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I think its more than permissible, but often necessary, to get dialectic going and to train one's apprentice dialecticians. But its rightness in actual use does depend upon one's interlocutors and their level of consciousness and awareness and maturity. Can they handle this kind of "good" deceptiveness and manipulation, handling meaning profit by it and not see it as sophistical? Do they understand the purpose of such games as being only useful and not good in themselves, for the point of all dialectic is the acquisition of Truth? etc.

I approach it a bit differently as a political scientist. Socrates exist in a social and political settings where irrationality counts as much as rationality in politics, discourse, and action. Eristics is sometimes the best one can do in such an environment. Although dialectics is the ideal, it takes time to pave the way to make this possible, i.e., to reduce people's passions, to make rational conversation possible.

In fact, I think this is one of the problems of the current president. He is entirely dialectical and doesn't engage in eristics with the American public. The president fails to recognize that reasoned argumentation fails to appeal to the passions of the people, e.g., Tea Party. This is not to say that one can disagree with the president's policies on rational grounds; rather, my point is that because the president fails to use eristics in his communication strategy, he comes across as aloof and out-of-touch. The people want passion as much as they claim they want reason.

I know this will sound a bit naive. Nevertheless . . . Perchance isn't the relevant distinction between using good and bad argument rather than between using strong and weak ones. If an argument is truly unsound, then I think we should refrain from using it--save in that case where we are showing what the argument entails or what rational consistency requires. For instance, an entailment of Humean epistemology is that we must be skeptical not only of the existence of God but also of the existence of an external world, of other minds, and of the law of causation. Now, the Humean argument reaches what I take to be a false conclusion. But his conclusions would seem to follow rather straightforwardly from his premises. So I might construct an argument I take to be unsound but valid for educative purposes--to say, well, you subscribe to this epistemology, but you realize that x, y, or z follows, don't you? And perhaps the Humean skeptic might be inclined to be less Humean if they realize the argument that leads to skepticism about belief in God also entails skepticism about belief in the self and so also of rights, etc.

As for Socrates . . . might not one understand his engagement with folks like Thrasymachus as an endeavor to show what we would today call the self-referential incoherency of his position?

I would contend that all arguments are valid for pedagogical purposes, although I agree it is important to show the differences between a strong and a weak one when students are at the point of examining things rationally. However, it may take some time to get them to that point.

"I'm struck in the Platonic texts how often someone needs to be defeated or converted so that real inquiry can begin."

As in the Meno, where Socrates explicitly states that the servant's mistaken belief that he knows must be given up before he can learn the truth: "You realize, Meno, what point he has reached in his recollection. At first he did not know...; even now he does not yet know, but then he thought he knew, and answered confidently as if he did know, and he did not think himself at a loss, but now he does think himself at a loss, and as he does not know, neither does he think he knows. ... Indeed, we have probably achieved something relevant to finding out how matters stand, for now, as he does not know, he would be glad to find out, whereas before he thought he could easily make many fine speeches to large audiences...."

If all learning is recollection (as is claimed in the Phaedo), then all "finding out how matters stand" must be preceded by elenchus.

I'm interested to note the difference between a political and philosophical approach to the question. A philosophical approach asks questions of soundness and referential inconsistency, whereas a political approach talks about apprenticing the young. In class, are we doing political training or philosophical training?

May I ask why you call it "political" training? I would think moral or spiritual?

Hello RJ, Just wondering what you mean by this: "Since he's [Socrates is] not trying to establish a truth as much as reveal the confused state of the interlocutor..." You could mean at least these two: (a) Socrates is just as uninterested in the question of truth as the Sophists, and only wants to be a punk because he is smarter than his interlocuters and can easily reduce them to silence. Or (b) Oftentimes, since the truth is difficlt to achieve, in the midst of his love of truth and desire to achieve knowledge of it, the best he can do is start with the debunking of what he knows is not the truth. In this way, as a servant of truth, he hopes at least to get closer to it.

Please forgive my colloquial speach, but I just want to get a handle on your understanding of the relation between the person of Socrates and truth. I think it is point (b) above. Pete

Thanks to everyone for their comments:

Political vs. moral--perhaps this is the accident that I'm teaching the Republic just now. While both political and moral virtues could have a sort of apprenticeship, here I'm thinking of education as a form of public life--which is to say it is a-moral.

Peter: I mean simply that in elenchus Socrates' teaching seems performative rather than substantive. He seems to be trying to convert people to a way of life rather than to a particular set of beliefs--or at least the two are alongside each other. Think of Book One of Republic where Socrates chases off Cephalus insofar as Cephalus is a philodoxer and refuses coversion.