Socrates' View of Persuasion
I do not believe Socrates would agree with the following statement: "Persuasion is about getting what you want from others, without using force." Socrates believed in bringing the truth out of people through questions. Words are a powerful instrument, whose use can be directed toward various ends. One end is persuasion. Arguments are used to induce belief in the audience. Socrates and Plato held that some beliefs are better than others: true belief is always the most desirable outcome of argumentation. Thus, they clashed with the Sophists, who taught their students how to argue without concern for whether true belief is produced as a result. The concept of true belief is itself a difficult one, with which Plato and philosophers to the present day have wrestled.
The Sophists abandoned science, philosophy, mathematics and ethics. What they taught was the subtle art of persuasion. A Sophist was a person who could argue eloquently - and could prove a position whether that position was correct or incorrect. In other words, what mattered was persuasion and not truth. The Sophists were also relativists. They believed that there was no such thing as a universal or absolute truth, valid at all times. Everything is relative and there are no values because man, individual man, is the measure of all things. Nothing is good or bad since everything depends on the individual. Gorgias was a well-paid teacher of rhetoric and famous for his saying that a man could not know anything. And if he could, he could not describe it and if he could describe it, no one would understand him.
Socrates was not a Sophist himself, but a philosopher, a lover of wisdom. He did not reveal answers. He did not reveal truth. Many of his questions were, on the surface, quite simple: What is courage? What is virtue? What is duty? What Socrates discovered, and what he taught his students to discover, was that most people could not answer these fundamental questions to his satisfaction, yet all of them claimed to be courageous, virtuous and dutiful. So, what Socrates knew, was that he knew nothing, upon this sole fact lay the source of his wisdom. Socrates was not necessarily an intelligent man - but he was a wise man. There is a difference between the two.
I do not believe Socrates would agree with the following statement: "Persuasion is about getting what you want from others, without using force." Socrates believed in bringing the truth out of people through questions. Words are a powerful instrument, whose use can be directed toward various ends. One end is persuasion. Arguments are used to induce belief in the audience. Socrates and Plato held that some beliefs are better than others: true belief is always the most desirable outcome of argumentation. Thus, they clashed with the Sophists, who taught their students how to argue without concern for whether true belief is produced as a result. The concept of true belief is itself a difficult one, with which Plato and philosophers to the present day have wrestled.
The Sophists abandoned science, philosophy, mathematics and ethics. What they taught was the subtle art of persuasion. A Sophist was a person who could argue eloquently - and could prove a position whether that position was correct or incorrect. In other words, what mattered was persuasion and not truth. The Sophists were also relativists. They believed that there was no such thing as a universal or absolute truth, valid at all times. Everything is relative and there are no values because man, individual man, is the measure of all things. Nothing is good or bad since everything depends on the individual. Gorgias was a well-paid teacher of rhetoric and famous for his saying that a man could not know anything. And if he could, he could not describe it and if he could describe it, no one would understand him.
Socrates was not a Sophist himself, but a philosopher, a lover of wisdom. He did not reveal answers. He did not reveal truth. Many of his questions were, on the surface, quite simple: What is courage? What is virtue? What is duty? What Socrates discovered, and what he taught his students to discover, was that most people could not answer these fundamental questions to his satisfaction, yet all of them claimed to be courageous, virtuous and dutiful. So, what Socrates knew, was that he knew nothing, upon this sole fact lay the source of his wisdom. Socrates was not necessarily an intelligent man - but he was a wise man. There is a difference between the two.
