Someone says they understand fairness. Socrates asks what fairness means, then asks whether that definition fits other things the person believes. The conversation may end with a problem rather than an answer. Plato’s Euthyphro gives this kind of questioning a concrete setting: a disagreement over religious duty (Euthyphro, 5d–11b).
This is an inquiry into reasons people give for their beliefs. It should not be confused with an experiment on the brain.
A person known through other people
Socrates lived in Athens in the fifth century BCE and died in 399 BCE. His birth is conventionally placed around 470 or 469 BCE. He left no philosophical writings of his own. Plato, Xenophon and the comic playwright Aristophanes give us different portraits (Nails and Monoson, “Socrates”).
That creates the Socratic problem: how much belongs to the historical person, and how much to the writers portraying him? The distinction is Disputed, not a puzzle this page can settle. A dialogue can document what Plato wrote without proving that Socrates spoke those exact words.
The oracle story
In Plato’s Apology, Socrates tells the court that his friend Chaerephon asked the oracle at Delphi whether anyone was wiser than Socrates. The answer was no. Puzzled, Socrates describes questioning people reputed to be wise: politicians, poets and craftspeople (20e–23b).
The craftspeople possess knowledge of their crafts, but Socrates says some overestimate their knowledge of other matters. His account distinguishes having expertise from knowing everything. He presents his own advantage as recognizing limits to his knowledge.
The story is Documented in Plato’s account. Its details are not independently established here, and it does not give us a secure calendar date when Socrates invented a method.
What a question can uncover
In Euthyphro, Socrates asks for a definition of piety: what makes conduct religiously right? An example of pious conduct is not enough; he wants an explanation that covers the different cases (5d–6e).
Euthyphro proposes that piety is what the gods love. Discussion of their disagreements leads to a revised proposal involving what all the gods love. Socrates then separates two possibilities: do the gods love something because it is pious, or does their love make it pious? The question tests whether the proposed definition explains piety or merely describes something associated with it (7a–11b).
The dialogue ends without an agreed definition. Euthyphro leaves (15e–16a). That unfinished ending matters: questioning has not automatically delivered a final answer.
The term elenchus is commonly used for this kind of examination or refutation (James M. Ambury, §3a). It describes testing an account, not a guaranteed recipe for discovering truth. Calling every Socratic conversation the same method hides differences among Plato’s dialogues (Nails and Monoson, §2.2).
Helping an idea take shape
In Theaetetus, Plato gives Socrates another comparison: intellectual midwifery. Socrates describes helping someone bring forward an idea and examining whether it is sound (149a–151d).
The comparison includes testing the idea, not simply encouraging someone to express whatever they already believe. It belongs to this dialogue’s portrait of Socrates; it should not be treated as his surviving instruction manual. Nor should its claims about students be turned into measured educational outcomes.
A crowded intellectual world
Socrates was not questioning people in an otherwise thoughtless society. The teachers called sophists addressed language, politics, ethics and other subjects. They did not share one organization or one fixed doctrine. Describing them only as entertainers or manipulators repeats a hostile caricature (Taylor and Lee, “The Sophists”).
Plato’s Apology distinguishes Socrates from paid teaching: his Socrates denies charging for instruction and denies having been anyone’s teacher (19d–20c; 33a–b). That claim complicates the familiar picture of Socrates simply running a school with a standard curriculum.
Trial, prison and later classrooms
Socrates was tried and executed in Athens in 399 BCE on charges concerning the city’s gods and corruption of the young. Plato presents the defense in Apology, an argument about escaping prison in Crito, and the final conversation and death in Phaedo. These are distinct literary accounts, not one courtroom transcript (Apology; Crito; Phaedo; Nails and Monoson).
A later, specific connection survives in education. The University of Chicago Law School describes classroom questioning under the name Socratic method. That documents a modern adaptation, without proving an unchanged practice from ancient Athens or claiming improved outcomes (law school account).
How we know
What survives: Other authors’ portraits, including philosophical dialogues and comedy.
Whose voices are missing: Socrates’s own written account and independent records of most people he questioned.
What is uncertain: Which arguments and conversational details can be assigned to Socrates himself rather than his authors.
Then vs. now
The historical question is what these texts show about examining beliefs and ways of living. Claims about brain function require different evidence. Socrates’s place in this history does not depend on declaring him the founder of psychology—or declaring that neuroscience has disproved dialogue.