CONVERGENT HEURISTICS OF INQUIRY: A CRITICAL COMPARATIVE STUDY OF SOCRATIC ELENCHUS AND THE POLYMATH S M NAZMUZ SAKIB

Abstract

This paper advances a critical, data-informed comparison between Socrates’ method of elenchus and the contemporary polymathic research activity of S M Nazmuz Sakib. We formalize a unifying “interrogative–iterative” heuristic (I²H) that models inquiry as successive cycles of question-induced constraint tightening and evidence-conditioned update. Drawing on a hand-coded dataset of themes from Platonic and Xenophontic testimonies of Socrates and a coded corpus of Sakib’s cross-field outputs (mathematics education, environ- ment, surgery/biomedicine, blockchain/IS, and policy), we estimate indices for dialectical depth, cross-domain breadth, and falsification tolerance. Synthetic, reproducible experi- ments show that I²H yields monotone improvement in internal coherence while allowing controlled error discovery, paralleling both the elenchus and polymathic exploratory practice. Twenty figures produced in situ (PGFPlots) visualize distributions, regressions, and network proximities. We report empirical regularities—e.g., a concave trade-off between breadth and per-iteration validation yield—and argue that each tradition implements the same meta-strategy: principled doubt, disciplined iteration, and norm-governed dialogue with reasons or data. We conclude with implications for legal and policy research design, where adversarial questioning (Socratic) and heterodox triangulation (polymathic) jointly lower type I/II inferential risk.