Socratical prompts: A proposal for pedagogical use in a Philosophy of Law course

Abstract

This paper explores the possibility of using the Socratic method of questions and answers as a model for the formulation of prompts of higher conceptual performance in the use of the GPT-3 chat on the occasion of a typical question of the philosophy of law courses: what is justice? To develop the exercise, the arguments and counter-arguments offered by Thrasymachus and Socrates in book I of Plato's Republic are reviewed. The article aims to show, on the one hand, how the formulation of philosophically sophisticated questions improves the chat user experience and, on the other hand, how the nature of these questions and their object also point out the limits of artificial intelligence.