Plato uses the term dialectic throughout his works to refer to whatever
method he happens to be recommending as the vehicle of philosophy. The term,
from dialegesthai, meaning to converse or talk through, gives insight into his
core conception of the project. Yet it is also evident that he stresses different
aspects of the conversational method in different dialogues.
The form of dialectic featured in the Socratic works became the basis of
subsequent practice in the Academy—where it was taught by Aristotle—and in the
teachings of the Skeptics during the Hellenistic Age. While the conversation in
a Socratic dialogue unfolds naturally, it features a process by which even
someone who lacks knowledge of a given subject (as Socrates in these works
claims to do) may test the understanding of a putative expert. The testing
consists of a series of questions posed in connection with a position the
interlocutor is trying to uphold. The method presupposes that one cannot have
knowledge of any fact in isolation; what is known must be embedded in a larger
explanatory structure. Thus, in order to know if a certain act is pious, one
must know what piety is. This requirement licenses the questioner to ask the
respondent about issues suitably related to his original claim. If, in the
course of this process, a contradiction emerges, the supposed expert is
revealed not to command knowledge after all: if he did, his grasp of the truth
would have enabled him to avoid contradiction. While both Socrates and the
Skeptics hoped to find the truth (a skeptikos is after all a “seeker”), the
method all too often reveals only the inadequacy of the respondent. Since he
has fallen into contradiction, it follows that he is not an expert, but this
does not automatically reveal what the truth is.
By the time of the composition of the Republic, Plato’s focus had
shifted to developing positive views, and thus “dialectic” was now thought of
not as a technique of testing but as a means of “saying of each thing what it
is.” The Republic stresses that true dialectic is performed by thinking solely
of the abstract and nonsensible realm of forms; it requires that reason secure
an unhypothetical first principle (the Good) and then derive other results in
light of it. Since this part of the dialogue is merely a programmatic sketch,
however, no actual examples of the activity are provided, and indeed some
readers have wondered whether it is really possible.
In the later dialogue Parmenides, dialectic is introduced as an exercise
that the young Socrates must undertake if he is to understand the forms properly.
The exercise, which Parmenides demonstrates in the second part of the work, is
extremely laborious: a single instance involves the construction of eight
sections of argument; the demonstration then takes up some three-quarters of
the dialogue. The exercise challenges the reader to make a distinction
associated with a sophisticated development of the theory of Platonic forms
(see below The theory of forms). Even after a general understanding has been
achieved, repeating the exercise with different subjects allows one to grasp
each subject’s role in the world.
This understanding of dialectic gives a central place to specifying each
subject’s account in terms of genus and differentiae (and so, relatedly, to
mapping its position in a genus-species tree). The Phaedrus calls the
dialectician the person who can specify these relations—and thereby “carve
reality at the joints.” Continuity among all the kinds of dialectic in Plato
comes from the fact that the genus-species divisions of the late works are a
way of providing the accounts that dialectic sought in all the previous works.
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