Not to get too serious about this, but the salad salad contrastive reduplication overlaps some definitions of Socratic irony, in which he both does and does not mean what he says; or his words both mean what they say and point beyond it. When he says that he knows only that he does not know, we are invited to question what "knowing" means, since Socrates knows his name, that he is in Athens, how to deliver a defense in court, etc.

We feel that same contrastive difference and distance in conversations when one person asks another, "Do you love me?" and then "But do you love me?" Or "Are you a Christian?" and then, "But are you a Christian?" Socratic irony lives in the distance between those two, according to Richard Lear and others.