Socrates real method is an outcome of his discovery and practice of a fundamental principle of reason: Arguments are only as strong as their strongest criticism. The acceptance and practice of this principle implies that your intellectual opponents and enemies are actually your greatest friends. This reversal of traditional Athenian morality, which called for you to keep your friends close and your enemies at a maximal disadvantage, is the cornerstone of the entire Western intellectual tradition. It is the foundation of the university, with Plato's Academy being its first tangible institutional fruit.
Socrates recognition of this principle guided his entire life. He spent all his time (or so we are told) pursuing interlocutors with whom he could practice the quid pro quo suggested by his principle. He criticized others' arguments for their most deeply held beliefs in the hope that they would return the favour.
Yet, traditional descriptions of "the Socratic Method" often leave this last part out. Instead they emphasize only the former part of the method, in which Socrates poses probing questions that discomfit and confuse his discussion partners. These descriptions limit his aim to the attempt to promote self-reflection and self-criticism in the minds of his interlocutors. The result is the belief, as one of my colleagues once put, that the heart of Socrates' method and the discipline of Philosophy as a whole is to learn how to be "a professional pain in the ass." This turns Socrates into an insufferable know-it-all or mere provocateur, and completely betrays his personal mottos of "gnÅthi sauton" (know thyself) and that the only thing he truly knew was "that he knew nothing."
I'm not sure what this core principle of Socrates should be called. One can find on the Net one suggestion: "The Rubuttal Principle." As a standard piece of logic advice goes:
"Check for rebuttals: Does the argument effectively address the strongest counterarguments? "
the author continues:
"Some ways that arguments can fail to meet the Rebuttal principle include: Misrepresenting the criticism, Bringing up trivial objections, Using humor or ridicule, Ignoring or denying counterevidence, and Attacking the critic instead of the criticism."
It is very difficult to imagine the full-scale cultural embrace of this principle in European intellectual traditions without the influence of classical Periclean Athens (and its public assembly with a requirement for voters' attendance at debates) and of Socrates. His rejection of the Sophists and their techniques for winning debates makes no sense without recognition of something like this principle.
The Sophists were certainly not above (or so we are told by Plato) using many of the techniques listed above. But for Socrates Rebuttal Principle was clearly more than a piece of sage logical advice. It was not a mere question regarding argument formation. It was a call to action "Go find the strongest counter arguments!" Could there ever be an end to such a search? The true recognition of this principle puts one on a perpetual quest, a quest tilted towards engaging your intellectual enemies, and away from your intellectual friends and supporters. This tilt is what ultimately led to his death. Clearly someone who did not frequently challenge people of a different mind on things would not have ended up having to drink hemlock. It is a dangerous and even a deadly principle.
Part of what made it so deadly was that Socrates clearly felt that it could not be practiced at a distance (at least permanently). Apparently he could write, but he was not a "man of letters." Instead, he chose to prioritize face-to-face discourse. There are obvious advantages to this approach. It is certainly more difficult to misrepresent, trivialize, ridicule or deny your opponent, when they are standing right in front of you, listening. In his practice of this principle there is a warning for our mediated age. You attenuate yourselves from your enemies at your peril.
Clearly, media today are not "broadcast" but "narrowcast." That is to say as Marshall McLuhan put it, "In the electric age, when our central nervous system is technologically extended to involve us in the whole of mankind … the globe is no more than a village" (1964, p. 5). The "new media" do away with traditional "broadcasting", which only work by reaching out to broad general audiences from central points (newspapers, radio, TV). These old media structurally tended towards creating forms of "virtual agora/assembly" through competition between a limited number of these points. This necessity of their very structure and operation encouraged forms of quality control, professional editorial curation (the role played by "moderators" in real group discussions), which allowed for the convening of accessible but not chaotic broad-based public discourse. Instead, with the new media you have "all margins" and "point to point" communication that tends to create only loosely interconnected parochial networks "like villages", in which you have possibilities for the force of conventionalism to bear down on participants, while also providing endless possibilities for the creation of fragmented sub-groups and cliques ("echo chambers"). McLuhan used the phrase "village" to raise all the specters of "a place anyone with a right mind wishes to escape from", rather than misty nostalgia of the "there's no place like home" type. Socrates would agree, and would undoubtedly eschew all the pseudo forms of "engagement" that social media create, and instead head downtown, to engage with his fellow citizens, for real.
