The import of question-and-answer in Plato’s method

In my continuing trek through Robinson’s chapter on the dialectic I’ve come across his discussion on Plato’s use of question and answer as an integral part of the dialectic. Robinson’s basic argument is that 1) Plato’s dialectic requires question and answer but that 2) this presupposes that philosophy (insofar as it is done via the dialectic) cannot be done except via question and answer and 3) Plato does not really give us an argument for this and although we may be able to give one or two for him, it’s questionable whether these arguments are themselves good arguments. So the central question that Robinson is bringing out (rightly so, I think) is why question and answer is so central to the dialectic. Why must we engage in question and answer in order to engage in philosophy?

Actually, given my penchance for quoting people (because they say it so much better than I!) here are a couple of the bits from Robinson:

On the main problem, then, which is why question-and-answer is essential to discover, the Phaedrus, which on first thoughts seems the most hopeful place to look, provides no information. Yet the problem urgently requires a solution. For can Plato really have thought that you cannot do philosophy by yourself? Surely a question-and-answer conversation such as the dialogues exemplify could not occur at all unless the leader had done a great deal of private discovery before hand?

This problem has usually been overlooked by students of Plato’s dialectic; and the reason is probably that they have taken him as meaning that question-and-answer is essential only to teaching and not also to discovery. But that is not all he means…it is…quite certain that from the Meno to the Philebus Plato is convinced of these two propositions: (1) that dialectic is the supreme method of discovery as well as of teachin, and (2) that dialectic has its being only in question and answer. (85)

Robinson goes on to say that Plato never gives a satisfactory answer to why question-and-answer is necessary to philosophic discovery. This isn’t to say that Plato gives no arguments (Robinson goes on to note several such places where Plato gives a variety of ’smallish’ arguments concerning these) but, Robinson argues, these aren’t sufficient to justify why question-and-answer is such a crucial component of the dialectic. Robinson goes on to offer arguments in favor of Plato’s view that, nonetheless, Plato doesn’t give and he winds up offering a couple of historical phenomena that, he says, may account for Plato’s firm confidence in question-and-answer (the Athenian’s love for discussion and Plato’s intellectual rearing by Socratic elenchus).

This is a rather perplexing question, though both for Plato and for contemporary accounts of methodology that require (or recommend) some sort of q&a. My quasi-conception of understanding, for example, requires the ability to give and defend accounts. Here, at least in terms of the defence of accounts, I very much have in mind a sort of Platonic dialectic (or Socratic elenchus, perhaps). But what about the development of an account? Is question and answer really necessary then? Similarly for Plato…did he require constant question and answer? Was the only way that one could develop an account through engaging in dialogue with another? Or was it just that one had to be able to answer questions concerning his account in the form of dialectic? (I see these as seperate issues. On the one hand it is presupposing that one cannot even develop an account, much less defend it, without the use of q&a whereas the other assumes that you may be able to develop an account without q&a but you cannot be said to understand it without having the ability to engage in a healthy dialectical session in defense of that view.) Can one be said to put forward an account when one puts forward a hypothesis (surely not…an account is longer than one single assumption, is it not?) and that account is refined and developed through q&a?

Arg.. This is getting confused. Largely, I think, because I’m getting tired. But these are perplexing questions that I want to think about a lot more. How intricately related is q&a to the method of the dialectic and how related is the method of the dialectic to 1) developing an account and 2) defending that account? See. And this all seemed so simple yesterday.

More on this later.