Socrates-I am the wisest man in the world because i know one thing. That i know nothing?

I'll try...

Imagine that you and some others are all on an alien world. The question arises, "What to eat?"

Your friends think that it's all good, but you don't.

You don't know what is good, but you DO know what is bad. Who is better off, you or your friends?

Socrates doesn't claim to know what is good, but he's certain that we don't know.

Would the Socratic Method work on scientific facts? No, nor is it designed to do so. The scientific method relies of "Empiricism" (experimentation) as a means of discovering truth, whereas the Socratic Method is designed to uncover error in "Reason."

To apply one to the other is like judging apples by the same standards used to judge oranges.

Hope this helps.

The reason he said this is because he lived in Athens at the same time as the "sophists" or the wise ones, they were like the scientologists of that time and for a price they would instruct others in how to be "wise" for they taught that wisdom was power and that power brought influence and a high station in life. But Socrates by asking many questions demonstrated that the foundations of the "wisdom" the sophist claimed to be able to bestow upon others had no rational bases of validity. The oracle at Delphi learned of Socrates and his questions and made a proclamation that he was the wisest man in Athens. Once word of this reached Socrates he thought to himself how can this be, the sophist are the ones that claim to know all the answers and I claim to know none but the oracle is the divine source of truth, the only humans that know the mysteries of the gods, surely the oracle's was not speaking a lie. So after some thought about this Socrates concluded that the reason the Oracle must have said this is because he realized that he know nothing and that is what made him the wisest man in Athens. This is important for many reasons, in all methods of analyzing our world rationally we must first accept an assumption that may or may not be true and there is simply know way to confirm the validity of the first assumption. In foundationalism it is called a self evident truth. You see no system of reason exists that does not lead to a paradox, the simple statement made by Socrates would seem rather paradoxal if we but change it slightly the only thing that can know without a doubt ist that I know nothing without a doubt. You see much of philosophy is still indevelopment bcause some basic paradoxs have yet to be resolved definitively, well at least from an objective viewpoint, but it would seem the modern world is built upon western philosophical concepts and many assumptions are considered dead issues. I hoped this helped have a nice day.

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RE:

Socrates-I am the wisest man in the world because i know one thing. That i know nothing?

Socrates claimed this after finding out from the oracle that there was no-one wiser than he. Does this mean that he is wisest because some think they know truth about beauty etc but he could always disprove them but never claimed to know the truth of what, in this example, beauty was. Could someone...

Socrates Wise

Following a thorough review of the legitimate resources - Aristophanes, Plato, Xenophon, classical historiography - a serious comparison between the thinker's ergon and logos must be made. And this comparison leads to a very specific conclusion about Socrates, that of Socratic Irony, which in turn informs us about the handful of oft-repeated but poorly understood enigmatic statements.

The questioner is completely off track, therefore, and leads us no closer to Socrates than a banker would to his safe combination. Am I claiming this question is an attempt to obscure the meaning of the statement? - Indeed I am.

It is especially deceptive to invoke the irrelevant issue of "proof'", "scientific fact", as regards the oracle at Delphi to Chaerephon: this is the questioner's fraudulent insertion.

That the Socratic statement is a specie of repetition of what originated from the oracle is plain, but there are still those, and always will be those, who imply Socrates used it in a disputatious, vulgar, rhetorical, thoughtless manner. Thus, from the questioner, we have the example, "...what HE MEANS...to disprove others...?" This is actually an insult to Socrates' logos, and puts him in double jeopardy after two millennia! I can't imagine there is much of anything more tiresome.

On the crucial matter of HOW the oracle actually motivated the thinker potential thinkers must now wonder.

I'm surprised no one has picked up on this, but Socrates never claimed to be the wisest man in the world. He said that there are none wiser than him---which leaves open the possibility that there others who are just as wise.

Socrates was not concerned with scientific fact, which he associates with "techne". Socrates, instead, was concerned with "sophos", matters of wisdom that cannot be nailed down to a science. No "scientific fact" can tell us what "wisdom", "temperance", "holiness", "justice", etc., mean because none of these vritues can be reduced to any single appearance. That is, I can do something wise, but that wise thing does not completely exhaust everything that wisdom includes. No one particular instance fully captures the universal. This is Socrates's basic point in his earlier dialogues like the Protagoras and Laches.

I think Socrates was successful in showing how certain positions lead to contradictions, but these contradictions rely on logic alone, not on scientific fact. Also be aware that the dialogues are constructed by Plato and are largely fictional. There is little evidence that Socrates was the philosophical master that Plato portrays him as.

Cheers.

"One who knows that he does not know , is a truly wise man" . Socrates was such a wise man - One who realized that knowledge was immeasurable and unconquerable and that every scholar should continually seek to quench his/ her thirst for knowledge, by humbly submitting that he/ she did not know.

Socrates' characteristic questioning to disprove others would certainly work against scientific facts, because even they are based on certain theories or hypothesis. If these are questioned, the very foundation of science could be shaken up.

Eg. Science says that the colour of daylight is white and that night is black. If a philosopher refutes this by saying that the colour of daylight is orange or green or violet, he would be called a lunatic. Yet, science has proved that this white light can be split up into it's spectra of 7 colours, the VIBGYOR!

So what is the one thing that Socrates knew after claiming that he was the wisest man in the world? That he knew as much as you!?

Wisdom allegedly comes from knowledge but wisdom and knowledge are not the same thing.

Socrates was being modest and also honest because he realized that there are so many areas about which he knew nothing.

Goethe echos this sentiment in Faust's monoIogue.

"I have studied Philosophy,

Medicine,Law, Theology.

Alas, poor fool,with all my lore,

I am no wiser than before."

It ties into a similar saying "The more you learn, the less you know."

Because the more you study, and learn, and from those small things you learn, you open yourself to bigger and bigger things, you kind of realize how much there is out there in the world, and that you know relatively little of it. A wise man realizes that, through even knowing what he knows, he ultimately knows that he knows little compared to what's out there.

While an idiot think he knows everything because he knows everything in his small sphere of knowledge.