Platonic dialectic
from 380 BCE Developed across the middle dialogues
Two people arguing their way upward from what either of them thought at the start toward something neither of them brought.
- Active
- from 380 BCE
- Where
- Athens
- Also
- dialektike
- Status
- In use
- Tradition
- Classical procedures
What it is
Where the elenchus refutes and stops, dialectic keeps going. It is the practice of moving from a rejected account to a better one, and from that to a better one still, by argument between two people rather than by one person thinking alone.
Plato takes the conversational form seriously rather than decoratively. The claim is that this kind of knowledge cannot be transmitted in a lecture or a book, because it has to be assembled by the person acquiring it, and only the pressure of another mind will make them assemble it.
How it works
Begin from a proposal, usually a poor one. Test it and let it fail. Ask what the failure shows about what a better account must do. Propose again at a higher level of generality. Repeat until you reach something that survives, or until the ascent runs out.
Each round has to keep what the last one established. A dialectic that merely produces a series of unconnected refutations has collapsed back into the elenchus.
The moves, in order
- State the current account
- Test it until it fails
- Ask what the failure requires of any successor
- Propose a more general account meeting that requirement
- Repeat, carrying forward what each round established
The procedure
Proposition The boundary fence should be shared equally.
- The first proposal is that the fence belongs to whoever built it, so the cost is his alone. This fails: the fence has stood forty years and neither present owner built it.
- What that failure shows is that the account must attach the cost to something present rather than to a past act.
- The second proposal is that the cost falls on whoever benefits. This is better, but it fails too: both benefit, and no measure separates the benefits.
- What that failure shows is that where a benefit is genuinely joint and unmeasurable, an account must divide rather than apportion.
- Both parties now hold a principle neither stated at the outset: joint and unmeasurable benefit is divided equally.
Therefore The fence is shared equally — not as a compromise between two positions, but as what follows from a principle the two of them arrived at together.
The conclusion is the same one a coin toss would have produced. What dialectic supplies is not the answer but the shared principle behind it, which is what makes it hold for the next fence as well.
What it is good for
Disputes where the parties disagree about a case and have never examined the principle underneath it. It is slow, and it produces agreements that survive because both sides own them.
Where it fails
It needs a willing partner. Dialectic is cooperative and cannot be conducted against someone who is not trying to get somewhere, which makes it useless in adversarial settings — courts, parliaments, most public argument.
Its deeper problem is that nothing guarantees the ascent goes anywhere. Plato believed it terminated in genuine knowledge of the Forms; strip that metaphysics away, as almost everyone now does, and what is left is a procedure that improves accounts without any assurance that it converges.
Common misconceptions
That it means the Hegelian thesis-antithesis-synthesis triad, which is later, different in structure, and not what Plato is doing. Nor is it the Socratic method as taught in law schools, which is closer to the elenchus.
Where it came from
Developed through the middle dialogues, most explicitly in the Republic, where dialectic is the highest study in the education of the guardians and the only one that reaches first principles.
What became of it
The word survived and the practice changed beyond recognition, through Aristotle, the medievals, Kant and Hegel, each meaning something different by it.
Lasting influence
The founding model of philosophy as conversation rather than pronouncement, which is why the discipline still argues in journals rather than issuing findings.
Why it still matters
Alive in mediation, in genuine collaborative inquiry, and in any argument where both parties would rather be right than win.
Put another way
Two people climbing a ridge from opposite sides, meeting where neither had been.
Texts
Plato, Republic
Books VI and VII give the fullest account, including the divided line and the claim that dialectic alone reaches unhypothesised first principles.
Where to start
Read the Meno. It shows the transition from refutation to construction more clearly than the Republic describes it.
The surprising bit
Plato wrote dialogues while arguing in them that writing cannot convey the thing that matters, and he never resolved the tension.
In their own words
Dialectic is the only method which does away with hypotheses in order to make its ground secure
Who held it
the Academy
Connections
- Relies on
- Socratic elenchus
- Influenced
- Sublation, The disputatio
- Parallel to
- Reflective equilibrium
The verdict
The best procedure there is for genuine joint inquiry, and useless against anyone not conducting one.