🔭 Alex is Learning (To Think)

What is the elenchus?

Jul 16, 20258 min read

1. What is the elenchus?

  • This is one of the classic “moves”
  • Socrates would have you confirm that you believe something (X), and confirm that you believe something else (Y), and then show how these two are incompatible
  • This creates Aporia, as you are now tied up by your own thinking, and are at an impasse
  • “Its primary meaning is “search,” and its etymology also includes notions of testing, of refutation, and of shaming and ridicule. The word is sometimes used by others to refer to refutation in general, with the Socratic elenchus being one variety.”
_Elenchus_ is a Greek word that literally translates to  
"{{c1::refutation}}"  
or  
"{{c1::cross-examination}}."

What does it look like?

  • “You make a claim. Socrates gets you to agree to some other proposition. Then he shows, sometimes surprisingly, that the new point to which you’ve agreed is inconsistent with what you said before. In short, he causes you to contradict yourself.”
  • “It’s the discomfort of realizing that you don’t know what you’re talking about or that you were sure when you shouldn’t have been. It’s a homemade form of shame, strictly between you and yourself, so it can be felt identically by people thousands of years apart in radically different situations. It’s a sign that you are making progress.”

The art of falsification

  • John Stuart Mill:

“It is the fashion of the present time to disparage negative logic—that which points out weaknesses in theory or errors in practice, without establishing positive truths. Such negative criticism would indeed be poor enough as an ultimate result; but as a means to attaining any positive knowledge or conviction worthy the name, it cannot be valued too highly; and until people are again systematically trained to it, there will be few great thinkers, and a low general average of intellect, in any but the mathematical and physical departments of speculation. On any other subject no one’s opinions deserve the name of knowledge, except so far as he has either had forced upon him by others, or gone through of himself, the same mental process which would have been required of him in carrying on an active controversy with opponents.”

2. Profundity of the elenchus

Purgative elenchus

  • Elenchus to discover your confusion, go from a place of unconscious ignorance to ignorance
  • “First, it may show that they don’t believe what they say they believe; it may show that they don’t know what they think they know. Their claims don’t hold up. These varieties of elenchus have been called “purgative” because they purge conceits of knowledge from their holders. Those conceits are replaced with more accurate feelings of ignorance.”
What is the purgative elenchus?
{{c1::Elenchus to discover your confusion, go from a place of unconscious ignorance to ignorance}}

Defensive elenchus

  • Elenchus to find truth?
  • “to fend off challenges to a claim of truth. Socrates says that he thinks X is true, and then shows that anyone who denies X ends up contradicting himself. This has been called a “defensive” elenchus because it’s used to support a claim by showing how hard it is to refute, not to prove someone else’s ignorance. Put more plainly, an elenchus can support a claim by showing how hard it is to say otherwise”
What is the defensive elenchus?
{{c1::Support of a claim by showing how hard it is to refute}}
E.g. {{c1::"Socrates says that he thinks X is true, and then shows that anyone who denies X ends up contradicting himself"}}

Gathering knowledge via elenchus

  • “In any event, false beliefs you hold, if traced out far enough, will come into conflict with some of those true ones. If you find a belief that doesn’t conflict with any others you hold, the lack of conflict—that consistency—is some evidence that the belief is true. It’s a survivor.
  • Socrates’ personal project, on this theory, is to accumulate truths. His collection slowly grows as he finds more ideas that are all consistent. As his mass of consistent claims becomes larger, it gets easier for him to detect falsehoods and expel them.”
  • “Then someone like Polus comes along and takes a contrary position, and it’s shown to fail because it is inconsistent with other things that Polus thinks and that Socrates probably thinks. Another challenger to Socrates’ set of beliefs has failed to lay a glove on them. Their probability of being right has gone up a little more. As a proposition holds up under different conditions, confidence in it rises. The elenchus thus becomes a device for finding truth, not just refuting what others say. It can produce cumulative consistency.
  • “Cumulative consistency is more than reassuring. It leads to enlargement of your knowledge and confidence in it; it snowballs. In this way the elenchus helps along the formation of the self. It causes you to figure out what your moral conscience is made of. There is a conflict in your views; you have to decide which to keep and which to drop. It is like an inner tournament with winning and losing ideas. You understand yourself better after many rounds of it.17 The Socratic method thus helps toward fulfillment of the instruction inscribed over the entrance to the Temple of Apollo at Delphi: know thyself.”
Two word summary of "gathering knowledge via elenchus"
{{c1::Cumulative consistency}}

3. Solo elenctic thinking

What is elenctic thinking?

  • “Elenctic thinking amounts to a search for contradictions between what you’re saying now and other things you believe. That is an inquiry that can be made anytime. You take your own beliefs and follow their implications as far as you can, and keep going after you flinch.
  • You test them with extreme cases; you look at them from different perspectives; you imagine what you would think about your view if the winners and losers produced by it were reversed; and so on, with other kinds of questions we will see in chapter 18 and elsewhere.”

It’s much harder to use the elenchus on yourself

  • “Like performing surgery on yourself without anaesthesia” (painful)
  • “Speaking of self-skepticism, though, how can you use the elenchus on yourself? In some ways it’s impossible, or nearly so; in some ways it’s merely difficult.”
    • “To begin with the first: between partners, the elenchus functions like a trap. Socrates gets his partner to agree to a proposition that doesn’t look like a problem, and then works backward to show that it conflicts with whatever claim the partner made earlier. But you can only set that kind of trap if you see the conflict coming when you ask the questions. Socrates asks for his partner’s assent to a damaging proposition because Socrates knows where it leads and his partner doesn’t. That works fine when you can see ahead better than your partner does, but you can’t quite do it alone. It’s like sneaking up on yourself.”
  • “The response to these problems was discussed in chapter 4 and is a general theme of this book: developing a Socratic function in the mind that is skeptical and is tough about it. What does an understanding of the elenchus add to that point? Just a better sense of how much work the Socratic function takes to develop. An internalized Socrates has to carry out a job that two people can do far more easily and also more gently.
    • When one person uses the elenchus on another, it can make the exposure of inconsistency less painful. It brings your conflicts to light by a circuitous route in which you’ve agreed to every step on the way. A gracious partner drives the process forward while creating the sense that you are puzzling over a problem together.
    • If you don’t have a partner, there is nobody to push or soften the process in those ways. The elenchus may need to be replaced by brute force.
    • So a Socratic posture toward one’s own thinking is a heroic state of mind. Chapter 4 compared the solo version of the Socratic method to exercise done without the help of a trainer. Now we see that it may be more like performing surgery on yourself: far more challenging than having it done by someone else, both practically and because anesthesia is out of the question. There is no partner to complete the incision when your courage runs out.
    • The simile is severe because the process is severe if taken seriously. The best compensation—that is, the best way to make Socratic scrutiny of the self endurable—is an attitude of acceptance and good humor toward your own constant state of error. The previous section of this chapter suggested that such an attitude makes it easier for others to put up with us. But it also makes finding the truth easier because you aren’t so desperately attached to your own views. You get used to the idea not only of being wrong a lot but of being wrong more often than you think (that’s something else that you’re wrong about). This makes it a little less agonizing to dig out the next example.”

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