others that seemed to vary from time to time and place to place, such as lan-
guages, customs, laws, political institutions, and so on. The Greeks came to refer
to the former sorts of things collectively as physis, or what we would roughly
translate as nature, and to the latter as nomos, or, approximately, custom or per-
haps even culture. The crucial point of this distinction was that while nature, phy-
sis, provided the fixed context to which human beings could do nothing else but
adjust their lives, human-made things and institutions, nomoi (plural of nomos),
could, at least in principle, be changed by human activity.

There was, however, a crucial problem in this distinction, as Socrates seems to
have recognized. As he went about Athens talking with his fellow citizens, he no-
ticed that most persons tended unthinkingly to hold firm opinions about existing
values, practices, and institutions that made these nomoi appear to be as stable
and unchangeable as the natural phenomena of physis. Many of the Platonic dia-
logues, such as the Euthyphro, portray encounters between Socrates and another
Athenian in which Socrates attempts to shake his interlocutor's complacency by
questioning his received opinions about the existing cultural world. Often the
opinions of Plato's interlocutors reflected what might be called the common sense
prevailing in that particular society at that time. In this respect, Socrates can be
fairly regarded as the first cultural critic (in the sense indicated above), since his
task was to call into question the commonsensical conviction of the truth of
widely held opinions--opinions that on further discussion turned out to be as
unstable and variable as the cultural phenomena that they concerned.

Socrates's manner of questioning widely held but unvalidated opinions natu-
rally led him to take another important step. In examining the network of opin-
ions that make up what we call common sense, he found not only that many
opinions turned out to be inconsistent with one another, but also that some opin-
ions seemed to stand the scrutiny of his questioning better than others. In a case
where his interlocutor came to contradict himself, Socrates concluded that the
other's opinion (doxa) on a given topic could not amount to knowledge
(epistēmē), since to maintain, at the same time, both that something is a certain
way and also that it is not, is self-canceling and amounts to saying nothing at all.
On the other hand, some commonsensical opinions, even on sustained question-
ing, at least failed to result in contradiction. In such cases, Socrates tended to re-
gard them as meeting at least the minimal conditions for qualifying as "true be-
lief," subject, of course, to further investigation. Thus, while Socrates stopped
short of claiming that these latter opinions, or doxai, should straightaway be
counted as knowledge or epistēmē, he did take their withstanding critical scrutiny
while others did not as indicating an important distinction between those things
that we can legitimately claim to know and those that we either cannot consis-
tently assert or can merely believe without any real evidence in their favor.

Even if he had stopped at this point, Socrates would already have established a
rudimentary basis for a critical approach to culture. For beginning with the dis-
tinction between physis and nomos, the natural and the human or cultural, his
questioning established that especially in the sphere of the latter, what persons be-

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