2025 Theses Doctoral

Norms of Dialectic: Plato’s Dialectical Requirement in the Meno and Beyond

Breuker, Abigail Rose

My dissertation seeks to answer the question of how we can help each other gain knowledge through conversation. In particular, I am looking at a piece of text presented in Plato’s Meno, known as the “dialectical requirement.” My core argument is that the dialectical requirement encapsulates norms of dialectic that facilitate conversations that are epistemically productive. Further, we can find and apply these norms beyond the context of the Meno.

In doing so, I analyze the dialectical requirement and provide an account of three norms it proposes: the requirement of gentle-friendship, the truth-requirement, and the requirement that interlocutors use shared concepts. I then turn to focus in detail on the requirement of gentle-friendship, arguing that it is a relationship that Plato emphasizes throughout his corpus as a crucial component in successful conversations. I also look at Aristotle’s Topics and trace how Aristotle responds to the dialectical requirement in formulating his own norms of dialectic.

Finally, I examine where Plato’s norms of dialectic fit into contemporary work on virtue argumentation theory and social epistemology. This dissertation addresses a gap in existing scholarship which has not taken the dialectical requirement seriously in a way to better understand ancient dialectic, as well as arguing for the importance of norms that are perhaps more basic than ones previously explored. Overall, I argue that understanding Plato’s norms for dialectic provides an important reference point for thinking about what makes some conversations more successful than others.