Dialectic, they said, is indispensable and is itself a virtue, embracing other particular virtues under it.
Freedom from precipitancy is a knowledge when to give or withhold the mind's assent to impressions.
By wariness they mean a strong presumption against what at the moment seems probable, so as not to be taken in by it.
Irrefutability is strength in argument so as not to be brought over by it to the opposite side.
Earnestness (or absence of frivolity) is a habit of referring presentations to right reason.
Knowledge itself they define either as unerring apprehension or as a habit or state which in reception of presentations cannot be shaken by argument.
Without the study of dialectic, they say, the wise man cannot guard himself in argument so as never to fall; for it enables him to distinguish between truth and falsehood, and to discriminate what is merely plausible and what is ambiguously expressed, and without it he cannot methodically put questions and give answers.
—Diogenes Laërtius, 7.46-47
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