Zoos Locking up Animals Just isn't Right (specifically referring to birds)

Who?:confused:

My point stands. The Socratic Method is at root a method of teaching others by forcing them to articulate their views and reflect on why they think what they do. Apply it to yourself before you presume to teach others.

Well I know that. You are right. It would be pretty ineffective to just ask “why” all the time. You are trying to also get the opponent to contradict themselves. There are some pretty good articles online about this and I have one of them saved on my computer.

EDIT: I am not trying to teach anyone anything. Instead I am just using the method as a tool to argue.

You basically just said “I’m doing this to be annoying.” Socrates at least pretended to try to educate people. He said he only “argued” in order to correct. It isn’t supposed to replace having an actual argument or thoughts of your own, which it sounds like you’re doing.

It probably also works best when you try to apply it near the beginning of a thread - not after 200 posts, many of which already addressed the issue you’re asking about, and three or four days after the OP has stopped posting anyway.

I don’t have a problem with AU’s line of ambiguous questioning per se. Lots of other dopers use the “define x” and “how do you measure y” approach. I’ll agree that he’s not using it effectively and it destroys what little credibility he has when instead of engaging in an argument with counterpoints he descends into a string of questions.

It’d probably work better in GQ if he had a legitimate question but not in GD where people are looking for arguments.

Well yes, I just started learning how to question effectively so obviously I have a lot of learning to do, and it probably won’t work well the first few times.

The first rule of the bird lottery is that YOU DON’T TALK ABOUT THE BIRD LOTTERY!
That’s also the second rule :slight_smile: