Plato's dialogues are most obviously concerned with philosophical conversations between interlocutors. But they also promote dialogue of a second kind, between text and readers and it is the reader that forms the focus of my study. I argue that readers are invited to engage in a process of learning analogous to that of the interlocutors, whose activity functions as a complex model for our own; and I suggest that many aspects of the dialogues' composition are best understood as designed to promote such a learning experience in the reader.