What is Plato’s method of enquiry in the central ontological sections of the Sophist (242c–259d)? In particular, is the ti esti question, here ‘What is being?’, the main question addressed, or is it the question ‘What is there?’ These are the questions this chapter proposes to examine. Going back to the passage at 242c, it argues that the need to raise the ti esti question about being emerges from a particular difficulty regarding an enquiry primarily driven by the question ‘What is there?’, namely that of determining whether or not being and what there is are just one and the same thing. Moving on to 250a–d after the Gigantomachia, it shows that Theaetetus and the Eleatic Stranger ultimately come to the conclusion that being is not the same as what there is, leaving it to the rest of the dialogue to work out their relation. Based on this analysis, it concludes that Plato’s method of enquiry in those sections of the Sophist is very much in line with other dialogues with regard to the role of the ti esti question and finally offers a different reading of the description of dialectic at 253c–d.