The first half of the elenchus

• Parent page - How to construct the elenchus

---

• Find X
• “This chapter is about that process of helping your partner produce the first half of an elenchus—that is, a claim you can test. ”
• “The front half of the elenchus—the claim that will be tested—has to be established first, and this process involves questioning, too.”
• Preliminary questions to clarify thinking
• “Good preliminary questions tee up the claims that the parties go on to pursue.
  • That’s part of the secret of Socratic dialogue: getting a claim on the table that lends itself to productive questioning.
  • Such claims don’t usually spring up right away or on their own.
  • Sometimes they are developed by listening for a while; often they are developed by friendly questioning.
  • The questions aren’t testing anything. They just draw out the views of your partner and steer them into a position that will support a good dialogue.”

The front half of the elenchus is (5 words):
{{c1::The claim to be tested}}
|
Step 0 in the elenchus is 
{{c1::asking preliminary questions}}
in order to
{{c1::find a claim to pursue}}

1. “Find the principle”

• “Imagine arguing with someone about whether a movie is good. This goes on for a while, with both of you quarreling over details. Then it occurs to you to ask: What is a good movie, anyway? What makes one better than another?
  • You realize that you’ve been arguing about a particular movie—the question in the foreground—because you have different opinions about those larger questions in the background.
  • The background questions are what you should be arguing about.
  • Now replace the word “movie” with the word “act” or the word “life” and you have the usual Socratic inquiry.”
• “find the unconscious judgment that is the “root and nerve” of whatever claim is set forth.
• You want to get to the bottom of what the argument is really about.
• Socrates doesn’t usually enter a debate on the terms where it is being fought. He moves it to the level of principle, then goes to work there.”

Step 1 of the elenchus (3 lines):
“{{c1::Find the unconscious judgment 
that is the “root and nerve” 
of whatever claim is set forth}}
|
"Socrates doesn’t usually enter a debate on the terms where it is being fought. He {{c1::moves it to the level of principle, then goes to work there}}."

Restated more formally → major and minor premise

• “The point can be restated more formally. A classic deductive argument contains a major premise and a minor one.”
  • The stock example of a major premise, first used in these words by Mill, is All men are mortal.
  • The stock example of a minor premise is Socrates is a man.
  • Those two premises, taken together, lead to the conclusion that Socrates is mortal.
  • The major premise is a general principle.
  • The minor premise is a statement about a particular case.
• Why is this useful to understand?
  • Because the general principle at stake in an argument often goes unstated and unexamined—the “inarticulate major premise,” as it’s sometimes called. The first thing Socrates does is smoke it out.”

Re: step 1 of the elenchus:
A classic deductive argument contains 
{{c1::a major premise and a minor premise}}
|
Stock example of a major premise:
{{c1::All men are mortal}}
|
Stock example of a minor premise:
{{c1::Socrates is a man}}
|
The major premise is a (2 words)
{{c1::General principle}}
|
The minor premise is a (5 words)
{{c1::Statement about a particular case}}
|
The {{c1::major premise}} in an argument often goes {{c2::unstated and unexamined}} 
|
What "{{c1::the inarticulate major premise}}" means:
{{c2::The major premise in an argument often goes unstated and unexamined}}
|
Re: major/minor premise and step 1 of the elenchus:
{{c1::"Smoking out" the inarticulate major premise}}

Nested major/minor layers

• “And there usually isn’t just one major premise behind a claim. There are layers of them. The first layer might be a reason for whatever has been said in the foreground. Then there’s the reason behind that reason—a more general principle. When you’re engaged in Socratic questioning, you have to decide when to keep pressing for more general principles and when you’ve gone far enough.”

2. Once you’ve landed on a major premise → 3-fold fork

• “Good: now we have a major premise—a principle to talk about that was in the background. This brings us to a fork in the road—or rather to three ways you might proceed.”

A. Use the new principle to test the original claim

• “The newly announced principle might serve as the second half of an elenchus; it might be shown inconsistent with the original claim. That possibility could be pursued here with a question like: are you sure that pornography can’t ever be political? You have to decide if that question—or smaller questions and examples that lead to it—will be a productive route to pursue. If not, you might choose instead to.…”

B. Test the new principle

• “The newly announced principle can itself become the first half of an elenchus. In other words, you can make it the target of testing. They’ve said that the First Amendment only protects political speech; so you develop examples of nonpolitical speech that they might also want to protect. Or you use other questions of the general kind shown in the next chapter. (This approach means putting the original question—here, the treatment of pornography—to one side at least for the moment, just as Socrates put aside the question of fighting in armor while they all talked about courage generally.)”

C. Push for another principle

• “Or the questioner can push further, seeking the principle behind the principle just offered: You say that only political speech is protected, but what is political speech? (Let’s have a definition.) Why does the First Amendment protect it? (Let’s have a rationale.) Either of those questions would lead you to other principles that are more general than the one on the table.”

3. How to know which to choose

• “And so it goes. At any point you can choose: take the principle that’s been offered and use it to challenge an earlier claim; or make the new claim itself the subject of challenge and testing; or push to find another principle—probably one that’s more general. Which of these approaches is best? Here are three ways to think about it.”

Look for “we can work here”

• “First, as a matter of Socratic craft, the typical goal is to climb until you’ve found a claim that you can refute or put into tension with something that has already been said. When a claim can’t survive shallower scrutiny, there’s no point in going deeper; it already needs work. And practically speaking you need a claim that will lend itself to good questions from you and answers from your partner. If the principle in front of you isn’t well suited for those operations, you climb another rung. It’s like a musician trying to find a key in which a song can be played, given the vocal range of the singer. You might move up a little at a time until you find a key about which you think: we can work here.”

Look for where the action is (a rich vein)

• “Second, you want to find an angle that does justice to your partner’s thinking. The goal isn’t to lead people where they don’t want to go so that they can be questioned on uncomfortable territory. It’s to figure out the true reasons for their views, even if (especially if) they themselves might not be sure what those reasons are. You are probing for the “root and nerve” of the matter under discussion, not trying to avoid it. You want to get to where the action really is. To shift the medical simile a bit, you might imagine a doctor seeking to draw blood and looking for a rich vein.”

Look for agreement

• “Third, in some contexts you might climb another rung for a different reason: to find a proposition on which you can agree—in earnest, and not just for the sake of discussion. Most people do care about the same things when you reach a high enough level of generality. Establishing that point of departure early can have great value in efforts to persuade later. It allows you and your partner to reason together from a common understanding.By whatever of these criteria it may be guided, Socratic discussion starts with a hunt for the right level of generality at which to talk.”

4. Words = judgements

• “a concept will eventually come into view. Something will be described as good or bad or unjust or ridiculous, or a word ending with -ism will be applied to it. Good: now you can ask about the meaning of that concept.But this leads to a second issue. Asking what a concept means can sound like a fuss about nothing. You seem to be bickering about the meaning of a word, and people don’t care about words; they care about real things. The point to stress in reply is that you aren’t just talking about a word. You’re talking about a judgment. The word under discussion is a placeholder for that judgment. If the word seems unimportant, no problem: we can use another one. Indeed, it’s sometimes useful to change out the word at issue for a different word or phrase from time to time, just to make clear that the discussion isn’t about semantics. It’s about a judgment.”

5. Propositions

• “Propositions. Sometimes the major premise behind an opinion isn’t a concept that needs to be defined. It’s a proposition that needs to be defended: a belief about what is so, for example, or about the reason for something. (Mill’s major premise—“all men are mortal”—is a proposition.) Instead of asking what the concept means, you’ll be asking whether the proposition is true. But first, as before, the proposition simply has to be identified. It may again be half-conscious even in the person who holds it. Arguments can go on for a long time with the major premises on each side taken for granted and invisible to everyone.”
• “How do you find the proposition in the background of a claim? A good route is often provided by a persistent use of the question why. The question is asked, and then asked again in a nearly childlike spirit—or if not in that simple form, then in the more complex shapes it can take: What is the purpose of the thing we are talking about? What is the reason for it? How do you know? What makes you so sure? And what is the reason for the reason? These kinds of questions can push through layers of principle that usually get more general at each step. They work because the major premise of an argument usually amounts, in conversation, to a reason why the conclusion is true. So asking about the reason for a conclusion takes you back to the premises behind it.”

The second half of the elenchus