What is the Socratic method? Could it be used to test students in an age of AI?

Most students now use AI in their tertiary studies. AI can also, under certain conditions, answer at least 65% of questions correctly in STEM subjects.

In the humanities, where the whole aim is critical and creative reflection, educators face a thorny question. How do you develop and measure thinking of the kind that a machine could not genuinely imitate?

AI has proved it can answer questions well. But can it ask questions? And can it ask the right questions?

This is the philosophical method at the heart of the work of the Ancient Greek philosopher, Plato. His Socratic method of teaching is, perhaps, the mode of thinking we need to emulate in our teaching and learning today.

Plato wrote dialogues: texts that read (in nearly every case) like a conversation between Socrates (Plato’s teacher) and a partner drawn into conversation by Socrates after claiming to know something about living a good and virtuous life.

There is a dialogue for all the great philosophical questions: what justice is; what courage or love really requires; what makes a good friend; and even how we acquire knowledge.

In each case the conversation is set by Socrates, who questions someone who seems to possess knowledge about a certain thing, or who has come to Socrates for advice.

It is not just the content of these dialogues that has prompted centuries of discussion, but their form. Plato’s dialogues are extraordinary literary achievements, drawing on a range of genres and placing characters, historical and fictional, inside deliberately constructed settings.

These are challenging and strange texts in many cases. They ask of their readers not just to read them as dialogues, but to call into question what we think we know.

Take the Euthyphro, the dialogue students most often meet first, which opens the sequence of dialogues dramatising Socrates’ trial and death.

Socrates is on the way to his own trial, over (politically motivated) charges of failing to honour the gods of this city, introducing new divinities and corrupting the youth. He meets a man called Euthyphro, who is on his way to court to accuse his own father of murder. Euthyphro insists this is the pious thing to do.

To Socrates, this is evidence that Euthyphro must know something about what piety is. Dialogue ensues. Socrates leads Euthyphro through a frustratingly methodical discussion using elenchus, also called the Socratic method.