You are viewing a single comment's thread from:
RE: Confused Philosophy: My take on philosophy - Socrates' the wisest man who knew nothing!
I think you’ve just highlighted the reason why Internet trolls like the Socratic method - it can provoke an angry response.
So true... I never put the two together but the Socratic method is exactly what they use...
Heh. Whether Socrates was humble or arrogant (he was pretty arrogant), I don’t think his intention was to piss people off. He really was searching for truth, and trying to get the citizens around him to understand that their assumptions were not always valid. Trolls, on the other hand, are just looking for a reaction.
Agreed. I think there is some middle ground /over lap on the scale between socratic method and trolling ( i.e: feminists saying men are trash) but most trolls who are the trolliest simply exist for their own enjoyment. They just want to fuvk with ppl and biebe its not onlh their right, but their duty to be an asshat.
On the other hand some ppl accidentalky troll and try to use socratic method by asking rhetorical questions with forced and loaded answers. Usualky that becomes a thing of ppl answering in the form of another rhetorical question. Its a mess
I may sometimes be guilty of the latter. :) However, to go back to Socrates: I don't think he asked what we would consider "rhetorical questions" - which, to me, means: a question that is not necessary to answer, since it is obvious. While the people he questioned may have first thought the answers to be obvious, Socrates' whole point was to show that answers to such questions are usually more complicated and hard to discern.