Introduction
The German philosopher Leonard Nelson (1882 -1927), a follower of Kant’s ideas and a proponent of the Enlightenment, developed a method of teaching and learning to philosophise, which he called Socratic, and which later became known as Socratic Dialogue (SD). He used it as a pedagogic method in the seminars at the University of Goettingen, where he taught philosophy and mathematics. Subsequently he came to practise it with workers and other members of political organizations as well as at school. The tradition was taken on by his disciple Gustav Heckmann, professor in Hannover. nowadays a number of NGOs in some west European countries as well as all over the world are practicing it in a multitude of institutional settings. It is not an exaggeration to say that SD has become a widespread philosophical movement.
Here I am not going to compare Nelson’s version of SD with the original method of Socrates, or to fully reconstruct Nelson’s account of it. My task, as I see it for the purposes of our conference, is to present the current ways of practicing SD in educational (in the very broad sense of the word) contexts. I’ll try to define dialogue as a specific philosophical genre, and to show its basic aims and logic as I see them.
I became acquainted with SD about 6 years ago, and since then have attended several 3-days or shorter dialogues either as a participant or as an observer. without systematic training in the method, I ventured to use elements of it in my teaching at the university, e.g. answering the question “What is knowledge?”, and both the students and I feel that it has been a success. Another resource is a book in English containing essential materials on history and current practices in SD. It appeared in 2004 and is entitled Enquiring Minds. Socratic Dialogue in Education, edited by R. Saran and B. Neisser, published by Trentham Books. I find it invaluable for those who seek clear theoretical and practical instructions into the potentials of SD.
1. General description of the dialogue
We are speaking here of an oral form of communication between a number of people who are engaged in exploring a certain problem. Usually the main purpose of the dialogue is identified (and Nelson himself does so) as to let people acquire genuine philosophical experience. What exactly makes such a communication a dialogue, a philosophical one, and a Socratic one? And is the experience of philosophising to be regarded only as an end or as a goal in itself? The obvious answer, sanctioned by the millennia of philosophical activity, is “no”; therefore I’ll try to show what other – let’s call them sub-goals – of SD are being pursued by it.
1.1. “Dialogue”: in it a group of people (in SD - usually limited to 15, nearer 10 is preferable) interact via questions and answers in pursuit of a common goal. What makes this activity a dialogue is the exchange of thoughts on the basis of equal rights and obligations of the participants to follow the course of the thinking process, may be sometimes silently. The common goal converts the mere group of people into a community. The thought exchange creates a common space where people can meet. It is not a space occupied by a single person who confesses her own views on a given matter, nor a universal space from which everything can be seen clearly. Further on, the dialogue sets a common time - neither the biographical one of a single speaker, nor an eternal one in which universal truths dwell.
1.2. “Philosophy”: the nature of group activity in SD is talking as thinking. there are, however, different kinds of thinking. I find relevant to SD I’ll the distinction between contemplation and deliberation made by Aristotle. In Nicomachean Ethics, Book VI, Ch. I, 1139a, he says:
Let us call one of these [parts of the soul] the scientific part, and the other the rationally calculating part; for deliberating is the same as rationally calculating and no one deliberates about what cannot be otherwise.
(Similar statements can be found in EN 1111b26, 1112b15, 1177a17, 1177b1, Met. XII 7 1072b13-30).
In contemplation we seek knowledge about what is so and so, and cannot be otherwise, e.g. the laws of nature. In deliberation we think about what to do or not to do where things allow for change by human effort, e.g. where to go for dinner. Successful contemplation results in conclusion, successful deliberation – in decision. Contemplation is theoretical, deliberation – practical. Philosophical dialogue is a reflective practice that can be devoted either to contemplation or to deliberation, or to a certain combination of both. It is not just thinking about thinking, which is too abstract a definition of reflection; it is either deliberation of how we (do, must or must not) contemplate, or contemplation of how we (do, must or must not) deliberate.
1.3. “Socratic”: Socratic philosophical dialogue might be defined as contemplation of (past and finished) deliberations. It is contemplative thinking about deliberative thinking employed in some past practical situation, a deliberation that has led to a decision for a certain action. Through contemplation of the process of deliberation SD seeks to improve the latter, so that in some future situations it works better. This is practical wisdom which is impossible without theoretical one. SD is a unique liaison between theoretical and practical philosophy. Doing it, people think how to learn to think better, and in thinking how to learn, people learn how to think.
This is what makes the thinking in SD philosophical. thinking, however, is a process with content. The content of Socratic philosophical thinking is about what is guiding us in our everyday life. It is about our values, habits, preferences, customs and intuitions that structure our behaviour. We are dependent on our understanding of those values – of friendship, success, loyalty, freedom, etc.
Our understanding functions through shortcuts called concepts. Our value concepts are controversial by their very nature, and therefore they may be called truly philosophical. It is absurd to say that there is “the right notion of friendship” or “the true definition of the meaning of life”. Thus philosophy in SD depends both on method (thinking about thinking) and on content (thinking about value concepts).
So far, by specifying what is dialogical, Socratic and philosophical in SD, I have set some limits to the questions suitable for dealing with by the Socratic Method. A list of sample questions and topics is given in Appendix 2.
2. Diachronic Structure of SD – phases of the dialogue and the logic of the story
2.1. Setting the stage, time and rules. A SD is announced and a group of people gather to discuss a question that interests them, often because they have asked themselves that question previously concerning particular situations encountered in their past, and likely to happen again in the future. A person trained in guiding discussions is authorised to see that the story is being “written” according to the cannons of the genre and goes by and large in a “grammatically” correct way (here I mean grammar as the structure of the dialogue). The “grammatical” rules are being handed out either in advance or described at the beginning of the dialogue. Arrangements for report writing are made, parameters of meta-dialogue (see § 3.6. below) are introduced and examples told by participants are collected.
2.2. The question of interest is being explored on the basis of a particular example. The group or the facilitator chooses the example, applying certain criteria. The person who gave it becomes the example-giver (voluntarily) and makes a detailed description of the example helped by the questions and requests for particulars and clarifications by the other participants. The chosen example is being written up.
2.3. Participants analyse the example by questioning the reasons for the actions and attitudes of people in the example, by judging the discovered ones and/or by hypothesizing different reasons. Agreed reasons are further examined as instantiations of norms and values that underpinned the actions of people in the example. Participants determine points of agreement in the analysis. Those points are written up.
2.4. General questions, problems and principles are abstracted from the concrete example. This is what Nelson called regressive abstraction: going back from the contextually described particular situation to the reasons and principles behind it. Those reasons are supposedly grounded in norms and values, so the next step is to test the ethical validity of the latter on the basis of the former. Participants identify which abstractions they can agree with, and which remain as points of dissent. Shared views are being formulated and written up. This is how the story ends.
3. Synchronic structure – protagonist’s roles and the logic of enquiry.
3.1. Reliance on personal experience
SD theory claims that the personal experience of the participants plays a crucial role in the dialogue. It is essential for keeping the discussion close to the practical needs of the participants. But what is the practical need for philosophising? As Socrates himself saw it, philosophical еnquiry must dig under the surface of our everyday stereotypes of behaviour in order to reveal our ultimate goals in life, i.e. the values that guide us, and by an appeal to which we justify or excuse our actions. What do we call courage, prudence, justice, beauty? If all of us have their own peculiar and unique understanding of them, the life in a community would be impossible. So somewhere deep beneath the seeming differences must lie a common conception of those values. In order to discover it we must reflect on our personal experience and eliminate the things that obscure our view: social status, gender features, age, origin, language differences, and the like. The same attitude has been adopted by 20th century phenomenology, L. Nelson being one of the founders of one of its various types. In phenomenology we must turn to “the things themselves”, to their essence obscured by the influences of tradition, authorities of various kinds, theoretical commitments, cultural conventions, personal idiosyncrasies, etc. What remains after bracketing all these, is the pure phenomenon (hence phenomenology), and there is nothing beyond it – so it is also the essence, the eidos (the original, the model) of the thing we are studying. This clarifies further Nelson’s regressive abstraction – starting from the concrete and arriving at the universal. Precisely the universal was what Socrates sought to discover as common knowledge, i.e. the basis for shared values and collective activity.
So SD enquiry is looking for better understanding of our own commitments and their conceptual fundament.
Thus it might be said that the first sub-goal of SD is the discovery of norms and values at work in a certain community (thus using and fostering theoretical wisdom) [1].
3.2. Enquiring into the truth
The need for objectivity has always accompanied good philosophy; and what could be more objective than the truth? SD adopts a strong commitment to truth as one of the goals of inquiry. As yet, it might seem unclear what theory of truth underlies SD (see D. Krohn, Theory and practice of Socratic Dialogue, in: Enquiring Minds, pp. 21 -22). I would venture to say that different truth theories underlie the different stages of enquiry. Where a practical decision is to be made, the consensus theory plays a dominant role; where empirical facts are to be assessed, correspondence of statement and fact becomes crucial; and where speculation is needed in order to outline a vision about goals and outcomes, coherence and logical consistency comes to the fore. In so far as the final outcome of the SD is a judgement about values at work and their validity, the leading theory must be the consensus one.
Next, the question arises about what kind of truth is envisaged?
Nowadays we witness extreme relativism about truth, just to mention some post-modernistic views or the popular conception of Richard Rorty. Moreover, even contemporary science does not speak exclusively of objectivity and truth, but often of inter-subjective validity instead. It is not surprising that philosophy too has reconsidered and revised its demands for (especially absolute) truth, and proceeds from truths common to small communities, to more general ones accepted in a wider context. However, no universal truths are to be sought, if universal means context independent.
How intensively we seek the truth depends strongly on how deep is our desire to know it. When we put some question to the world, we outline a path that seems to lead somewhere, and supposedly we are willing to follow that path. So it is important for the question to be our own, to be of deep interest. In the tradition of SD the participants take a significant role in the choice of the dialogue topic. Looking backwards to Socrates, he sometimes elicits the question from the situation in which his interlocutor happens to be; sometimes the question is already “in the air” in one or other form. However, when the participants in SD have their own questions on the agenda, it is a kind of warrant that the discussion will not die out before the question is answered in a satisfactory way.
So the second sub-goal of SD is (passionately) tracking the truth in the above qualified sense (thus seeking theoretical wisdom) [2].
3.3. Interpersonal understanding and ethics of enquiry
The SD methodology is extremely suitable for team-building, because it aims at deeper and better interpersonal understanding. This is partly due to its theoretical background – the Nelsonian version of phenomenology: pure phenomena are supposedly universal for all people. However, there is another theory on the level of the synchronic structure that concerns the transfer of meaning in the dialogue.
Transfer of meaning is essential in any kind of communication, but the philosophical dialogue is a special case. It tries to approximate the ideal communicative situation. That is why so many philosophers in the past century have tried to specify its enabling conditions.
SD could be viewed as an exemplification of such a communicative situation, in which the so called “maxims” of communication, formulated by the Oxford philosopher H. P. Grice, are at work. They all fall under the constitutive principle of meaning exchange called the Cooperative principle. It states: Our talk exchanges do not normally consist of a succession of disconnected remarks, and would not be rational if they did. Each participant recognises in them a common purpose, or at least a mutually accepted direction. This purpose or direction may be fairly definite (as in SD) or quite indefinite (as in everyday conversations). But at each stage some possible conversational moves would be excluded as unsuitable (H. P. Grice. Logic and Conversation, 1975. in: A. P. Martinich, The Philosophy of Language, Oxford University Press 1996, p. 156.) The specific maxims are:
1. Quantity: make your contribution as informative as is required for the current purposes of the exchange.
2. Quality: Do not say what you believe to be false or lacks adequate evidence.
3. Relation: Be relevant.
4. Manner: Avoid obscurity of expression and ambiguity. Be brief and orderly.
You may recognise in these maxims the rules of SD. they also imply that particular thinking skills are to be exercised in order to follow the maxims. reasoning in a community creates conditions for manifesting the variety of thinking skills available to the community as a whole. This is one of the major advantages of philosophical dialogue in general. Human beings exceed in intelligence all other species precisely by being able to use the resources of the whole community through language. When one participant uses skills for generalisation, another – of exemplification, a third – of tracing consequences, a fourth – of discovering hidden assumptions, all participants have the opportunity for trying to apply - by imitation and modeling – skills used by the others. Thus each participant is enabled to enrich their own repertoire of thinking skills. On the other hand, the group as a whole comes into possession of a wide variety of skills, so that very difficult questions can be handled with the thinking powers of the community. The so called synergic effect occurs.
Noteworthy, we have to differentiate between thinking in a community and groupthink. The latter is a mode of thought whereby individuals intentionally conform to what they perceive to be the consensus of the group. Groupthink may cause the group to make bad or irrational judgements (or decisions) which each member might individually consider to be unwise. Hence it is essential for SD to avoid groupthink, and this is ensured by the facilitator, the metadialogue, and the attentiveness of participants themselves.
The third sub-goal of SD might be identified as increasing the communicative intelligence of the participants as well as their thinking skills (thus fostering practical wisdom) [3].
3.4. Reaching consensus. Rule N 1 for facilitators (as well as phase 3 of SD) explicitly insists that consensus about norms and values is the ultimate outcome to be achieved. How strict is this requirement, and how is consensus to be understood in this context? For instance, consensus is a key concept in the philosophical school of pragmatism. There consensus is a truth criterion: for pragmatism the truth is what the whole community of researchers would accept in the long run, provided that the enquiry takes a long enough time. As Ch. S. Peirce says, the truth is the fate of a proposition; so we might say that consensus is the fate of the dialogue. However, contemporary notions of consensus are slightly different. One possible explication is this. consensus is a general agreement among the members of a given community, each of which exercises some discretion in judgement, decision making and follow-up action. Achieving consensus requires serious treatment of every stakeholder’s considered opinion. Consensus should involve collaboration rather than compromise. If consensus is being sought for in a purely instrumental way the result may be a simple trading—we'll sacrifice this if you'll sacrifice that. Genuine consensus typically requires more focus on developing the relationships among participants, so that they work together to achieve agreements based on willing consent. After all, it is possible in principle for everyone to agree but be mistaken.
In contemporary practice of SD, sometimes it is enough to achieve a greater clarification of the views that participants have about the matter at issue. Sometimes the outcome is just the outlining of different perspectives. And only sometimes merging of perspectives into one unified view is reached. In some institutional contexts it seems justified for SD to insist on reaching full consensus in order to justify SD’s practical applicability concerning ethical and political issues connected with decision making. in educational settings, however, SD often ends up without an explicit consensus, and this is to be theoretically assimilated, as in some recent publications (Rethinking Dialogue – Philosophy and Systems Intelligence, Sebastian Slotte, http://www.systemsintelligence.tkk.fi/slotte1.pdf).
The fourth sub-goal of SD is moving towards consensus (thus seeking practical wisdom) [4].
3.5. The role of the facilitator
The SD methodology adopts a content-neutral role of the facilitator. Especially in education, this is a very important strategy for fostering independent thinking. As Nelson contends, all the questions and answers are to come from the students (L. Nelson. The Socratic Method, in: Enquiring Minds, p. 142). the teacher is by all means an authority for the students, therefore in the classroom the danger of indoctrination is the greatest, if the teacher in the role of the facilitator allows herself to express her own views on the matter. The students take it to be the truth itself, and further inquiry becomes blocked.
The fifth sub-goal of SD is to foster thinking and deciding for oneself (thus seeking a union between theoretical and practical wisdom) [5].
3.6. Meta-dialogue
Meta-dialogue is the method for self-reflection of the dialogical community. It might be described as deliberation of how the contemplation is going and is to proceed further. In the meta-dialogue the rules of dialogue and matters of group dynamics are being discussed. Meta-dialogue may be started at any point of the dialogue in response to a request by any participant or by the facilitator, provided the need for it is well justified. My experience, very similarly to that of our German and English colleagues who are working in schools, shows that it might prove felicitous to start the lesson with a meta-dialogue in order “to clear up questions of organisation and problems of understanding” (R. Saran and B. Neisser, Socratic Dialogue in teaching ethics and philosophy: organisational issues. In: Enquiring Minds, p. 33).
Meta-dialogue is also a space for evaluation of the content dialogue. To my knowledge there is not a systematically developed framework for evaluation of SD. Some models are in use, however. They either distinguish evaluations by the participants, or assess the dialogue phases. The quality of analysis, participation, atmosphere, and the like are being mentioned in such evaluations.
the sixth sub-goal of SD is fostering philosophical wisdom, which distinguishes between practical and theoretical ones but is able to borrow from both in an appropriate way [6].
Conclusion
Philosophical experience acquired during SD is not only a matter of fascination prompted by a communicative situation different from many everyday strategic, manipulative and otherwise unsatisfactory dealings. It serves another clear-cut end of personal transformation: pushing forward the limits of freedom, independent thinking and self-enlightenment. Both facilitators and participants have the right to make use of SD to this end, and the responsibility to contribute to its achievement.
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