When you hear about the “Socratic Method,” it almost always refers to a way of teaching. There may well be Socratic Methods for other things — making souvlaki, arranging your toga into erudite-looking folds, skipping rocks across a pond — but those haven’t generally gotten as much notice. Socrates taught by creating a dialog in which he simply asked innocent-sounding questions that lead to the student realizing some error or inconsistency in their thinking and changing their mind.
The thinking behind this approach is that each student either implicitly knows the truth or is capable of working it out, but just needs help bringing that awareness to the fore. The questioner, of course, already knows the answer, and forms questions that embody clues to help the student work things out correctly.
There’s another word for the Socratic Method: “maieutic.” It sounds like it was adopted from Greek, and so it was; it’s the English version of the Greek word “μαιευτικός,” which means “obstetric” — it originally referred to the duties of a midwife. In fact Socrates himself used the word when he appeared (as a character) in Plato’s “Theaetetus.” That was one of Plato’s dialogs, which dealt with the nature of knowledge. It dates to about 369 BCE.
Strictly speaking, everything we know about the Socratic Method, AKA the maieutic method, comes from Plato. He was a student of Socrates, and he’s the one who wrote down all the stuff Socrates said — one of Socrates methods was evidently to never write anything down himself, but to find a willing graduate student (that would be Plato) to do it for him.
In the dialog “Theatetus,” Socrates and Theatetus discuss three possible things “knowledge” might be: it’s either nothing but perception (that doesn’t hold up), or it’s true judgment (nope), or maybe it’s true judgment with an account. That last one isn’t really it either. In the course of the dialog Socrates says he considers his philosophical work to be “Maieutics,” or midwifery — but of knowledge, not of babies. One bit of trivia from the dialog is that Socrates says he models himself in this regard after his own mother, who really was a midwife. The dialog ends sort of abruptly when Socrates announces he’s due in court because some windbag named Meletus has accused him of treason.
Meletus won the trial, of course, and that led to the famous scene where Socrates performs his own execution by drinking poison. It’s less well known that the general populous in Athens were so unhappy with this outcome that their very next step was to execute Meletus.
In any case, a couple of thousand years passed and “maieutic” appeared in English around 1656, when Thomas Stanley used it in his “History of Philosophy”. A century later the word appeared again in the “Synopsis Works Plato” from 1759: “The Maieutic Dialogues..were supposed to resemble Giving the Rudiments of the Art; as the Peirastic were, to represent a Skirmish, or Trial of Proficiency.”
Interestingly enough, “maieutic” is getting more common as time goes by. It’s still mostly a technical term that you’d seldom hear in casual conversation unless you hang around with philosophers, educational theorists, or even psychotherapists. Even there some authors still feel the need to explain what they mean by it, as James Freeman did in his 2011 “Argument Structure: Representation and Theory:” “The challenger then exercises a Socratic or maieutic function, drawing out an argument from the proponent as she recognizes that his case presented so far needs further development to constitute a cogent argument or the strongest argument possible.”
