What the method does
The Socratic method, in Plato's early dialogues, has a recognisable shape. Socrates asks an interlocutor for a definition of something that interlocutor claims to understand — courage, piety, friendship, moderation, justice. He elicits a definition; he draws out what the definition implies; he produces a counter-example or shows the definition is internally inconsistent; the interlocutor proposes a revision; the process repeats. Most of the early dialogues end in aporia — productive deadlock, the recognition that what was thought to be known is not known.
This pattern is called the elenchus, from a Greek word meaning something like cross-examination or refutation. It is not the same as modern critical thinking, though it is one of that tradition's deepest sources. It has its own assumptions and its own discipline.
Why aporia counts as progress
The most counter-intuitive feature of the method is that it usually ends without an answer. The Laches does not settle what courage is. The Charmides does not settle what sōphrosynē is. The Euthyphro does not settle what piety is. The first book of the Republic does not settle what justice is — that question is taken up again in Book II and remade.
The classical Socratic claim is that this is real progress. Clearing false confidence is itself moral work, because acting on bad knowledge is a recognisable way of going wrong. The Apology makes the version of this argument that is most often quoted: the famous "I know that I know nothing" formulation that, in the actual text of Plato, is something more nuanced — Socrates says he is wiser than the politicians and craftsmen he has questioned only in the precise sense that they think they know what they do not. Removing the false confidence is the first stage of any honest inquiry.
The link to virtue
The method does this work because, on the Socratic view, virtue is in some way a kind of knowledge. If acting well depends on knowing what acting well is, then exposing a bad definition of justice or courage is not merely an intellectual exercise — it removes a piece of false guidance that the interlocutor would otherwise act on.
This is one of the most argued-over claims in ancient philosophy. The relation between knowledge and virtue is more complicated than the slogan, and Aristotle in particular will press hard against the Socratic identification. But for the dialogues themselves, the elenchus is part of how one becomes the kind of person who acts well. It is a practice, not just an inquiry technique.
The Xenophontic Socrates uses the same method
Xenophon's Memorabilia records the same Socrates conducting the same kind of cross-examination, but on different material. Where Plato's Socrates pursues the definitional question (what is X?), Xenophon's tends to pursue the practical one (are you the kind of person who can do this well?). A general is questioned on whether he has actually thought through what command requires; a young man on whether he can manage his household before he proposes to manage the city.
The method is the same — questioning, counter-example, productive embarrassment, return — applied to a different set of subjects. This is part of why the two Socrateses matter together. The standard scholarly reading does not treat them as contradictory but as recognisably the same teacher caught from different angles. See the comparison entry on Plato and Xenophon for the longer treatment.
What it is not
Two contemporary misreadings are worth marking.
First, the Socratic method is not a debate technique. It is not about winning a discussion or scoring points off an interlocutor. The dialogues are quite clear that Socrates would rather be refuted than do the refuting; the goal is to understand, not to defeat. When Plato writes a Socrates who appears to enjoy the game (the Gorgias, parts of the Protagoras), he is also writing the moral cost of treating the inquiry that way.
Second, the method is not the same as Socratic teaching in the sense the term sometimes carries in modern professional education. The classical practice was conducted between adults in public spaces about the most serious questions; it was not a pedagogical scaffold for delivering an already-known answer. Some modern pedagogies use the name; the resemblance is partial.
Why it still matters
What endures from the method is, more than the technique, the disposition. The willingness to be examined; the patience to follow a definition through its consequences; the acceptance that unresolved questions are sometimes the right place to stop for the moment. None of that is exclusively classical. But the dialogues are where it was first done with this much care, and reading them is the way the practice is most reliably learned.