Socrates
The midwife's trade
No answers, only delivery
Plato, Theaetetus
His mother delivered babies and he said he had inherited the trade. This page is about why he withheld answers.
What actually happened?
In the Theaetetus he explains his own method outright. My art of midwifery is in general like theirs, except that my patients are men, and my concern is with the soul in travail rather than the body. The god compels him to act as midwife and never allows him to bring forth. The young men who come to him seem to know nothing at first and later produce a great deal, all of it found in themselves. He keeps the other half of the craft too: telling a real child from a wind-egg, and disposing of the false one.
A given answer has no roots
Tell somebody the conclusion and they hold a sentence they can repeat. Bring them to it by questions and they hold a route they walked. The first gets dropped at the first counter-example. The second gets defended, because it is theirs.
Point out the flaw and he fixes that one line. Ask three questions until he sees the flaw and he fixes the two others like it.
Delivery is slower and harder than handing it over
The answer takes ten seconds; questioning somebody into producing it can take an hour. The slowness buys a filter. Only what is already forming in them can be delivered, and if nothing comes, telling them would not have helped either.
What you have explained four times and they still cannot do is rarely explained badly. There is nothing yet for it to attach to. Let them hit the wall once, then explain.
The false one has to be removed on the spot
The second half of the craft is judgement. What gets produced is not automatically true, so he tests his interlocutor's own conclusions against counter-examples and throws out what fails. Delivery without inspection manufactures confident error.
Make whoever proposed the idea answer the three hardest questions immediately. Drop what cannot stand, before it acquires the protection of being the group's.
How do I use it today?
Where you are: you can see the answer and are about to say it.
Ask first: has he anything for this answer to attach to, and could three questions get him there himself?
Where it goes wrong: turning questions into a guessing game with the answer already locked, or delivering without ever inspecting what came out.
Lines to keep
They have never learned anything from me.
An answer counts only when it came out of the other person.
Same situation, other people are asking
We fell into the same hole again.New people, same mistakes.I have replaced the people and the same fight came back.We punished the person who did it and it happened again.The same mistakes keep happening · all 9 questions →If this one named what you are going through,
send it to someone who needs it, or keep it somewhere you will find it again.