system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Why aren't Socrates and Plato considered as skeptics?

After reading several of Plato's Dialogues, i feel as though they were both skeptics at the end of the day, and that Plato wrote the dialogues specifically in a certain way, so as to deceive the masses or superficial readers of his time from his skeptical/nihilistic views, as in the dialogues were maybe only meant to be fully understood by his inner circle.
gpt
Some of Plato's heirs during the Hellenistic period, often called the "New Academy", interpreted Plato's writings in a skeptical manner.

But in regard to the thesis you suggest that the dialogues were written to fool people, it does seem to me that we have to be awfully wary of this sort of occult interpretation.  Our interpretation should be based on the evidence, and the texts themselves are usually our main source of evidence--and there is something methodologically backwards about starting with a hypothesis about what Plato really meant and using it to disregard the evidence we have about what he meant.

Anyway, in the case of Plato we do have some influential accounts of what his private teaching is like, from Aristotle and on the basis of what we know of Speusippus and Xenocrates, and these accounts suggest the opposite of your hypothesis: that Plato's private teaching strongly emphasized the dogmatic content of his philosophy (in the sense of its positive, systematic metaphysical claims) rather than its skeptical side.  So that the skeptical aspect of his dialogues look, on this basis, more like a *reductio* of common views meant to motivate the turn towards his metaphysical system--i.e., rather than a case for general skepticism.