seemed to be innocent questions, Franklin would draw people into making concessions that would gradually prove whatever point he was trying to assert. “I found this method the safest for myself and very embarrassing to those against whom I used it; therefore, I took a delight in it.” Although he later abandoned the more annoying aspects of
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