Socrates was an Athenian philosopher who lived around 2,400 years ago, and he’s one of the founding figures of Western thought. He never wrote any of his thoughts down.
Almost everything we know about how he thought comes from his student, Plato, who reconstructed him and his ideas in what is known as the dialogues. Socrates used questioning to enable people to question their own beliefs and find the truth.
The Socratic method is questioning and, importantly, not telling. It’s patient, relentless questioning that exposes where someone’s thinking doesn’t hold up, including your own. He rarely told people they were wrong. He asked them questions until they discovered it for themselves. The method starts from the assumption that you don’t already understand.
It’s so important as a methodology that modern therapy is based on it. Cognitive behavioural therapy uses Socratic questioning as a core technique: the therapist doesn’t tell the patient what is wrong or how to fix it; they ask questions that let the patient see their own thinking clearly, often for the first time. Two and a half thousand years on, the best tool we have for changing how a person thinks is still Socrates’ tool.
You can’t tell people they may be wrong; they have to reach that conclusion themselves, through intelligent questions asked of them. I say intelligent questions, as any old questions won’t work; you need to force people to think about their ideas in a new way.
If you want to know more, I recommend “The Socratic Method: A Practitioner’s Handbook” by Ward Farnsworth.
This is important for EVT, as listening isn’t the act of staying quiet. It’s the same discipline Socrates was practising: not assuming you already understand, and questioning until you actually do. When I say people fail to listen, it’s because of Cognitive Miser Theory: they assume they understood it and move on. Socrates proved that listening isn’t a soft skill. It’s one of the hardest things a mind can do, and everything from philosophy to therapy has been built on the back of it.
