In the fifth century BC, a friend of Socrates asked the Oracle of Delphi whether anyone in Greece was wiser, and the oracle said no one was. Socrates, convinced he knew nothing, set out to prove the oracle wrong by questioning Athenian politicians, poets and supposed wise men. His approach was a direct alternative to the Sophists, paid teachers of rhetoric who trained young noblemen to win arguments rather than find truth. In Plato’s Theaetetus, Socrates calls his method midwifery, the maieutic method, helping others give birth to ideas already inside them. Its engine is the elenchus, a cross-examination that exposes contradictions, as when a definition of courage as never retreating collapses against a feigned retreat used to set an ambush. The usual result is aporia, a state of puzzlement.
Scholars disagree on the point: Gregory Vlastos saw the elenchus as proving a thesis false, Michael Frede argued that disproving one thesis does not prove another, and W. K. C. Guthrie held that it aimed to expose ignorance. Socrates, the gadfly of Athens, was tried and executed. The method survived in Socratic seminars, where teachers step back and students question ambiguous texts, and in psychotherapy, including Adlerian therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy and logotherapy, where therapists use guided questions to challenge beliefs such as I always fail at everything. Europe has also seen a movement of philosophical counseling.
- Diogenes Laertius claimed that Protagoras used the questioning method before Socrates, though Plato gave it its familiar form.
- In the fishbowl format, an inner circle discusses a text while a silent outer circle takes notes and later gives feedback.
- In the triad format, a pilot speaks while two co-pilots behind them can confer during pauses or swap seats.
- Seminar texts can include photographs, sculptures, maps and even the layout of a public park.
- Peter Boghossian warned that misapplying the method can induce shame, ridicule and humiliation in students.
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