Socrates' one Little Question (296 D 5-297 B 8)

Socrates is willing to accept his everlasting omniscience, but first he wants the brothers to explain how he can claim to know a proposition of this type: that good men are unjust (). "Do I know this, or do I not?" he asks Euthydemus. Since the sophist has just proved Socrates to be omniscient, he must embrace the positive horn of the dilemma: "Of course you know it," he replies. But when Socrates asks him to specify what it is that he knows, Euthydemus is in serious trouble. Not with a partial grasp of Socrates' question but with a full understanding of the threat it poses to his argument, he doesn't respond to the point at issue, but by sleight of hand tries to weasel out of the trap by slipping "not" into his reply, an addition that converts the statement into something which can be known: that good men are not unjust . But this "eristic addition" is precisely what Euthydemus claimed the Socratic qualifications to be, merely "misdirected noise." For his part, Socrates accepts the addition as if it did express real content (a content, in fact, the truth of which he claims to have known for a long time) and, in conscious imitation of one of Euthydemus' testy remarks, replies: "But that is not what I'm asking; rather where did I learn that good men are unjust?"^[50] The tables are now being turned on Euthydemus, and so his enantiomorph comes to the rescue. "Nowhere ," quips Dionysodorus. Thereupon Socrates immediately shifts to the other side of the dilemma and concludes: "Therefore, I do not know this." Into this eristic line of argument, Socrates

has sneaked the very real probem of how, when, or where we "learn" and so come to "know" a falsehood. When Dionysodorus hears the problem so formulated, he slips into a familiar groove and just responds in accordance with his eristic training; there can be no place or time or way Socrates could have learned "that which exists nowhere."^[51] In the present context, however, his apparently correct answer has the real effect of destroying (E9) and (E10); for, as Euthydemus informs his brother, Socrates is now both a knower and a not-knower. There is only one genuine response for an eristic who has thus ruined an argument: Dionysodorus blushes.^[52] But not satisfied with this end to the inquiry, Socrates returns to Euthydemus and continues to press the questioning: "What do you mean, Euthydemus, don't you think your brother, who knows all things, speaks correctly?" Since Dionysodorus is omniscient, he can't very well speak falsely. So perhaps he is speaking the truth when he claims that this falsehood exists "nowhere"; at any rate, Socrates is more than willing to take up the problem with Euthydemus. Now it seems that Dionysodorus' defeat is about to bring down Euthydemus too.^[53] Socrates has not only divided but is about to conquer the pair. The situation calls for immediate and desperate action. So, seizing upon the trigger word brother , Dionysodorus makes an unconscionable leap to an inescapable question that prefigures the quibbles on family relationships.^[54] But when Socrates objects to this gross disruption of his conversation with Euthydemus, Dionysodorus takes refuge in the "rules" of argument and automatically indicts Socrates for "flight ," an unacceptable failure to perform his role as answerer.^[55]

Here any falsehood would have proved adequate for the trick. So why has Socrates submitted this one? Is the statement "Good men are unjust" false simply because the "good" men whom we encounter in our experience are not unjust? No doubt there would be radical opposition to this claim. So maybe Socrates is trying to suggest something more complicated. Perhaps he doesn't want to learn that good men are unjust. Is he instead implying that the terms good and unjust are incompatible predicates? Have they combined in a false statement because their forms, goodness and injustice, do not blend or mix in some way?^[56] What, in short, is wrong with saying: "Good men are unjust?" Socrates really wants instruction on this problem, but he is not about to receive it in an eristic context.^[57] At this point it suits Plato's purpose to submit a false statement that obviously refers to something

and conveys meaning to its hearers, as is evidenced by the fact that Euthydemus immediately intuits the danger that it presents to his argument. To an eristic, a falsehood certainly can "refer" to something and have "meaning" if it threatens to destroy his argument.^[58] But now, rather than bicker again with Dionysodorus over questioning procedures, Socrates moves into the realm of myth in order to gain some distance from the immediacy of his entanglement with these two monsters.