I. Use of the dialogue as a literary form
A. Common literary form among many other classical authors for moral and political ideas
B. Attractive to Plato as a dramatist
II. Elenchos- Socratic method- can be translated as refutation, examination, inquiry. He never refers to himself as using a specific method
III. His method is orderly:
A. Adversarial- declines to state his own thesis, but asks to examine the interlocutor’s thesis (who usually claims this knowledge!)
B. Questions are not at random
C. Socrates has a variety of standards that he proposes to measure a premise against
D. Interlocutors must say only what they believe
E. Both must seek adequate definitions first
F. Then seek applications/extensions, not just examples
G. Socrates makes no claim of knowledge himself (we’ll discuss more when we discuss the subject of irony)
H. Can’t explicate what he’s looking for; can’t teach (more to be discussed later)
I. No intent to deceive, to merely show up the loser- by the nature of elencthus, he can only find the truth if he can show the interlocutor how his truths don’t hang together
IV. He examines lives, not just propositions- “the unexamined life is not worth living”
V. Tries to reach constructive results-finds his interlocutors not to know what they think they know BUT finds his way closer to an adequate definition
VI. More than just finding error: purge his interlocutor of pretenses of wisdom, undertake to find what kinds of beliefs are necessary for a happy life, test and refine definitions, deliberate about right action, even exhort.
VII. Not just to destroy the interlocutor’s conceit of knowledge, but to worm it out of them- show them that it doesn’t follow from their own premises- “say what you believe”- he expects to turn up true, more fundamental beliefs that entail the negation of what they first stated
VIII. Such a truth-seeking device cannot yield certainty, for one can’t be certain that the interlocutor does have a more fundamental and true moral belief- the solution to the paradox of Socrates’ “irony” and his claim not to have knowledge. The moral truth was always in his interlocutors- just needed the elencthus to allow both S and his interlocutor to arrive at it.