Meaning
Taught, examined, or demolished by patient questioning - the method that proves you do not know what you thought you knew. A Socratic question is one that seems innocent and leaves a belief in pieces. Formal-educational register, with an admiring or a wary face depending on which side of the questioning one sits; the irony is the pretended ignorance that turns real. Regional use: General English; classical origin.
Origin
Socrates taught by asking. The technique the dialogues formalize is the elenchus, an argument of disproof: the interlocutor asserts a thesis, agrees to further premises, and watches them entail its opposite - Gregory Vlastos's reconstruction - while Michael Frede's caveat stands that refuting a claim proves only ignorance, not truth, and the dialogues end in aporia, the improved state of still not knowing. The motive was the Delphic oracle's verdict that no one was wiser than Socrates, joined to his profession of knowing nothing worthwhile; the aim, care of the soul, with a life unexamined not worth living; and his own figure for it, in the Theaetetus, midwifery - the questioner delivers other people's ideas, having none of his own. Diogenes Laertius gives the invention partly to Protagoras. The modern classroom keeps the lower-case habit alive in Socratic seminars, and law schools still use the weaponized form.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- Socratic irony
- Socratic questioning
- the Socratic method
Usage Examples
- The chair's Socratic opening - what exactly is a member? - consumed the agenda and two committee members.
- Her Socratic tutorials ended with students defending positions they had entered despising.
- Cross-examination turned Socratic: by the fourth definition of document, the witness doubted paper existed.