The Socratic Dialectic and Generosity

A never-before-published bonus chapter.

“We may be amused by Socrates for comparing himself to a midwife, but we must remember it was the midwife’s task to decide which children would be allowed to live. By this comparison Socrates metaphorically pleads guilty to infanticide; if his dialectic is the road to truth, it is littered with dead thought babies.”

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Dear philosophers,

We’re at the end of our journey, but a new literary expedition begins shortly!

The first part of what follows has been edited. The second part is an unedited rough draft direct from the mind of the professor circa 2005. I couldn’t see an easy way to edit this part, so instead I’ve included my own comments in footnotes.

Enjoy!

—Tina

Much that is said here is dependent on Donald Davidson’s article, “Plato’s Philosopher” in Modern Thinkers and Ancient Thinkers and is an extension of his basic idea.

Part 1

THE PRINCIPLE OF GENEROSITY tells us that, at bottom, all language is like poetry. There is no refutation, no winning and losing, at least not when discourse is confined to the area of pure description¹. The oracle and poet as such are never wrong. For foundational truth-seeking, nothing could more inappropriate than the adversarial model, and no philosophy could be more wrong-headed than one that hoped to establish its truths by rigorous defense and argumentation.

And yet, while philosophy has its poets, the dominant paradigm is legal-dialectical. So far as modern Europe goes, this is the perfecting of a seed that took root in the Scholastic tradition, despite the fact that for sacred scripture the Scholastics had an ancient and elaborate system of the most generous hermeneutics. But the dialectical paradigm is most acutely expressed in the Socratic elenchus, ironically depicted by philosopher-poet, Plato.

Initially, dialectic and interpretation seem quite different. Dialectic seems combative and critical, as thoroughly negative as Socrates’s personal daemon, whose only function was to say, “No.” We may be amused by Socrates for comparing himself to a midwife, but we must remember it was the midwife’s task to decide which children would be allowed to live. By this comparison Socrates metaphorically pleads guilty to infanticide; if his dialectic is the road to truth, it is littered with dead thought babies.

Dramatic, but not untrue. Military metaphors abound throughout the Platonic dialogues. The dialectic is compared to punishment, and although it is thought good for the soul, it is spoken of as the spiritual equivalent of surgery without anesthetic:

[Those who fear punishment] perceive its painfulness but are blind to its benefits, and are unaware how much more wretched than lack of health in the body it is to dwell with a soul that is not healthy, but corrupt, unjust and unholy; and hence it is that they do all they can to avoid paying the penalty. —Gorgias (477b-479d).

Needless to say, the ‘cure’ for this ignorance is the Socratic dialectic.

But on deeper examination, things turn out to be more complicated. Whether or not Plato was aware of the fact, the Socratic dialectic is precisely the kind of interpretation we have described.

Let us take a step back. Typically the Socratic interlocutor is interested in some philosophical matter that presses on him with the urgency of real life: How should we live? That is to say, the Platonic dialogue usually begins with a point that, if true, would constitute real wisdom—a point about how to raise good children, perhaps (Meno); whether justice boils down to ‘might makes right’ (Republic), or whether love is worthy of praise (Symposium). Typically, Socrates redirects the inquiry by making the meaning of the key word the object of discussion, usually on the ground that one cannot know anything about x until one knows what x itself is. The interlocutor then more or less unwillingly proposes a series of definitions of the key term, each of which Socrates proves unsatisfactory. The dialogue usually ends with the hope that through this ordeal of refutation we have been purged of error—this is the curative punishment—and so are now better able to find the truth if we ever take the matter up again.

Except in certain cases, Socrates does not assume that the original statement is true and then seek its meaning in the manner of ‘epistemology through the lens of interpretation.’ Ancient sages and divinely-inspired poets are sometimes treated this way, just as the Scholastics treated the Bible, but contemporaries, it is presumed, can simply be wrong, and it is the task of the adversarial sting ray and gadfly to prove it. 

But what gets refuted in the Socratic exchange is not the interlocutor’s original statement about the world. The first step in Socrates’s method is to divert attention from first-order, practical statements about the world to second-order statements about the language we use. Socrates shifts attention from things to signs, from worldly truths to truths about language and meaning. There is a shift to the technical, the academic, and what actually gets refuted are the subsequent definitions intended to illustrate the original meaning. Since the Socratic position is that the meanings of such key words are unknown until their definition is made explicit, it would follow that the meaning of the original statement is unknown until its key words are clarified. Logically, then, the various definitions amount to a series of interpretations of the original statement, and the refutation of any one of them is simply the rejection of a specific interpretation of the original statement. Socratic dialectic is thus interpretation as much as refutation—nurturance as much as verbicide.

On what basis are the interpretations of the original statement rejected?

Obviously Socrates does not simply assume the original statement is true and then reject any interpretation that would make it false. If he did, he would be treating everyone the way he treats the sacred and the divinely-inspired; the principle of generosity most certainly would be his most fundamental principle, and his dialectic would have a far gentler reputation. But if we look at how the dialectic works, we can see that the whole process is an example of the principle of generosity applied not directly to the original statement, but to the rough totality of accepted opinion. That is to say, the dialectic works only by assuming the general truth of common opinion, the very thing that we have called the body of presupposed belief. (This point was made by Davidson in the above-mentioned article.)

To see this we need only ask after Socrates’s criteria for the falseness of a proposed definition—or we might call it his criteria for the rejection of a proposed translation of the original statement. This comes about in two ways: either the proposed definition (translation) is seen to lead logically to an out-an-out internal contradiction, or its consequences are seen to contradict some common belief that, for the moment at least, is taken as true (this is the typical outcome). Thus a true translation would be one that:

 1). leads to no contradiction, and 

 2). contradicts the least possible number of things we normally say. 

In other words, coherence and the preservation of truth in the body of common opinion are the criteria of correctness in the dialectical search for meaning. Truth is presupposed, meaning is adjusted to make it possible. Thus the full scale Socratic dialectic, even when pictured by Plato at its harshest, is fundamentally guided by and dependent on the principle of generosity.