SOCRATES' METHODS

The early dialogues present Socrates in conversation with various people – sophists, religious experts, generals, old friends and new adversaries. Socrates insistently questions his interlocutors, about what they are doing and why. He asks because he wants to know and because he claims to be ignorant himself. Ironically he commends his interlocutor's expertise and then, by careful analysis, shows his interlocutor to be in an even worse cognitive case. For when the interlocutor defines some ethical notion Socrates elicits from him a whole collection of his sincere beliefs and assumptions, and then shows that those beliefs are inconsistent with the proposed definition. This, famously, results in dismay, irritation, even apoplectic horror on the part of the interlocutor.

You can see why they gave Socrates the hemlock. His methods are not only maddening for his victims; they also seem pretty destructive. For showing a set of propositions inconsistent shows that at least one of them must be false; but it does not show which one. The elenchus does not seem to offer positive progress unless the exposure of inconsistency is itself positive (e.g. Gorgias 482b–c). So the elenchus may be barren and negative. Matters may be made worse when Socrates insists that he knows nothing anyway (e.g. Apology 21b–c; Euthyphro 5a–b; Charmides 165b–c). Why does he do that? Does he intend to undermine anything his interlocutor believes, and thus save him from the horrors of doxosophy? Then Socrates' arguments may be therapeutic; but are they any more productive than sophistry? Or does Socrates have some knowledge himself which protects the argument from the waste of scepticism? If he does, how is that knowledge immune from the elenchus?