Socrates




The "Socratic Problem"


Socrates lived in Athens from 470/469 until 399 BCE. He left no writings. But after his death (and perhaps before), many Greeks wrote "Socratic" works which featured him as a character. Most of those works are lost, except for those of Plato and Xenophon and some fragmentary texts of a few others.

Which brings us to the Socratic Problem: How do we know what Socrates, the historical character, really said and thought?

A case in point: Cf. Xen. Apology 1 and 2: Socratic "defiance." Was Socrates arrogant in his defense speech?

The Socratic Method


In modern English, the "Socratic Method" of teaching involves asking students questions to lead them to the right answer. It has the advantage that the students must provide the material from their own brains and arrive at the answer that way too. It has the disadvantage that it seems like a quiz or a test: the teacher knows the answers full well and is just leading the students by the nose. If it works for a teacher, it can be a good way to teach. Often, however, it does not. The crucial element for us is that the modern "Socratic Method" teacher knows the answers beforehand.

In Plato's dialogues, however, Socrates' "Method" is different. For Socrates claims that he does not know the answers to his own questions. The initial questions are almost invariably of the form, "What is X? Where X is "virtue," "piety," "bravery," "justice," or some other virtue.

What is more, in Plato's dialogues, the answer to such questions always involves a sort of knowledge. Being brave, for Socrates, is a type of knowledge. He simply does not have that knowledge, so he claims. The people he talks to claim to be brave, pious, just, etc., and so he asks them to teach him what bravery, piety, justice, etc. is.

In their efforts to teach him, they initially attempt to answer his question directly with an account of bravery, piety, justice, etc. Then Socrates asks them further questions. The answers to those further questions lead to a logical problem with their initial answer. And so they reject their initial answer and try again. By the end of the dialogue, they have reached a stage where they admit that they cannot answer the question to Socrates' satisfaction.

That process of testing an individual's answers is called "the elenchus" (Greek elenchein means "refute"), and so the dialogues that have conversations like that are called "elenctic" dialogues. The individual whose answers are being tested, Socrates' conversation partner, is called his "interlocutor." "Interlocutor" is synonymous with "conversation partner." When the interlocutor reaches the point that they realize and admit that they cannot answer Socrates' question to his satisfaction, they are said to be in "aporia" (Greek aporia means "no way out"). Plato's Socratic dialogues that end in aporia are called "aporetic" dialogues.

Let's take a typical elenctic argument. In the Euthyphro 6e and following, Socrates asks Euthyphro to teach him what piety is. Euthyphro says that being pious consists in "being beloved by the gods." Socrates is satisfied with the answer's form. He proceeds to ask questions. The argument can be summarized thus:

The question to ask now is what should the interlocutor do? If the interlocutor really believes both P and Q, then the interlocutor has contradictory beliefs. Contradictory beliefs may be acceptable in some areas, but in Socratic philosophy it is pretty clear that contradiction indicates that something is wrong. It is not clear to me that contradiction makes this argument wrong: maybe piety is relative. Socrates does not believe that, however, and yet never argues against it. What Euthyphro does is to reject P. He tries for a new answer. The new answer is shot down in much the same way.

So the elenchus is a way to test whether a given belief is consistent with other beliefs. It is assumed that the truth will be consistent. Invariably after the elenchus, the interlocutor rejects his initial belief P, whatever that belief is. But logically, he could reject Q and keep P.

An important question is whether one could ever do more than test the consistency of various claims using the elenchus. Could the elenchus do more than reject holding a certain set of beliefs at the same time? Could the elenchus tell you which beliefs are true?

It could if it were true that

  1. Everyone has in their belief system some true and some false beliefs.
  2. False beliefs inevitable lead to inconsistency.
  3. True beliefs are consistent with each other.

In that case, thru repeated applications of the elenchus, one could discover which sets of beliefs are consistent with each other and which are not. The elenchus could slowly winnow out the false beliefs and leave the true ones. But you would need to apply it to all sorts of belief sets and one could never be certain that one had not considered some belief or other that might work better. But one could certainly get a lot further along towards justified true belief than if one did not use the elenchus.

Back to the "Socratic Problem"



We cannot know with certainty that Socrates actually though of the elenchus in this fashion, because we cannot solve the "Socratic Problem." The elenchus as described above is found only in Plato, and then only in a certain small set of dialogues which are typically called the "early" or "Socratic" dialogues. One solution of the "Socratic Problem," one which I favor, not without some hesitation and not unaware that it is not without problems, is as follows.

To say the least, that picture is not without challengers, but most agree that the group of dialogues identified above does hang together as a group. They differ more in their explanations of the groupings than in their groupings. Some reject the notion that Aristotle is independent evidence, because he was never mainly concerned with historical accuracy and what is more, he may have formed his opinion mainly from Plato's own dialogues.

Socrates' Defense Speech(es)


First, know that "Apology" is from the Greek Apologia which means "defense (speech)."
Xenophon does not try to write the whole of Socrates' defense speech, but he tells us clearly that Socrates was glad of the opportunity to end his life at that point and saw no reason to defend himself in such as way as to be acquitted.

That is a despicable thing to do. The idea is that Socrates had only pain and suffering awaiting him (a questionable assumption) and so chose to use the jury as the instrument of his own death leaves Socrates in the wrong. The jury will have thought that they were punishing Socrates, perhaps justly, perhaps not. Socrates, on the other hand, believed that it was unjust for them to kill him. Thus by being defiant in his defense speech, he is inducing the jury to commit what he thinks is an injustice. Whether it is or is not wrong in actuality, whether morality exists or not independent of convention, on that account, Socrates thinks he is commiting an injustice and so is blameworthy. Xenophon is basing his account on hearsay, but if it is the true account, we should think far less of Socrates. For Socrates does not say that he is being a martyr: rather, he says that he thinks it is better FOR HIM to die now than later, and the trial is a convenient way to do it.

It may well be that Socrates did think that death at that point of his life was not a big deal and that dying might avert a good deal of pain and suffering, but if we are to find his death admirable, there must be a good deal more to his beliefs than that. And in Plato's account, there is. Namely, in Plato's account, although he is defiant, he takes principled stands on important issues and refuses to change or lie about his belief system in order to be acquitted. On Plato's account, I think he is a martyr. In Plato's account, he gave a defense speech honestly designed to secure an acquittal without compromising his belief system. Perhaps his manner of speaking was defiant, but being defiant is not blameworthy. If he gave his defense his best shot, and was nonetheless condemned largely because he refused to admit any wrongdoing and actually claimed to be benefitting Athens, then he is a martyr for his cause.

Plato's Apology



Plato's Apology divides into two halves, one that deals with the old accusers, and one that deals with the new accusers.

Following his defense speech itself, there is a speech proposing a penalty. Following that there is a short speech to the jury.

Highlights of the defense speech are:
1. Disavowal of knowledge (20c)
2. Explanation of how Soc. is wiser than others (20)
3. The Delphic Oracle and Socrates' mission to Athens (21): god has stationed me in Athens and I won't disobey god (28e)
4. Craftsmen-model of knowledge (22d)
5. Young people like watching him and imitating him (23c, 33c+39d)
6. Actual charges-24b
7. I never willingly do injustice-I am not corrupting the young intentionally and so don't deserve punishment-25d+37a
8. Refutation of belief in gods (26-he never says he believes in the gods of the city and is not introducing new gods)
9. Death has no bearing when it's a question of right or wrong (28b): fearing death is a species of ignorance (29b): fear injustice more.
10. No greater good has come to the city than my service to you (30a)
11. Putting me to death will harm you more than me: my accusers cannot harm me (and neither can you, seems to be implied) 30c-d.
12. my poverty shows that I am not doing this for my own gain (31d)
13. Why I did not enter politics (31c ff): divine sign (31c(+40b)): I would have been killed long ago! (32e)
14. None of the relations of the supposedly corrupted are coming forth to accuse me (33d)
15. A jury should be informed and persuaded, not begged (35c): I'd rather die that debase myself and you (38e)
16. If I had more time, I could convince you (37a)
17. Exile won't do (37d)
18. Death is one of two things (40c)
19. Nothing bad can happen to a good man (41d)


Socrates' Belief System


How can I possibly speak of a system of beliefs held by a man who said he did not know anything? Well, simply put, beliefs are not knowledge. So he can hold beliefs and honestly claim not to know anything.

And yet there is still a problem. Which Socrates am I talking about? I'll put my cards on the table and say that I am talking about the Socrates found as a character in Plato's dialogues. If you paid attention above, you will want to know "Which Socrates in Plato's dialogues?"

That is a sticky question, but given my preferred solution to the Socratic Problem, I am dealing with the Socrates who is a character in the dialogues that hang together as a group including the Apology, Euthyphro, Laches, Ion, Hippias Major, and to some extent the Gorgias, Meno, Lysis, and Protagoras and even book I of the Republic.

Given that these are all individual works, how can I be so bold as to think that I can find a belief system by using evidence from more than one dialogue? Don't they all form their own separate little worlds that are not in any way explicitly connected? No, they don't: one author wrote them, and he used the same character. So they are explicitly connected, but not tightly.

What about the fact that the ones that I am most certain are "Socratic" and "early" are aporetic? If they end in ignorance, how can I claim to find systems of beliefs in them? Well, look at Euthyphro 14c, where Socrates says that Euthyphro just about gave the answer. That means that Socrates must have a good idea what the answer is. It seems likely to be a hint that Plato has hidden the answer somewhere in the dialogue. He has given us all the parts to what he thinks the answer is, and is challenging us to construct an answer for ourselves. That is extremely important to Socrates: that one find the answer on one's own, because if one does not do the hard work of figuring out the answer and figuring out that it is the answer, one does not know it really, or so I think Socrates believes.

In any case, when we fiddle around with the various elements of the early Socratic dialogues, we find a remarkably coherent picture in some important but carefully limited areas. We find the Socrates thinks that virtue is knowledge, that it is teachable, that it is within the grasp of most humans' intellect, that one must have that knowledge in order to be truly virtuous, that all the individual virtues are all part of a whole (i.e. that virtue is one single thing: knowledge of good and bad), that knowing what is right is sufficient for doing it, that one cannot know what is right and not do it, etc. He also denies that he knows the answers to his most pressing questions about virtue and how to live his life (Ap. 20c)

In other words, I think the early Socrates in Plato has a remarkable and interesting ethical philosophy that is worth paying attention to.

Socratic Definitions



What is Socrates searching for? We might call it a definition, but it is not like a dictionary definition. A dictionary definition is simply this: a phrase that is substitutable for the word in question and uses words other than the word in question to identify the meaning of the word in question. The dictionary definer does not ever ask if the definition is the truth. Rather, she will happily define words like "unicorn," "dragon," "lysenkoism" (a false theory of evolution), "phlogiston" (a key term in a false theory of chemistry), etc. There is no problem with such definitions. Their correctness is determined by whether they are 1) substitutable without changes for the word in all of its ordinary uses, and 2) accurate reflections of what people intend to say when they use the word.

The Socratic definition, by contrast, is an account of a term that goes far beyond the word as simply a linguistic artefact. Socrates wants to talk about the reality behind the word, and he wants an interlocutor who can not only give a clear and accurate account of that thing behind the word, but can go on to answer many questions about the account and interlace it with his or her other beliefs.

Thus the first step is to give the account. Then the interlocutor has to be able to explain the account. To be sure, part of what Socrates wants is that the account not use any words that are themselves hard to understand. But he also wants the interlocutor to be able to show how the account is consistent with the interlocutors' other beliefs.

Another way to approach what Socrates wants is to look at the formal requirements he places on it: at Euthyphro 6d, Socrates asks for the form of piety which makes all pious things pious. What is it that all pious things share that is the one thing that makes them pious. He wants the reason why they are pious.

That formal requirement identifies what is called a "universal" in ancient philosophy. It is "the one over many." It is one thing that applies to many things. Note that Socrates never says where that one thing is: is it in each pious thing? Is it complete in each pious thing? or is it separate from them? Does it exist somewhere or somehow else apart from the many pious things?

The Euthyphro is the first text we have that identifies with some care the logical requirements for a universal. It is also related somehow to Platonic Forms, but saying how is not easy.

When Euthyphro says that the pious is the god-beloved, that is an extremely interesting point: did god give the ten commandments because they are right (whether god says so or not) or did his saying so make them right? I.e. is morality a divinely sanctioned convention or does it have some reality to it that even gods must respect? Socrates clearly thinks that piety is what it is independently of what the gods say it is or what anyone else says it is. It is a thing that really exists.

Euthyphro's first answer, that piety is this act and that act and that other act, etc. was not satifactory, because it did not identify the one thing that all pious things share. But in a sense, Euthyphro's answer was eminently practical and potentially perfectly accurate. If I ask you to teach me what a bird is, because I, for whatever reason, have never seen one, your first instinct is to point to a bird. And it may be the only fully accurate way to identify what a bird really is.