 This activity took the form of argument on both sides of the question (in utramque partem). The speeches for and against justice that Carneades delivered during the philosophers’ embassy to Rome was an instance. Most often, however, Academics in this period left the defense of a theory to its proponents and argued against it, creating an opposition in this way. The Academy’s method of argument was, in the first instance, dialectical, like that of Socrates in Plato’s Socratic dialogues. An argument is dialectical in the relevant sense when one party, the questioner, puts questions to another, questions that when affirmed by the answerer become premises in an argument to a conclusion that contradicts a thesis of the answerer’s. This conclusion, deduced as it is from premises chosen by the questioner because the answerer is committed to them or will otherwise find them hard to resist, is not one to which the questioner need be committed in propria persona. In drawing them out, he remains detached, uncovering difficulties internal to his interlocutor’s position without committing himself to a position of his own. The side usually taken by the Academics in epistemological debates was that of the skeptic, in the sense of one who challenges the possibility of knowledge.