In Plato’s dialogue “Meno,” the eponymous speaker, after much frustration, declares that Socrates, his insistent interviewer, is like a “broad torpedo fish” – better known to us as an electric ray – which stuns and paralyzes those who approach it.1 The two men had conversed at length on the topic of virtue, something Meno professed to know much about, and he readily produced several definitions. After Socrates debunked each in turn, Meno was at a loss. Like the torpedo fish, he tells Socrates, “you now seem to have had that effect on me, for both my mind and my tongue are numb, and I have no answer to give you. Yet I have made many speeches about virtue before large audiences on a thousand occasions, very good speeches I thought but now I cannot even say what it is!”2