Life in Balance: Amit D. Chaudhary’s Blog
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Benjamin Franklin in The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, mentions the Socratic Method as a method of Inquiry and to use in Dialog (Highlighting is my own.)

While I was intent on improving my language, I met with an English grammar (I think it was Greenwood’s), at the end of which there were two little sketches of the arts of rhetoric and logic, the latter finishing with a specimen of a dispute in the Socratic method; and soon after I procur’d Xenophon’s Memorable Things of Socrates, wherein there are many instances of the same method. I was charm’d with it, adopted it, dropt my abrupt contradiction and positive argumentation, and put on the humble inquirer and doubter.

And being then, from reading Shaftesbury and Collins, become a real doubter in many points of our religious doctrine, I found this method safest for myself and very embarrassing to those against whom I used it; therefore I took a delight in it, practis’d it continually, and grew very artful and expert in drawing people, even of superior knowledge, into concessions, the consequences of which they did not foresee, entangling them in difficulties out of which they could not extricate themselves, and so obtaining victories that neither myself nor my cause always deserved.

I continu’d this method some few years, but gradually left it, retaining only the habit of expressing myself in terms of modest diffidence; never using, when I advanced any thing that may possibly be disputed

Incase you would like to read up more,

• The Wikipedia article:Socratic method

• the book Xenophon’s Memorable Things of Socrates is available online at Project Gutenberg or as the in-print book: Conversations of Socrates by by Xenophon (Do skip the editor’s notes and just read translation as they are distracting, opinionated and caustic)

• A more general book on Socrates is Socrates’ Way: Seven Keys to Using Your Mind to the Utmost by Ronald Gross