The Ancient Technique That Changes Minds

The Socratic Method: Why Socrates Is Remembered for His Method, Not His Answers

Socrates questions Euthyphro outside the Stoa Basileios, or Porch of the King Archon, in Athens.

Article substantially revised on 4 August 2026.

Socrates is often called ‘the father of philosophy’. Yet unlike Plato, Aristotle, or Kant, he left no books, no philosophical system, and scarcely any positive doctrines such as Plato’s Forms and Aristotle’s Four Causes. Instead, he is remembered above all for a method of thinking, questioning, and undermining.

This method, known as the Socratic method or method of elenchus, might seem disarmingly simple. Instead of asserting, contradicting, and correcting, Socrates asked apparently innocent questions. Instead of lecturing or teaching, he enquired. Instead of telling people what to think, he led them, rather like a modern therapist, to discover for themselves that they knew far less than they had imagined.

But how did Socrates arrive at this extraordinary way of testing, teaching, and philosophising? According to his student Plato, the answer lies in a remarkable visit to the Oracle of Delphi.

The Oracle of Delphi

The story goes that Socrates had a characterful friend called Chaerephon who went to Delphi and boldly asked the oracle to tell him whether there was anyone wiser than Socrates. Astonishingly, the oracle replied that there was no one wiser, leaving Socrates, who knew only that he knew nothing, perplexed.

To discover the meaning of the oracle, Socrates questioned several supposedly wise people—first the politicians, then the poets, and then the artisans—and in each case concluded: ‘I am likely to be wiser than he to this small extent, that I do not think I know what I do not know.’ Socrates was the wisest of all people not because he knew everything or anything, but because he knew what he did not know.

From then on, Socrates dedicated himself to the service of the gods by seeking out anyone who might be wise and, ‘if he is not, showing him that he is not.’ As a result, he acquired a reputation for wisdom and a following among young men of the richer classes, who began to imitate him. But he also earnt the enmity of those whom he had exposed, and of those who stood beside them.

Plato paints the oracle story as the turning point in Socrates’ career. By validating his skeptical stance to the philosophers who came before, it gave him the confidence, and the impetus, to develop his own, distinct manner and method of doing philosophy.

But is the oracle story even true, or is it just another of Plato’s myths? The oracle story conveniently serves to frame Socrates, who had been put to death as a heretic and corrupter of youths, as having been on a noble, divinely inspired mission, attached by the gods to Athens as upon a great horse which ‘needed to be stirred up by a kind of gadfly’. In favour of the story being true is that it is also related by Xenophon, who knew Socrates well, although in his version the oracle replies that there is no one more just (rather than wiser) than Socrates.

The Socratic Method

Plato might also have intended the oracle story as a sort of origin myth for the Socratic method, or method of elenchus.

But although Socrates may have perfected the method of elenchus, it is unlikely that he originated a mode of conversation that seems so naturally and fundamentally human. For instance, in Plato’s Parmenides, the much older Parmenides himself uses the method of elenchus on Socrates to undermine Plato’s Theory of the Forms. But it remains that while the sophists of his day tried to make a show of their knowledge, Socrates tried to make a show of his and everyone else’s ignorance.

The method of elenchus, especially as employed by Socrates, consists in questioning one or more people about a certain concept such as justice or virtue with the aim of exposing a contradiction in their initial assumptions and provoking a reappraisal of the concept. As the process is iterative, it leads to an increasingly precise or refined definition of the concept, and, in due course, to a shared recognition that it eludes our understanding—and hence that we know far less than we thought we did.

People rarely change their minds because someone tells them otherwise. They are more likely to change their minds when they discover, for themselves, that their own beliefs are inconsistent.

With our initial dogmatism transmuted into a state of puzzlement and suspended judgment, we are ready to become much more open and subtle thinkers—assuming, of course, that we have not first become angry and resentful.

Socratic Irony

Strictly speaking, the Socratic method is broader than the method of elenchus. Elenchus is the process of questioning and refuting by which Socrates exposes contradictions in his interlocutors’ beliefs. But it is only one of several techniques that he employs. Others include Socratic irony, in which he feigns ignorance while quietly steering the conversation; the search for rigorous definitions, by which he moves from examples to essences; and the so-called maieutic (‘midwifery’) method. In Plato’s Theaetetus, Socrates compares himself to a midwife, helping others to give birth not to children but to ideas of their own.

To have our understanding of a moral concept undermined is also to have our values undermined, and, with that, our sense of self. As I argue in The Problem with Critical Thinking, the greatest obstacle to reason is neither dullness nor ignorance, but our unconscious need to protect our sense of self. This is the realm of self-deception.

To manage their anger and anxieties, and to keep them talking, Socrates often flattered his interlocutors while himself playing the fool. In the Orator, Cicero esteems that, ‘for irony and dissimulation’, Socrates ‘far excelled all other men in the wit and genius which he displayed.’ Simon Blackburn in the Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy defines Socratic irony with brio as ‘Socrates’ irritating tendency to praise his hearers while undermining them, or to disparage his own superior abilities while manifesting them.’

Here is an example of Socratic irony, combined with a little mock flirting, from Plato’s Meno, so pushed as to be almost parodic:

Had I the command of you as well as of myself, Meno, I would not have enquired whether virtue is given by instruction or not, until we had first ascertained what it is. But as you think only of controlling me who am your slave, and never of controlling yourself—such being your notion of freedom, I must yield to you, for you are irresistible.

The technique resembles that used by the TV character Lieutenant Columbo to trap villains. One of the few miscreants who can see through Columbo’s fumbling and forgetful façade is the husband-killer Leslie Williams:

LW: You know, Columbo, you’re almost likeable in a shabby sort of way. Maybe it’s the way you come slouching in here with your shopworn bag of tricks.

Columbo: Me? Tricks?

LW: The humility, the seeming absent-mindedness, the homey anecdotes about the family: the wife, you know?

Columbo: Really?

LW: Yeah, Lieutenant Columbo, fumbling and stumbling along. But it’s always the jugular that he’s after.

The Socratic Method Today

Despite its pitfalls, and its potential for underhandedness, the Socratic method remains popular in education, especially at its acme, and has also been severally adapted for psychotherapy.

In the 1990s, during an institutional audit at the University of Oxford, a team of external assessors met the philosophers and asked about recent developments to their teaching methods. The question was met with a stunned silence, finally broken by Christopher Peacocke, the then Waynflete Professor of Metaphysics, who observed that Socrates had discovered the right way to teach philosophy more than two thousand years ago and that nobody since had been able to significantly improve upon it.