## Definition **The Socratic Method** (also called *elenchus*) is a form of cooperative philosophical inquiry in which one interlocutor — typically Socrates — asks a series of probing questions that expose the hidden contradictions or unjustified assumptions in the other's stated beliefs. The goal is not to transmit knowledge but to produce awareness of one's own ignorance as the first step toward genuine understanding. ## How It Works Socrates typically begins by asking his interlocutor for a definition of some concept taken to be obvious — justice, piety, courage, beauty. The interlocutor supplies a confident answer. Socrates then produces a counter-example or draws out an implication that the proposed definition cannot accommodate. Warburton illustrates this with the exchange between Socrates and Euthydemus over whether deception is always immoral: Socrates shows that stealing a knife from a suicidal friend constitutes a beneficial deception, thereby defeating the simple generalisation. The interlocutor, now confounded, is invited to revise the definition, and the process continues. ## Intellectual Context Socrates positioned himself against the Sophists — professional teachers who, he believed, trained pupils in persuasive rhetoric rather than genuine argument. For Socrates, authority, prestige, and eloquence confer no epistemic weight; only well-constructed argument does. He famously wrote nothing; all his ideas reach us through the dialogues of his pupil Plato. ## The Oracle and "Knowing You Do Not Know" The method's deeper motivation is epistemic humility. According to the tradition recorded by Plato, the oracle at Delphi proclaimed Socrates the wisest of men. Socrates interpreted this as meaning not that he knew more than others, but that he alone knew the limits of his knowledge. Wisdom, on this view, begins with the recognition of ignorance — the very condition his questioning was designed to produce. ## Legacy The Socratic Method shaped the Western tradition of philosophy as dialogue and argument rather than revelation or tradition. It is the direct ancestor of the dialectical method in logic, the Socratic seminar in pedagogy, and the adversarial structure of legal cross-examination. Warburton closes the book by evoking the spirit of Socrates in contemporary "gadfly" philosophers such as Peter Singer, who likewise make people uncomfortable with their complacent moral assumptions. ## Related - [[Plato's Theory of Forms]] - [[Aristotelian Virtue Ethics]] ## Sources - [[A Little History of Philosophy (Warburton 2011)]]