How do you apply the Socratic Method in chess?

From a philosophical point of view, what would you do? how would you apply the socratic method in your analysis?

First of all, define "Socratic Method", only to avoid any misunderstandings.

This question is not so simple at all. But my definiton or the way how I perceive the Socratic method is to use a questioniong system to analyze chosen moves in order to refute them to look for better moves. 

The problem with trying to be too clever.

Not really nice to accuse someone of trolling. I clearly wasn't, on the contrary I asked a definition only to avoid any misconceptions.

What do you mean by analysis -- calculating forcing lines, or determining imbalances and creating a plan?  Or do you just mean the broad process of picking a move in any kind of position?

They all require a certain amount of internal Q&A.  Chess players have a sketchy enough reputation but it is good to have a robust internal dialogue when playing chess.  

But the hard part is asking yourself the right questions.  If you make the questions too broad they are meaningless.  For example, when calculating forcing lines instead of asking yourself the broad (and meaningless) "what should I play?", better questions would be "what is my opponent threatening?", "what checks and captures do I have?", "what is the material balance", etc.  When analyzing to determine a plan you first have to know what imbalances to look for, but then you have to have an internal Q&A about which are the most important and what to do with them.

There is both a visual and a logical element to chess.  With tactics, you have to "see" certain things on the board (and have to know to look for them, too), like loose pieces, pieces in alignment, possible knight forks, vulnerable king, mating patterns/tactical patterns, etc.  But once you "see" something, say several pieces on the same diagonal, then comes the analytical piece where you have to determine what that actually means (do you have a possible pin, skewer, discovery, etc), and if it doesn't quite work you have to ask yourself the right questions to figure out why, and see if you can make it work.

I would say that all of it requires having a good internal dialogue, which seems to be very socratic, no?

What do we mean by "winning position"?

This reminds me of Botvinnik's attempt to use a "dynamic programming" style algorithm to create a chess-playing computer program. It would essentially ask questions like "Which pieces could move to that square?" or  "Which pieces could move to a square from which they control that square?". He applied these ideas with maps (functions) of squares and pieces. At that time, the computational power available was not enough to play well in that way (or in any other way). I wonder whether the technique could be applied today. We have powerful enough chess programs already, but the Botvinnik approach is applicable to a wide range of goal-seeking problems, not just chess. 

How about this for a Socratic Method ?

Wtf am I doing playing chess instead of poker ?

Doesn't the Socratic Method require more than one person? Something like Peer to Peer (or Peers) or Teacher to Student? 

In the end using the Socratic method just gets you killed!

Einstein above just refuted Socrates!

Relatively speaking of course!😋

Recently I found out that before internal dialogue, the visualization of all forcing moves in a given position should be the first thing you'd do when looking at the board and now I think internal dialogue is what's required of me to come up with a plan based on what I see. But yes, this is very socratic. 

I'm more interested about the kind of questions where you ask "Is there a better move? why not? how did I come to a position where I don't see any tactical opportunities? Is it because I had no idea what to do? Like, I want questions that tests my knowledge about the game itself. 

Not really,I think of it as myself playing against myself in chess, I'm not really about "beating the opponent" now since I'm just developing my tactical visualization. It's more interesting to see the game as myself teaching myself my errors.

There might be misconceptions since I'm only beginning to discover the socratic method and attempting to employ it. So far, the answers here are telling me that it's just a way to question knowledge about the game of any position but also it feels like that people have already been using it their entire lives.. these questionaires. 

It looks like you should make more errors so that you can learn from them. But if you really learn, you should do less errors. Hence also learn less. In the end, learning the ultimate truth about chess through errors in the Socratic method should be impossible.

"Visualizing" forcing moves isn't a good description.  That makes it sound like calculating forcing moves is somehow easy...as if you can just close your eyes and visualize.  Yes, you need to be able to visualize the pieces moving around the board in your head, but in order to calculate forcing variations well you also must have the "logical" piece of it, which includes an internal Q&A.

For example, let's say your opponent has attacked your knight with a pawn either on his last move, or in some future variation you are calculating (or "visualizing").  Yes, you can "see" the knight is under attack, but that doesn't tell you what to do about it.  What options do you have?  Which of those options is the best?  Have you considered all options?  You should be asking yourself critical questions like, can I pin/capture the pawn, can I block (not in this case), can I defend my knight, can I move the knight, can I counterattack something of equal or greater value, etc, throughout each ply (move) of a forced variation.

So you can't really say you visualize a variation "before internal dialogue".  I think it is more accurate to say that most people, probably all beginners, dont have a good internal dialogue...I would argue that is because they have no idea of what to even ask themselves.  They have maybe memorized a few opening moves, or saw something called a pin once, and think that by making those moves they are "calculating" or "visualizing".  In reality, there's not much internal dialogue going on at all.

I read something interesting recently that ties to this Q&A internal dialogue is that when you are asking questions your brain naturally finds all the answers for you. So the idea to ask correct questions and the answers would come about naturally. Also helps with refocusing your thoughts and keeps distractions at bay. So you brought up a pretty valid point on Q&A internal dialogue. 

I've been lurking around chess twitch and analyzing the thought process of chessplayers and the questions they ask are quite basic. Like "what's the threat?" but that question seems quite general. But I'm sure with more experience, I would begin to realize how deep that question actually is.