Key Elements of the Socratic Method
- It’s obvious to anyone who has read at least one dialogue that Socrates begins with questions.
- He treats questions not as a challenge, but as an act of friendship.
- If you treasure friendship, ask hard questions and help the person whom you are asking either refute the claim or go deeper.
- It requires courage to act and forfeit any claim to expertise. But let’s not forget that by displaying courage, we frame it as a form of knowledge, and by doing so, know even less.
- So, back to Socrates. The entrance point to any dialogue is a question and an answer.
- Questions are of different kinds: open and directed, the type when he asks if his partner agrees with him or not.
- Hence, instead of a lecture, we have a conversation that is difficult to call an argument because Socrates obtains his partner’s consent at every turn of the conversation.
- After Socrates has set the stage and created conditions for productive inquiry, he turns his attention to the consistency of his partners and their claims.
- He probes the consistency of a claim by the device known as the elenchus.
- His partner makes a claim, and Socrates leads the conversation in such a manner that his partner agrees to something else, inconsistent with the initial claim.
- He creates a situation which requires either refinement of the claim or outright abandonment.
- Socrates doesn’t state in this situation that the partner is wrong; the partner himself comes to this conclusion.
- He starts simply, with the question: “Can we agree that the following idea is true?” and when the partner agrees, after enough probing, that the previous claim wasn’t quite right, they together look for another approach.
- The next stage tests the principle behind what a partner is saying.
- After that, he looks for something that doesn’t align with the principle, or sometimes covers something that it shouldn’t.
- The fourth stage is where examples are used as a battering ram to drive Socrates’ reasoning. The examples usually include everyday situations.
- And in some instances, they illustrate conceptual points that weren’t seen before.
- Analogies are also a great way to demonstrate how things are familiar and how they aren’t.
- He tries by any means at his disposal to address bigger issues with specific cases that are easy to imagine, like the Feynman technique.
- Lastly, Socrates often concludes dialogues, claiming that he is not an expert but an actual amateur, creating a state of impasse, leaving his partner without an answer but with plenty to digest.
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Source:: The Socratic Method - Ward Farnsworth Friend:: Child:: Next:: Think you don’t know when you know, and be uncertain when you are certain
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