Socrates and Plato

This was my answer to the question whether Plato's account of Socrates can be relied upon: 

Plato’s account [or accounts] of Socrates has [have] to be considered in connection with other evidence, especially in my view the comedy THE CLOUDS, written by Aristophanes during Socrates’ lifetime. That is the TL;DR answer. For more, bear with me.

Aristophanes portrays Socrates as a sophist, and in fact as the leader of the sophists. And he portrays sophism in general as what we might call a cult, the purpose of which is to make bad arguments seem good, and good arguments seem bad.

Now this is odd on its face. Plato after all portrays Socrates as an anti-sophist. In PROTAGORAS especially, and even in the early going of THE REPUBLIC (the exchange with Thrasymachus), the Platonic Socrates devotes himself largely to showing the sophists — or to showing impressionable youngsters — the errors and arrogance of sophism. And Plato’s Socrates seems to object to sophism for essentially the same reason Aristophanes’ audience is expected to object to sophism. So why is Socrates portrayed as being on opposite sides of the same dispute, both for and against the same cult?

Ah, there’s the rub. If ‘Socrates’ were a fictional character that Plato and Aristophanes had cooked up, one would have expected them to be consistent on this. To take a consistent position, that is, on what their common character thought about sophism which, on BOTH accounts, was central to his career and purpose. Since they take such contrary views, I think it a fair inference even without more that Socrates was a real historical character, with an ambivalent relationship to sophism. So that we’re looking at the same facts from two very different contemporary perspectives.

Is Donald Trump a neoconservative? I think that millennia from now, there may be some who will regard him as having expressed the heart of early 21st century neoconservatism. And others who will regard him as the great enemy of the neocons. They will both be pointing to the same facts, the same reality.

At any rate, the answer to your question is “no, not taken in isolation.” Another good answer to your question is “yes, taken as part of a broader evidentiary whole.”