Socrates and Separating the Issues

I think the last post may have been a tad premature. So ignore it for the time being. Before we gorge ourselves on food for thought I would like to take a moment to outline some good table manners, and the process by which I hope to acheive Good Things on this blog.

The first is to explain that I'm a big fan of the Socratic Method. My idea here is to pose very specific questions for discussion, and get very specific questions and answers in response, and so on and so forth. Historically the Socratic Method is applied to a 2-person dialogue, so I don't know how well this will worth here, but hey -- let's give it a go and find out! (Hell, historically sex is a two-person deal, but I am aware of numerous places where this has been expanded to included many people, and with great success. So if it can work for sex, why not philosophy?*)

Also, the Socratic Method is often employed as a tool by people who already have a strong stance on a given subject to convert others to their way of thinking. In this case, I am not out to pursuade anyone. I am on a quest for understanding and enlightenment. When I ask a question it is not with an agenda to prove people wrong; it is asked with a sincere desire to understand what others think and feel. I'm not here to defend my assumptions. As the heading says, I'm here to question them. I hope you are, too.

To this end, there is a question of Separating the Issues. Many people seem to have a great deal of difficulty with this. As a person with Asperger's Syndrom it comes naturally to me, because I have a tendency to take things very literally -- too literally, often.

For example: Someone once asked me, "Are you afraid of the dark?" This struk me as a very silly question. Of course I'm not afraid of the dark! I may be afraid of what's IN the dark, but that is a different question entirely. I know, through social convention, that is what the person meant, but in a philosophical discussion it is critical to operate with this level of precision. Some people would call this 'splitting hairs,' which has a derogatory connotation, but splitting hairs is exactly what we're going to do here.

We're going to search for very precise answers to extremely specific questions. Many of the questions will be about abstract concepts, (such as faith, for example) and it is essential that these be discussed as abstracts.

For example: If I were to ask, "What is the best part of a pizza, the sauce or the cheese?" and someone was to reply, "On pizza you always have sauce and cheese, therefore they are the same thing, and I really like pizza," that does not answer the question. I strongly suspect I'm going to be harping on about this a lot in the coming weeks and months, and as readers you may get extremely bored with it all, but please please please please try to answer the specific question at hand, lest our potentially enlightening discussion get mired in a bewildering array of semi-relevant tangent topics and emotional diatribes. (Something to which I myself often fall victim, so I'm soliciting your help here in keeping me on track when I stray.)

So there we go. Them's the ground rules. Bon apetite!


*There's something I never thought I'd hear myself type.