The Socratic method explained

Most teachers explain first and ask questions afterwards. The Socrates we meet in Plato does the opposite: he says he does not know, and asks the other person to explain. Such a conversation is a διάλογος, and these are its usual steps:

• The question. Socrates asks what something is: τί ἐστι; What is courage? What is ἀρετή, excellence?
• The answer. The other person offers a ὁρισμός, a definition, and often feels sure of it.
• The test. Through small questions, Socrates finds a case that the answer does not fit, or a clash with something the person has already agreed. This test is the ἔλεγχος.
• A new try. The person changes the answer, and the test begins again.
• The dead end. Often nobody reaches a final answer. This state of being stuck is ἀπορία.

Being stuck is not failure here. Socrates says he seems a little wiser than a man who wrongly thinks he knows, because «ἃ μὴ οἶδα οὐδὲ οἴομαι εἰδέναι», what I do not know, I do not think I know either (Apology 21d).

In Plato's Laches, Socrates asks: «ἀνδρεία τί ποτʼ ἐστίν», what ever is courage? (190d). Laches thinks this is easy: a brave man stays in the ranks, fights the enemy and does not run away (190e).

Socrates agrees that such a man is brave, then offers cases that do not fit. The Scythians are said to fight as well in retreat as in pursuit (191a). Laches answers that this is cavalry, so Socrates mentions the Spartan foot soldiers at Plataea, who, people say, fell back and then turned to fight (191b–c). And people can also be brave at sea, in illness, in poverty and in politics (191d).

So the first answer was too narrow. Laches tries again, then Nicias tries, and both answers fail. Near the end Socrates concludes: «οὐκ ἄρα ηὑρήκαμεν … ἀνδρεία ὅτι ἔστιν», so we have not found what courage is (199e). The Euthyphro follows a similar path: there, what is tested is piety, through about five attempted definitions.

In the Meno, Meno complains that Socrates is like the flat sea fish νάρκη, the electric ray, which numbs anyone who touches it: he has spoken about ἀρετή many times, and now cannot even say what it is (80a–b). Socrates replies that he makes others feel ἀπορία because he feels it himself (80c–d). He then questions a slave boy of Meno's household about doubling a square. The boy feels sure, gets stuck, and only then wants to find out; Socrates and Meno agree that the numbing did him good (84a–c).

In the Theaetetus, Socrates says that his mother, Φαιναρέτη, was a μαῖα, a midwife, and that he practises her art on souls (149a–150c). He claims no wisdom of his own: he helps others bring ideas to birth, and tests whether each is real or false (150c). His art is called μαιευτική (161e), the source of the term maieutics.

In the Gorgias he contrasts two kinds of ἔλεγχος. In the courts, a side brings many witnesses, and this, he says, is worth nothing for the truth (471e–472a). His own kind needs one witness: the person he is talking to (475e–476a).

Socrates left no writings, so everything we know is second-hand and much of it is disputed. Aristophanes mocks him in the Clouds; Xenophon and Plato portray him in different ways; Plato's pupil Aristotle credits him with two things, inductive arguments and general definitions (Metaphysics 1078b). «The Socratic method» therefore usually means Socrates as Plato wrote him.

The sharpest debate is about εἰρωνεία. Thrasymachus cries out «αὕτη ʼκείνη ἡ εἰωθυῖα εἰρωνεία Σωκράτους», there it is, Socrates' usual εἰρωνεία, because he will not answer (Republic 337a). Alcibiades says that he spends his whole life εἰρωνευόμενος καὶ παίζων, playing a game with people (Symposium 216e). Aristotle takes the εἴρων as someone who understates, and names Socrates (Nicomachean Ethics 1127b). Plato's Socrates, though, insists that he knows nothing of real value (Apology 21d), and says that the jury will not believe him, thinking him εἰρωνευόμενος (38a). Was his ignorance a mask, or honest? Scholars disagree.

They also ask what the ἔλεγχος can prove. Gregory Vlastos held that it could reach positive results; others think it only shows that a person's beliefs do not fit together.