The Socratic method explained: learning by conversation

Picture a friend who never tells you what to think. They just keep asking, “What do you mean by that?” and “Is that always true?” Ten minutes in, you’re less sure of your opinion than when you started, and somehow you understand it better.

That friend is doing something very old. Long before lecture halls, slides or textbooks, some of the most influential teachers in history worked mainly by asking questions and talking things through. Here’s what the Socratic method actually is, what learning “near” a teacher looked like in ancient India, and what both can teach you now.

What is the Socratic method?

Socrates lived in Athens from about 470 to 399 BCE. He wrote nothing himself. What we know of him comes mostly from his followers Plato and Xenophon, and scholars still debate how much of the Socrates in Plato’s writing is the real man and how much is Plato.

In Plato’s dialogues, Socrates rarely lectures. He finds someone confident that they know what courage or justice is, asks for a definition, then asks question after question until the definition runs into something else the person believes. Scholars call this cross-examination the elenchus, a Greek word for testing or refutation. The classicist Gregory Vlastos’s 1983 essay on it is still a standard reference.

Many of these conversations end without a neat answer, in aporia: a state of being stuck, an honest “I don’t know any more”. That sounds like failure. It’s closer to the point. It is hard to learn something properly while you’re sure you already know it.

The Socratic method in four steps

1. Someone states a belief: “Being brave means never backing down.”
2. The questioner asks for examples and edge cases. What about someone who walks away from a fight they can’t win?
3. The belief clashes with something else the person holds.
4. They refine it, or admit they’re unsure, and the conversation carries on.

Why did Socrates call himself a midwife?

In Plato’s dialogue Theaetetus, Socrates offers his best-known image of himself (around 148e to 151d in the standard numbering). His mother, Phaenarete, was a midwife, he says, and he practises the same art, only for minds rather than bodies. He doesn’t hand people ideas. He helps them bring out the ideas they are already labouring over, then checks whether what has been born is the real thing or a mere imitation.

He adds that, like the midwives of his day, who were past childbearing age, he has no wisdom of his own to deliver. That fits his wider habit of disclaiming expert knowledge. Take it with a pinch of salt: Socrates is a famously ironic character, and the line is partly a teaching move. The idea underneath is still clear. Understanding is something the learner produces. A good questioner helps with the delivery.

What does Upanishad mean? Learning near a teacher

Far to the east, and probably a century or more before Socrates, thinkers in northern India were composing teachings later gathered into the Upanishads. The scholar Patrick Olivelle places the two oldest, the Brihadaranyaka and the Chandogya, around the 7th to 6th centuries BCE, while warning that any precise dating of these texts is shaky.

You will often read that “Upanishad” means “sitting down near”. That comes from splitting the word into upa (near), ni (down) and sad (sit), and it became the popular picture: a student seated close to a teacher. The Encyclopaedia Britannica notes that, contrary to what early Western scholars assumed, the word did not originally mean a session of students around a teacher. It meant “connection” or “equivalence”, the hidden links between a person and the wider world that the texts set out to explain. So treat “sitting near” as a lovely later reading rather than the literal original meaning.

What the texts do show clearly is how learning worked. Students went to live and study with a teacher, sometimes for years, in what is often called the guru-shishya (teacher and student) tradition. And many of the best-known passages are written as conversations.

In the Chandogya Upanishad, a young man called Shvetaketu comes home after twelve years of study, rather pleased with himself. His father, Uddalaka Aruni, asks whether he has learned the thing that makes everything else understandable. He hasn’t. So his father teaches him, not with a lecture, but with questions and small experiments. Put this lump of salt in water overnight. Now find it. Taste the water from the top. The middle. The bottom.

The conclusion the text draws belongs to a philosophical and religious tradition, and you don’t need to share it to notice the teaching style. The student has to look, taste, answer and work it out himself.

Socrates and the Upanishads: what do they have in common?

It would be easy to squash these two into one tidy story. They aren’t the same thing. Socrates tested definitions with arguments in the public spaces of Athens. The Upanishad teachers passed on ideas about the self and reality within a long tradition of study. Their goals and beliefs were very different.

But they share a few habits worth borrowing. Learning happens one to one, or close to it. The learner talks, not just listens. Questions do the heavy lifting. And being confused is treated as a stage, not a verdict.

Modern memory research backs part of this. In a 2006 experiment, Henry Roediger and Jeffrey Karpicke found that students who practised recalling a passage remembered 61% of it a week later, against 40% for students who simply reread it. In 2011, Karpicke and Janell Blunt found that this kind of retrieval practice also beat building concept maps, including on questions that needed real understanding. Those studies tested students recalling texts, not people in conversation, so they don’t prove Socrates right. They do show that pulling ideas out of your own head, which is exactly what a good question makes you do, builds stronger learning than having them poured in.

How to use the Socratic method yourself

• Pick one belief. Something you actually hold, like “I’m bad at maths” or “people don’t really change”.
• Ask “what do I mean by that?” Define the key word. Bad at maths compared with whom? At which bits?
• Hunt for a counterexample. Find one case where it isn’t true, then refine the belief.
• Ask, don’t tell. In conversation, swap one opinion for one real question: “What makes you think that?”, asked with curiosity, not as a trap.
• Let the silence sit. If they say “huh, I don’t know”, don’t rush to rescue them. That pause is the aporia moment, where the thinking starts.
• Swap roles. Let them question you back. It works best when you’re both learning.

One warning. Socrates annoyed plenty of Athenians, and in 399 BCE the city put him on trial and sentenced him to death. Cross-examining your friends over dinner won’t go that badly, but it won’t win you fans either. Ask because you’re curious, not to win.

Trying it on Everconnected

If you’d like to try this with someone new, Everconnected matches you with people who share your values and interests, for one-to-one conversations by voice. It’s free to join: create an account at app.everconnected.com, or get the app from the App Store or Google Play.

Questions people ask

Sources

1. Encyclopaedia Britannica. Socrates. www.britannica.com/biography/Socrates
2. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Socrates. iep.utm.edu/socrates
3. Chappell, T. Plato on knowledge in the Theaetetus. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato-theaetetus
4. Plato. Theaetetus, 150 (Greek text and English translation). Perseus Digital Library, Tufts University. www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.
5. Vlastos, G. (1983). The Socratic elenchus. Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, 1, 27-58. philpapers.org/rec/VLATSE-3
6. Encyclopaedia Britannica. Upanishad. www.britannica.com/topic/Upanishad
7. Olivelle, P. (1998). The Early Upaniṣads: Annotated Text and Translation. Oxford University Press.
8. Chandogya Upanishad, chapter 6 (English translation). Wisdom Library. www.wisdomlib.org/hinduism/book/chandogya-upanishad-english/
9. Roediger, H. L., & Karpicke, J. D. (2006). Test-enhanced learning: Taking memory tests improves long-term retention. Psychological Science, 17(3), 249-255. doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2006.01693.x
10. Karpicke, J. D., & Blunt, J. R. (2011). Retrieval practice produces more learning than elaborative studying with concept mapping. Science, 331(6018), 772-775. doi.org/10.1126/science.1199327