I’ll suggest a couple of items but wanted to hear other people’s thoughts.
My first thought is government schooling, which by its nature must disallow independent and critical thinking in order to condition people to accept the current matrix. I think this is pretty obvious to most people here. When values are handed down from on high, they cannot be questioned. In schools, questions are a sign that you are not properly processing material and that the brain-machine is malfunctioning, hence students apprehension to asking questions in class. The Socratic method, however, relies on questioning, and when employed on someone who has been conditioned to believe that questions are an admission of ignorance or stupidity, that person will either a) dismiss you as an annoying idiot or b) get the impression that you are being disengenious because you really “know” what your position is but you are feigning stupidity in order to make them look bad. Either of these cause the person to get angry.
Secondly, it seems a fundamental trait of humanity that we do not like our beliefs and knowledge questioned, and react negatively to those who do so.
Thirdly, Socratic dialectic forces a person to think, which people don’t like to do. They believe that logical inquiry is a “trick” or a “spell” or even “bourgeiose logic.”
It’s obvious to anyone who is awake that the majority of the population does not engage in Socratic thinking in their daily lives. If we did we would be living in a different world.
Most people accept things as they are because their parents did not warn them.
I noticed even in the earliest grades in school that people were always primarily concerned with their own status in a conversation. I’ve learned to detect that quickly and ignore that person. Kids are taught to be like that in school. The principle of being a student as generally taught is that being correct on every tidbit of trivia grants higher status and reward. Score high on a test, get a dog biscuit, gain special privileges. The intent is to use punishment/reward to incent learning. What it does more ultimately is incent approval seeking. What you have then is a mass of simpleton humans trained like dogs to go through life behaving in a way that might occasionally lead to material success when success is based on being approved. More often it prevents learning because knowledge is most often unnecessary for approval, as we all know too well.
I actually agree with you bloom on this point. I also think that continually asking somebody questions under certain circumstances means they don’t have anything to contribute and are only offering problems not solutions. Aristotle at least knew how to examine the world and didn’t need to rely on what other people thought though he still used the Socratic method Aristotle knew how to moderate and apply other means such as ‘thinking for oneself’. Socratic method taken to the extreme isn’t critical thinking because the person using it isn’t thinking and offering any knowledge. A question isn’t a proposition.
If I propose a question to you, would you agree that it could be said that I’m therefore proposing alternatives?
Is it necessary to define what the alternatives are?
Also, could the fact that a person is offering or proposing an alternative to an argument demonstrate that he or she is thinking critically enough about the conversation / arugment to understand it fully?
Certainly respect and civility must be displayed in discussion, but if a person is unwilling to measure his proposals against the law of non-contradiction, he is announcing that the logical consistency in whatever alternatives you might offer is of no importance to him. He is reaffirming his intention to remain in the forum of sophistry, because your argument will not be evaluated for logical consistency, but for how good it sounds.
No. You only asked a question. I wouldn’t know what Person-A asking a question actually holds in mind.
It’s not necessary to define anything which somebody doing the Socratic method is actually doing. Not defining anything. Only asking questions. Further, Person-B (receiving questions) may not know if person-A [who is asking the question(s)] holds the same meanings of the words in the question.
That’s vague. “fully”? To propose something is proposing it. It doesn’t mean that person proposing it actually even believes in the proposition. They could be lying. But they did propose something.
I don’t like being a victim to someone using the socratic method on me. The questioner assumes an air of superiority. He already knows the answers; I don’t.
And I find myself [despite my best efforts] seeking his approval for the answer I give. Did I get it right, oh teacher? The only time I like participating in the socratic method is when I am questioned by someone who clearly knows less than me. Then his attempt to use to use the socratic method will blow him out of the water. I wind up giving him an answer that shocks him by its truth and surprise value.
I welcome the method and seek it. It’s the best way of learning, shaking up your knowledge structure, and making it stronger. Just take your ego out of it and it’s smooth sailing. The problem is, more often than not, stupid questions pretend to be Socratic. Z.
The issue seems to be that the socratic method can be abused as a manipulative tactic in which one veers someone towards saying what you want them to say without you actually proving it. It can be used as a dishonest debating tactic for an easy “win”, making someone appear to be a fool by subtley steering the direction of the discourse and making use of the psychological power of suggestion. It is dishonest at least insofar as one is putting on an innocence act or “playing dumb”, asking questions that one (and possibly virtually everyone) already knows the answer to (“mammals aren’t cold-blooded and warm-blooded at the same time, right?”) in order to evoke some other point in a different context. Its use in honest discourse is limited.
