The Socratic Method Quotes

“I myself don’t know the facts of these matters, but I’ve never met anyone, including the people here today, who could disagree with what I’m saying and still avoid making himself ridiculous.”
― Ward Farnsworth, The Socratic Method: A Practitioner's Handbook

“If we treat Socrates as an internalized feature of the mind, then this is its first and constant order of business: uprooting false conceits of knowledge.”
― Ward Farnsworth, The Socratic Method: A Practitioner's Handbook

“A stupid man’s report of what a clever man says is never accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something that he can understand.”
― Ward Farnsworth, The Socratic Method: A Practitioner's Handbook

“socrates. Renouncing the honors at which the world aims, I desire only to know the truth, and to live as well as I can, and, when I die, to die as well as I can. And, to the utmost of my power, I exhort all other men to do the same. Gorgias 526de”
― Ward Farnsworth, The Socratic Method: A Practitioner's Handbook

“He played the philosopher while joking with you, perhaps, or drinking with you, or possibly campaigning with you, or at market with you, and finally when he was in prison and drinking the poison. He was thus the first to show that life affords scope for philosophy at every moment, in every detail, in every feeling and circumstance whatsoever.”
― Ward Farnsworth, The Socratic Method: A Practitioner's Handbook

“Renouncing the honors at which the world aims, I desire only to know the truth, and to live as well as I can, and, when I die, to die as well as I can. And, to the utmost of my power, I exhort all other men to do the same.”
― Ward Farnsworth, The Socratic Method: A Practitioner's Handbook

“Aporia can not only prepare you to learn but make you want to learn.4 It feels frustrating. In effect Socrates says: good—now get going on the search for an answer, this time with a better sense of the work it takes. You are made hungry for knowledge by discovering how little you have.”
― Ward Farnsworth, The Socratic Method: A Practitioner's Handbook

“The majority of mankind would need to be much better cultivated than has ever yet been the case, before they can be asked to place such reliance in their own power of estimating arguments, as to give up practical principles in which they have been born and bred and which are the basis of much of the existing order of the world, at the first argumentative attack which they are not capable of logically resisting.3”
― Ward Farnsworth, The Socratic Method: A Practitioner's Handbook

“The doings of Sherlock Holmes are better recorded by a Watson than by another Holmes.”
― Ward Farnsworth, The Socratic Method: A Practitioner's Handbook

“The ancient Romans built elaborate networks of pipes to deliver water where they wanted it to go. The networks were a marvel. But many of the pipes were made of lead, and the water carried the lead along with it. One school of thought regards this as part of the reason for the decline and fall of Rome: lead poisoning gradually took its toll, impairing the thought and judgment of many Romans, especially at the top. The theory is much disputed; perhaps it contains no truth. But as a metaphor it is irresistible. We have built networks for the delivery of information—the internet, and especially social media. These networks, too, are a marvel. But they also carry a kind of poison with them. The mind fed from those sources learns to subsist happily on quick reactions, easy certainties, one-liners, and rage. It craves confirmation and resents contradiction. Attention spans collapse; imbecility propagates, then seems normal, then is celebrated. The capacity for rational discourse between people who disagree gradually rots. I have a good deal more confidence in the lead-pipe theory of the internet, and its effect on our culture, than in the lead-pipe theory of the fall of Rome.”
― Ward Farnsworth, The Socratic Method: A Practitioner's Handbook

“socrates. There’s one proposition that I’d defend to the death, if I could, by argument and by action: that as long as we think we should search for what we don’t know, we’ll be better people—less faint-hearted and less lazy—than if we were to think that we had no chance of discovering what we don’t know and that there’s no point in even searching for it. Meno 86bc”
― Ward Farnsworth, The Socratic Method: A Practitioner's Handbook

“Why does Socrates use so many analogies? First, he is trying to get his partners to think hard in unaccustomed ways. Analogies make the process seem more familiar. He draws comparisons to everyday things and activities—to cobblers and clay. These images give relief from abstraction and create some comfort. They also suggest that anyone can do this, not just specialists. Socrates says: talk the way you are used to talking about the things you know, but do it while thinking about things that are larger.”
― Ward Farnsworth, The Socratic Method: A Practitioner's Handbook

“People rarely feel as though they’re in caves. They don’t notice until they’ve gotten out and can look back. (The simplest way to illustrate this for yourself is to think about what a fool your younger self was.) So it helps to have provocations that suggest how much we don’t understand but might. To put it more plainly, nobody walks through life feeling like an idiot, though you can no doubt think of plenty of people who fit that description, and it fits all of us from a certain point of view. Idiocy is a relative state and an invisible one to its occupant. People vary widely in how much wisdom they have, but not in their sense of how much they have; anyone’s felt sense of wisdom at any given time tends to be high and stable. It’s tempting to describe that feeling as a constant in the workings of the mind, because that is how it usually seems—but Socrates himself shows that it can vary between people. So let’s just call that sensation of one’s own wisdom a deceptive, insidious, and stubborn feature of human nature. This is the root of the problem that Socrates means to address; it is the master mistake that makes all other mistakes more likely, over a lifetime and by the hour. The Socratic method is a way to correct for it.”
― Ward Farnsworth, The Socratic Method: A Practitioner's Handbook

“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.”
― Ward Farnsworth, The Socratic Method: A Practitioner's Handbook

“the unexamined life is not worth living,”
― Ward Farnsworth, The Socratic Method: A Practitioner's Handbook

“On a Socratic view it’s never time to give up. We do better by accepting that the search probably has no end but going on anyway as if it might. For even if you can’t possess the truth, you can get closer to it.”
― Ward Farnsworth, The Socratic Method: A Practitioner's Handbook

“Aporia is a form of it.”
― Ward Farnsworth, The Socratic Method: A Practitioner's Handbook

“The ancient Romans built elaborate networks of pipes to deliver water where they wanted it to go. The networks were a marvel. But many of the pipes were made of lead, and the water carried the lead along with it. One school of thought regards this as part of the reason for the decline and fall of Rome: lead poisoning gradually took its toll, impairing the thought and judgment of many Romans, especially at the top. The theory is much disputed; perhaps it contains no truth. But as a metaphor it is irresistible. We have built networks for the delivery of information—the internet, and especially social media. These networks, too, are a marvel. But they also carry a kind of poison with them. The mind fed from those sources learns to subsist happily on quick reactions, easy certainties, one-liners, and rage. It craves confirmation and resents contradiction. Attention spans collapse; imbecility propagates, then seems normal, then is celebrated. The capacity for rational discourse between people who disagree gradually rots.”
― Ward Farnsworth, The Socratic Method: A Practitioner's Handbook