Socrates showed that confident people often can't defend what they claim to know

Warburton opens with Socrates, whose signature method involved asking apparently simple questions about concepts like courage or justice until his interlocutors' confident initial answers collapsed under scrutiny. Rather than offering his own systematic doctrine, Socrates specialized in exposing the gap between how certain people felt about their beliefs and how well those beliefs actually held up to sustained questioning.

Warburton highlights the famous episode where the oracle at Delphi declared no one wiser than Socrates, which puzzled him given his own sense of ignorance — until he concluded that his distinctive wisdom was precisely his awareness of what he didn't know, in contrast to others who assumed knowledge they couldn't actually justify. Socrates's eventual execution for corrupting Athenian youth through his questioning underscores how genuinely threatening this method could feel to those in power.

Takeaway: real wisdom might start with honestly recognizing the limits of what you actually know, rather than assuming confidence equals understanding.