“Stage 1: Wonder The Socratic method begins in wonder. Someone wonders something: “What is justice?” or “Is there intelligent life on other planets?” or “Does karma govern the cycle of cause and effect?” etc. Wondering takes propositional format—words are used to capture one’s thoughts—and are thus expressed as questions. Simply put: from wonder a hypothesis emerges. (See appendix B for the Socratic questions used in my study to increase prison inmates’ critical thinking and reasoning ability.) Stage 2: Hypothesis Hypotheses are speculative responses to questions posed in stage 1. They’re tentative answers to the object of wonder. For example, one possible response to the question, “Is there intelligent life on other planets?” would be, “Yes, there must be. The universe is just too large for there not to be.” Another response could be a simple, “No.”2 Stage 3: Elenchus (Q&A) The elenchus, or question and answer, is the heart of the Socratic method. In the elenchus, which is essentially a logical refutation, Socrates uses counterexamples to challenge the hypothesis. The purpose of the counterexample is to call the hypothesis into question and ultimately show that it’s false. Continuing with our previous example: Person A: “Is there intelligent life on other planets?” [Note: Stage of wonder] Person B: “Yes, there must be. I think the universe is just too large for there not to be.” [Note: Stage of hypothesis] Socratic Interlocutor: “Well, to paraphrase Carl Sagan, ‘We could be the first; someone had to be the first and it could be us.’” [Note: Stage of counterexample and beginning of the elenchus, which causes the epiphany of ignorance] “In the elenchus, the Socratic facilitator generates one or more ways that the hypothesis could be false. That is, what conditions could be in place that would make the hypothesis untrue? Definitively stating there’s no life on other planets is not a counterexample because it simply states that the hypothesis is wrong, it doesn’t state how it could be wrong. This may seem like an issue of style, but in fact the interchange is critical to the process, because without a dialogue there can be no intervention. Simply put: both parties enter into an open discussion. Using the example of life on other planets, one condition to make the hypothesis false would be if we were the first intelligent life forms to arise. If it is the case that we’re the first intelligent life forms to emerge, then by definition this means there is currently “no intelligent life on other planets. This is a successful counterexample because it calls the hypothesis into question—that is, it’s one viable explanation for why there could be no other intelligent life forms in the universe. Another condition that would call the hypothesis into question might be, “Just as it could be that we’re the first intelligent life form to have arisen, so too could it be that we’re the last intelligent life form.” This is a counterexample because it notes a possible condition that could make the hypothesis false. It is possible the universe was, at one point, teeming with intelligent life but perhaps there’s a “Great Filter” that either prevents or makes it exceedingly difficult for intelligent life to sustain itself (Hanson, 1998). The Great Filter possibility,3 or the possibility we’re the first intelligent life form to arise, calls the hypothesis into question. A hypothesis is never proven to be true. After a hypothesis survives repeated iterations in the elenchus, this only means that to date it has withstood a process of falsification. For example, through a window by a lake, you’ve seen one million white swans; nevertheless, this doesn’t mean all swans are white “true, it only means the hypothesis hasn’t been shown to be false (yet). A single counterexample can kill a hypothesis, yet even millions of confirming instances don’t change the status of the hypothesis. (There’s an asymmetry between confirmation and disconfirmation.) For example, let’s look at the hypothesis, “All swans are white.” Yet, one day, standing in your yard is a black swan. In this instance, the hypothesis was shown to be false, independent of your experience of seeing a multitude of white swans. Regardless of the content of one’s beliefs, that is, whether or not one believes in reincarnation, talking serpents, or that Tom Cruise is God, all but the most severely delusional individuals will recognize some constitutive, fundamental mistakes in “reasoning, like contradictions (a thing cannot be both X and not X) and inconsistency (incompatibility with other claims). The elenchus is a simple yet effective way to undermine a hypothesis by eliciting contradictions and inconsistencies in one’s reasoning, and thus engendering aporia. A classic aporia, or puzzlement, being, “Everything I say is a lie.”
Posted on: Sun, 20 Jul 2014 12:37:27 +0000
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