Temperance involves a number of notions that are central to Plato's philosophy. "Temperance" translates the Greek word sophrosyne, which has a number of meanings that exceed the English word. The Greek connotes, simultaneously, both an inner order of the soul and a kind of self-knowing restraint; the two are linked together in a whole person who is "temperate" in soul, in body, in self-awareness, and in action. There are a few references to the ordered soul in Charmides, particularly as a kind of "cure" that philosophical inquiry might be able to effect. But the full Platonic sense of the ordered soul as both a cause of and a metaphor for the external order of the body or society is not drawn out here.

The aspect of temperance that becomes central to Charmides is that of self-knowledge; the most significant and philosophically complex definitions that the dialogue tests for sophrosyne depend on questions of what it might mean to know one's own knowledge (including knowing what one does not know). Though this issue is wrestled with at length, it is never resolved here.