Abstract

The author focuses on the role that the epistemic practice of questioning, as it is presented in the Platonic dialogues, plays by Socrates. A comparison with Hintikka’s theory of questioning in proposed: in Hintikka’s account it is the questioner who endeavours to obtain new knowledge by asking someone who presumptively possesses that knowledge, whereas Socrates questions his interlocutors to wake in them the awareness of a knowledge they don’t know to possess. The origin of this knowledge is to be searched in the ideal “vision” that pertains to the immortal soul. But the dialogic practice aims also to the propositional articulation of the knowledge we become aware of: we must become able to “give reasons” (λόγον διδόναι) for our beliefs. This is the source of the Aristotelian theory of argumentation developed in the Topics.