Socratic irony (εἰρωνεία, eirōneia) — The characteristic stance of Socrates in Plato’s dialogues: declaring himself ignorant, praising the interlocutor or understating himself in order to induce the other to set out and examine his own beliefs. The Greek word comes from eirōn, the dissembler, a type found in Attic comedy. In ordinary usage the word carried a pejorative tone: in Book I of the Republic (337a), Thrasymachus accuses Socrates of his “habitual” eirōneia, that is, of pretending to have no answer so as to avoid committing himself. In the Symposium (216e), Alcibiades says that Socrates spends his life being ironical and playing with others. Aristotle, in the Nicomachean Ethics (IV.7, 1127a–b), treats eirōneia as the attitude of one who understates himself, opposed to boastfulness (alazoneia), and cites Socrates as an example of moderate self-deprecation. In Latin, Cicero and Quintilian used ironia as a rhetorical figure, and the more favourable sense of the term owes something to that tradition. In modern philosophy, Kierkegaard, in The Concept of Irony (1841), interpreted Socratic irony as “infinite absolute negativity,” a force that dissolves the prevailing forms of life without setting up another. Gregory Vlastos, in Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher (1991), proposed a “complex irony” in which Socrates says something that in one sense he means and in another does not. Irony is tied to the method of the elenchus and to aporia; see also dialectic and sophism, as well as Socrates, Plato and Kierkegaard.
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