Your answers to untimely questions stem from savage commands. Suppose you want to replace them with better answers. What should you do? Simple: keep an open mind and inquire, moving toward what’s true and away from what’s false.
Can that really be all there is to it? Yes. That is the Socratic method. It is by following that formula that Socrates secured for himself much better answers to untimely questions than the standard-issue versions supplied by his body or kinship groups. But, as you might expect, there is a catch: following the formula, using the method, is not as straightforward as it appears to be. When we try to follow it, we find that each of the three ingredients—open-mindedness, inquiry, and separating truth from falsity—conceals a paradox.
Open-mindedness means being able to admit that you are wrong. This sounds easy enough until you insist that the last three words be interpreted literally. Set aside being able to admit that you were wrong in the past, or that you are the sort of creature who is liable to go wrong, or that what you think at this very moment might be shown to be wrong at some future time, or that there might be some people out there right now who believe that you are wrong. Let’s focus on your ability to know (now) that you are in the wrong (now). If that’s what open-mindedness amounts to, being open-minded seems to entail believing what you also know to be false!
If you are wondering why a person who can admit that she was or might be wrong isn’t sufficiently open-minded, recall that with untimely questions, there is no suspension of judgment. If someone wants to criticize your answer to an untimely question without offering you a replacement, the only way you can be receptive to such criticism is by being able to see what is wrong with what you think even as you continue to think it. Either we cannot be open-minded about untimely questions, or we must somehow be able to think, “p is wrong, even though I believe p.” This is called “Moore’s paradox,” and it is the subject of chapter 6.
What is inquiry? We cannot simply equate inquiry with the asking of questions, because some questions are rhetorical, sometimes we are only asking a question to be polite, and even when neither of those two circumstances obtains, we often seek knowledge not from any inquisitive motive but simply because the information is instrumental to the removal of some practical obstacle. (“Where’s the post office?”; “How do I turn on the printer?”) We tend to prefer problem-solving to inquiry, which is why, quite often, when faced with a genuine question, our first instinct is to try to turn it into a problem. For instance, Einstein, when confronted with “What is time?” turned it into “How would clocks behave under various circumstances?”
We are eager to operationalize questions—to turn them into problems—by introducing measurement. So, for example, when confronted with questions such as What is it to be angry? or smart? or good at policework?, people are inclined to look to bodily indicators such as heart rate and skin temperature, or scores on IQ tests, or number of cases closed. The advantage of turning a question into a problem of measurement is that it becomes clear what it would mean to have a solution to it. Now consider this: If I were to treat a question as a proper question, rather than a problem in disguise—which is to say, to ask that question purely for the sake of answering it—could I tell when I had in fact arrived at the answer? This is called “Meno’s paradox,” named after the Socratic interlocutor Meno, who challenged Socrates with one of the most difficult questions in all of the dialogues: “If you should meet with it, how will you know that this [i.e., the answer] is the thing that you did not know?” We will discuss that question in chapter 7.
However, before discussing Socratic open-mindedness or Socratic inquisitiveness we must address the paradox that calls into question whether such a person as Socrates is even possible. It was obvious to everyone who encountered him that Socrates was a gadfly who busied himself with the negative, destructive activity of refutation—but Socrates also characterizes himself as a midwife who helpfully, constructively births the ideas of others. How can he be both? How is the negative project of avoiding falsehood related to the positive project of seeking the truth? I call this “the Gadfly-Midwife paradox.” In order to explain how there is one Socrates, rather than two, we are going to have to settle the question of how a person can go about both pursuing truth and avoiding falsity, when, on the face of it, these tasks are in tension with one another. To get a sense of the nature of the tension, consider that those who want truths must come to have beliefs, whereas the only sure way to avoid falsity is not to believe anything at all. The Gadfly-Midwife paradox is the one we will take up immediately, in chapter 5.
My initial characterization of the Socratic method—inquire open-mindedly, moving toward truth and away from falsity—is likely to have struck you as disappointingly banal. The banality comes from the fact that you already knew that was what you had to do. Before reading this book, you would likely have given similar instruction to anyone who wanted to learn anything. There is an important sense in which explaining the Socratic method is not a matter of offering new information. Instead of adding to our store of knowledge—as the biographer, or the cartographer, or the biologist might—Socrates demonstrates that we already have, in us, ideas we do not quite know how to live up to. Learning philosophy is less like filling a void and more like untying a knot. Philosophy begins not in ignorance, not in wonder, but in error.
I will show you that when you try to make sense of seeing that one is (not was) in the wrong, of posing questions (not problems), and of combining (in one act of thought, not two) the pursuit of truth and the avoidance of falsity—you will find that you are stuck. You don’t know how to proceed. I am going to argue that the key to getting unstuck, in all three cases, is relocating that act of thought—the act of thought that is inquisitive, open-minded, and oriented both toward truth and away from falsehood—from its usual home inside one person’s head into the shared space of the conversation that passes between two people. Socrates found a way for two people, together, to ask and answer untimely questions that neither could inquire into on their own. Socrates overturned the conventional wisdom that thinking is something that each of us can do, on our own, without much effort. Instead, he found that it was a communal feat—and he showed us how to pull it off.