My Spectrum Street Epistemology Secret: Eliciting a Contradiction

It’s a science to determine which claims to discuss and in what order. Here’s the secret to what I’m trying to achieve in my SSE sessions and how I try to achieve it:

• I ask myself, “What question can I pose to prompt someone to question their stated belief?” That is, I aim to elicit a contradiction between participants’ stated beliefs and their reasons for holding them.

This is what Socrates did. Nearly 2,400 years later, he remains unequaled.

The Socratic Method

In Book I of Plato’s Republic, Socrates engages in dialogue about the nature of justice. Cephalus claims justice is paying one’s debts. Socrates then poses a scenario: Borrowing a knife from a friend who later becomes a murderer. Is it just to return the knife, knowing he could harm others?

Socrates’ example reveals flaws in Cephalus’s definition. Returning the knife fulfills the obligation of repaying a debt but risks enabling harm. This suggests that justice cannot be reduced to “paying one’s debts.” Justice must consider the consequences of actions and their moral context. If the friend is a murderer, returning the knife likely violates a higher principle of justice. Socrates’ question challenges the idea that justice is a mechanical act of fulfilling obligations. Consequently, Cephalus realizes his contradiction and must revise his belief.

Socrates’ method is dialectical. He uses counterexamples to expose contradictions, refine understanding, and nudge (or shove) people toward belief revision. He doesn’t provide a definitive answer but shifts the inquiry to justice’s essence. The knife example underscores that justice requires practical wisdom, not blind adherence to rules like “paying one’s debts.”

This is precisely what I aim to do in Spectrum Street Epistemology (SSE) and Street Epistemology (SE). I elicit contradictions, help people evaluate values, adjust confidence, and question assumptions. Like moving chess pieces, anyone can learn the method, but mastering it requires time, experimentation, and an understanding of Socratic questioning. You must also be willing to take risks: Offending people with questions, inducing perplexity that challenges cherished beliefs, risks of asking bad questions, and risks of people thinking you’re an idiot because of the questions you asked.

Given the effectiveness of SSE in fostering critical thinking through the Socratic method, it’s worth examining how modern education approaches this indispensable skill.

The Sequence

We began with the claim: “Wokeness is a form of neo-Marxism.” I really like this sequence of claims, as it helps participants explore and weigh issues. Here’s the sequence of claims I presented:

• “Corporations make greater profit from a divided society.”

• “Wokeism could only arise in capitalist societies.”

• “Wokeism caused many corporations to override the profit motive.”

• “If wokeism caused many corporations to override the profit motive, then capitalism is inherently flawed.”

• “Communism provides more of a bulwark against wokeism than capitalism.”

• “I would rather live in a strongly woke society than a strongly communist society.”

• “I would rather live in a communist, non-woke society than a capitalist, hyper-woke one.”

Notice the progression in this sequence, which ultimately asks participants to compare wokeism, capitalism, and communism. Which is worse? How do you hierarchically prioritize them? What does that mean in practical terms? The session culminates with the claim: “I would rather live in a communist, non-woke society than a capitalist, hyper-woke one,” an amalgam of ideas from the previous questions with practical import.

Modern Education

“He flung himself from the room, flung himself upon his horse, and rode madly off in all directions.”
—Nonsense Novels (1911), Stephen Leacock

Falsification, defeasibility, error correction, identifying contradictions, pursuing truth, along with adopting the dispositions that support these, are core principles on which education should be based. But they are not. With few exceptions, formal education is built on Brazilian educator Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. The purpose of contemporary education is to alleviate oppression, not to correct errors, nor to pursue verisimilitude and approach truth. Truth, in fact, has virtually nothing to do with modern education. And the further systems deviate from truth, the more arbitrary their outcomes become. (As one point of contact: A 2023 study by the National Education Association found that only 12% of high school curricula include formal training in critical thinking skills, while 68% emphasize social-emotional learning.)

Over the next year, I’ll bring SSE to underserved communities in schools and prisons. I offer this for free to fulfill my nonprofit’s mission. Your paid Substack subscription helps fund this work.

It is my hope that more educators will incorporate SSE into their classrooms. In doing so, we can help students clean up their epistemology, correct errors in their thinking, and realign education’s purpose toward seeking truth.

If you’re an educational or correctional administrator and would like my team and me to provide free SSE training for your staff, please let me know in the comments.

The Experts Are Coming!

The primary criticism of our Spectrum Street Epistemology (SSE) series is that we feature too few experts. We hear you! Most of our upcoming videos will feature content experts. This video features think tank fellows from the Danube Institute: Dr. Calum Nicholson and Gavin Haynes. They are highly knowledgeable, and Calum is a close friend. Enjoy!