The Socratic Method Explained: Elenchus, Maieutics and Plato’s “Made-Up” Opponents

Last updated: October 20, 2026

The Socratic method is a way of examining ideas through questions rather than lectures. Socrates asks someone to define a concept they claim to understand, draws out what else they believe, and shows that their beliefs contradict each other, a cross-examination scholars call the elenchus, from the Greek for “refutation”. He also described his role with a second image, maieutics or midwifery: in Plato’s Theaetetus he says his art works like a midwife’s, except that he attends men and will “look after their souls when they are in labour” (Benjamin Jowett’s translation). The method usually ends not in an answer but in aporia, the honest admission that nobody in the room knows.

The meme has a different theory. Above a cartoon father lying back in bed with a cigar, eyes half closed in satisfaction, someone has pasted the marble head of Plato. The caption reads “Plato after winning arguments against his made up characters”, and the subtitle has him sighing “Boy, everyone is stupid except me”. It is an old objection to the dialogues, squeezed into one picture.

How an Elenchus Works, Step by Step

A Socratic examination follows a recognisable pattern: ask for a definition, test it against cases, collect the speaker’s other commitments, and show that they cannot all be true together.

Plato’s Laches is the cleanest example. Two Athenian generals, Laches and Nicias, are asked what courage is. Laches answers with confidence: the courageous man stays at his post and faces the enemy. Socrates offers a counterexample: what about soldiers who fight while retreating, as the Scythians are said to do? Laches tries again: courage is “a sort of endurance of the soul”. Socrates points out that some endurance is foolish, and foolish endurance is harmful, while courage is supposed to be noble. Nicias then offers a definition based on knowledge, and that too runs into trouble. The inquiry closes on Socrates’ verdict: “we have not discovered what courage is”. At no point does Socrates offer a definition of his own, and each refutation rests on premises the general has agreed to.

Gregory Vlastos’s 1983 paper “The Socratic Elenchus”, building on earlier work by Richard Robinson, set the terms of a debate that has run ever since, as a review in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews notes: does the method prove anything true, or does it only expose inconsistency? The Laches suggests the second, at least on the surface. Two generals who had commanded armies cannot say what the virtue of their profession is, and the conversation ends with an agreement to go back to school, old men included.

The Midwife Who Gives Birth to Nothing

Maieutics, Socrates’ midwife image, explains why he refuses to give answers: on his own account he has none to give, and his job is to help others deliver theirs and test whether they are real.

In the Theaetetus, Socrates reminds the young mathematician that his mother, Phaenarete, was a midwife, and confides that he practises midwifery too. Midwives in Athens, he says, were women past bearing children; likewise he is barren of wisdom. “I am not myself at all wise”, he says, and the people who talk with him make astonishing progress, though “they never learned anything from me”. The triumph of his art, he adds, is testing whether a young mind has produced “a false idol or a noble and true birth”. It is the elenchus described from the patient’s side of the bed.

The Meno shows the midwife at work. Socrates questions a slave boy about how to double the area of a square. The boy confidently says to double the side, then guesses something in between, and finally admits he does not know. Socrates asks Meno: “Is he not better off in knowing his ignorance?” A few questions later the boy reaches the answer, the square on the diagonal, though critics note how much the questions steer him. Plato uses the scene to introduce his theory of recollection, which goes beyond anything the historical Socrates may have claimed. As a picture of teaching by questions, it is still the one most often cited.

Socrates Loved Losing Arguments, at Least in Theory

What separates the Socratic method from simply winning debates is a stated willingness to be the one refuted.

In the Gorgias, Socrates tells the famous orator what sort of person he is: one “very willing to be refuted if I say anything which is not true”, and just as ready to refute others. Being refuted, he says, is the greater gain of the two, just as being cured of a disease beats curing someone else, and he counts a false belief about these questions as about the worst evil a person can carry. It is the part of the method that is easiest to admire and hardest to practise, and plenty of people asking “Socratic questions” online would rather see the other person end up in aporia.

In the Republic, the sophist Thrasymachus loses patience and calls the whole performance “your ironical style”, using eironeia, a word that then meant something closer to sly evasion than wit. It is one of the earliest uses of the word that later gave us “Socratic irony”. For the version of the method that starts with a single word, see our post on Socrates and the “define normal” meme.

Did Plato Rig the Game?

Partly. Plato wrote both sides of every conversation, yet many of Socrates’ opponents were real people, as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes, and Plato does not always let Socrates win.

Laches and Nicias were historical Athenian generals, Gorgias a famous orator from Leontini in Sicily, Thrasymachus a sophist from Chalcedon, Meno a Thessalian aristocrat who later turns up as a general in Xenophon. The conversations themselves are literary reconstructions, and scholars have long debated how much of Plato’s Socrates is the historical man, the so-called Socratic problem, since Socrates wrote nothing and our other main witnesses, Xenophon and Aristophanes, paint different pictures.

A Socratic dialogue, in the strict sense, is a prose conversation in which Socrates questions others, and it was a genre with several authors. Aristotle’s Poetics (1447b) names “Socratic dialogues” alongside the mimes of Sophron, and other followers of Socrates, among them Xenophon, Aeschines and Antisthenes, wrote them too. Plato’s are not one long victory lap. In the Parmenides, the young Socrates is the one cross-examined, and his theory of Forms comes out badly. In late works such as the Sophist and Statesman he barely speaks. And some interlocutors simply leave: the Euthyphro ends with Euthyphro announcing “Another time, Socrates; for I am in a hurry”. Plato wrote his hero’s defeats and walkouts as well.

The Socratic Method After Socrates

The method left Athens a long time ago, and it now turns up in law schools, therapy rooms and seminar groups, each time in a slightly different shape.

In American law schools, the “Socratic method” usually means a professor questioning students closely about cases instead of lecturing, an approach associated with Christopher Columbus Langdell, who became dean of Harvard Law School in 1870, as Harvard Magazine recounts. In cognitive behavioural therapy, “Socratic questioning” helps a client examine the evidence for their own beliefs rather than being told what to think; the psychologist Christine Padesky’s 1993 keynote “Socratic Questioning: Changing Minds or Guiding Discovery?” is a standard reference. And in Germany, the philosopher Leonard Nelson made the case for a revived Socratic method in a 1922 lecture in Göttingen; his student Gustav Heckmann later turned it into a structured group format, often called the neo-Socratic dialogue, in which participants start from a concrete experience and work towards a shared answer to a general question.

You can run the four steps on almost any confident claim. Take “freedom means doing whatever you want”. Counterexample: someone acting on an addiction does what they want and does not look free. Revision: “freedom means doing what you really want”. Then the next question: who decides what you really want, you, your upbringing, or the app that chose the last ten things you watched? A few rounds later you are in aporia, which in Socratic terms is progress. None of these modern versions copy Plato’s dramas. What they share is a bet that knowledge you reach by answering questions sticks better than knowledge you are handed.

Why the Ideal Dialogue Is So Hard to Have

Plato’s dialogues are often held up as the ideal philosophical conversation, and that is fair in both senses: they are the model, and the model is rarely achieved.

A real elenchus needs a partner who is willing to state what they believe, follow the argument and admit when it fails, and a questioner who is willing to find out that they were wrong too. Plato could guarantee the first condition because he wrote the partner’s lines. In life, people walk away, change the subject or, like Thrasymachus, get angry. Socrates himself was sentenced to death in 399 BC on charges of impiety and corrupting the young; in Plato’s Apology he blames the resentment his questioning had built up, though his ties to Alcibiades and Critias probably did not help, as the IEP notes, and we look at that question in Did democracy kill Socrates?. Winning against characters you wrote is easy, and the meme is right about that. The harder, more Socratic move is to keep asking when you might lose, and the Plato in the picture has put down his questions and picked up a cigar.

For what Socrates thought he actually knew, read our post on Socrates’ theory of knowledge.