Reading in VAP: 143-187; 234-259.
Reading in CP: 104-107; 155-168; 180-218.
Reading in CCR: Protagoras in the chapter on the Sophists; Plato: Phaedo 72e-77d; Republic V, VI, VII; not in CCR, Plato: Theaetetus.
Routes to the Forms (take 2)
Last week we looked at the metaphysical position associated with Plato's name. Today we shall look at those arguments he offered for it that appeal to what we can know, and we shall try to elucidate the similes he offered in the Republic for what our cognitive relation to things looks like. We shall also look briefly at some other remarks on knowledge in the Theaetetus.
The instability of what is perceived versus the stability of the known
See Cohen's lecture, and the one that follows, for another approach to these issues.
We have already seen part of the Meno's argument by which Plato hoped to show that we do not so much learn new things as remember what we knew in a previous existence. The claim is that the slave boy is not told the answer, but comes upon it through appropriate questioning. Among his various opinions, some are true, and he can come to recognise them as such. Plato supposes this is enough for him to say that "he finds the knowledge in himself" [85d], and this is recollection. Since the slave boy hasn't been taught in this life, the information must have been acquired earlier. We will look again at this reasoning when we consider Plato's arguments for the immortality of the soul. For now, the main point is that nothing in the Meno makes Plato say that what the slave boy once knew was any different in kind from what he is now meeting with the soul "has been born often and has seen all things here and in the underworld" [81c].
It is worth noting explicitly that these ideas only have any plausibility with respect to what are usually known as a priori items of knowledge, that is items that we can discover through taking thought. As Cohen says, it would be crazy to think that we discover who is knocking on the door by some process of recollecting an item we knew in a previous life. A priori knowledge is contrasted with a posteriori, or experiential knowledge. As we will see, Plato often tends to downgrade our thoughts about everyday realities. Certainly, the topics Socrates seems most to have been concerned with (justice, courage, etc.) are not obviously matters of a posteriori knowledge, nor is mathematics, which was an important inspiration for Plato.
When Plato turns his attention more fully to immortality in the Phaedo, he also fills out the recollection argument in the direction of the Forms. The crucial contrast is between equality (in length or weight) or greater or smaller or beautiful or other general ideas as we perceive them through our senses and as we realise them to be on reflection. He has said that one can be reminded of X both by things that are like X and by things that are dissimilar. We meet with sticks and stones that may appear equal; these "remind" us of what is true of "the Equal itself" [74b]. The sticks and stones exhibit only a deficient similarity to the Equal itself: "equal sticks and stones sometimes, while remaining the same, appear to one person to be equal and to another to be unequal" [74b] whereas the equals themselves have never appeared unequal or equality to be inequality. We realise that equal sticks only exemplify the Equal in a deficient way; "they strive to be like the Equal" [74e]. What we realise, then, goes beyond what our senses give us. Plato supposes that it reflects something we acquired before we started using the senses. And it is usually assumed that he takes it to be something separate and distinct from the things we perceive, something we latch on to with our minds.
Similar considerations (often labelled "the compresence of opposites") are offered in the Republic:
of all the many beautiful things, is there one that will not also appear ugly? Or is there one of those just things that will not also appear unjust?..... There isn't one, for it is necessary that they appear to be beautiful in a way and also to be ugly in a way [479a]Elsewhere he suggests that a beautiful pot looks ugly amongst pretty girls; a beautiful woman would be ugly among goddesses (Hippias Major 289a2-c6 [some doubt that this was actually written by Plato, but not that its views diverge significantly from his]).
How should we understand these claims? One point that can be conceded is that if we take a type or general kind of thing, F, we can find instances that are X and other instances that are not-X. (Plato often deals in contrary pairs, hot/cold, large/small, rather than strict contradictories, but here this is not crucial.) When the types are types of action and the predicate is "good", this consideration supports the Socratic rejection of examples as telling us what a virtue is, since other examples of the same action type may well be lacking in that or any other virtue (courage is not defined by reference to Leonidas' standing firm against the Persians since someone else's standing firm may be an example of foolhardiness it is not standing firm tout court that makes it a case of courage). But Plato sounds like he is making a stronger claim: that any particular instance of F is both X and not-X at the same time. The same pot is beautiful compared to the surrounding pottery but ugly in relation to the girl who is holding it. My index finger is smaller than my middle finger (and so is small) and larger than my little finger (and so is large). In the case of the equal sticks that appear unequal, it seems (in CCR's translation) that Plato is relying on opposed thoughts from different observers rather than on judgments that one and the same person can make simultaneously (though one might interpret it as 'this stick is equal to that one but smaller than this other one').
But Plato himself admits that my finger just is a finger; there is no problem in that case. To include it among the problematic cases we would have to invoke the fact that it won't always be a finger or that it changes over time.
Following White's suggestion, Plato can be seen as responding to the fact that when we think something is X (beautiful, or just, or large, or whatever) we think it is simply X; we treat what is on the surface a monadic property as if it is a monadic property, not a more complex relation. We may be able to recognise that our judgment makes implicit reference to a standard or comparison class, or to a perspective, or that the thing is likely to alter or perish at a different time or place; but none of this relativity to circumstances is part of what we think in thinking the thing is X. White's view is that Plato may have been able to see the relativities as well as we can, but his approach was to understand things from the other direction, so, for instance, he prefers to construe "A is larger than B" as more like "A is large and B is small". At any rate, Plato can find lots of cases that suggest to him that what is given through perception is deficient, or as he puts it in the Republic "intermediate between being and not being". However we should understand this terminology, it is clearly evaluative: some things are better than others, in particular the Forms are superior to ordinary objects of experience. This superiority is often expressed by saying that the Forms are more real than ordinary objects.
As indicated last week, our approach now is to take these predicates as more complex than they appear to be, so we take the relativities to circumstances or the implicit comparison classes as part of the full meaning of what we say. An approach I have often used is to talk about such uses as elliptical: the sentence "A is to the left of B" is a perfectly good grammatical sentence, but to make a determinately true or false statement we have to supply a missing perspective. And so with the examples Plato uses, one might suggest other implicit items that must be supplied before the claim can be evaluated as true or false. For an introduction to this notion, see a section of my Argument Analysis; for more advanced discussion, see my paper Ellipsis: History and Prospects.
He seems to say in the Phaedo that the Forms never yield similarly contrary appearances, but perhaps this should be taken to mean that our careful judgments about what it is to be F never yield contrary or contradictory claims: in mathematics we are never tempted to suppose that if x = y then it is also the case that x doesn't = y. Nor would we suppose that the Beautiful itself could ever be ugly.
How much has Plato achieved? Irwin suggests that the considerations given in the Phaedo and Republic suffice to show that we cannot characterise some general notions (including the ones Plato and Socrates were especially interested in) simply in terms of sensible properties a thesis he labels 'non-reducibility'. (This assumes that we can rely on a contrast between sensible or observational properties and others itself a controversial issue in general philosophy.) The crucial point is that non-reducibility, supposing it coherent, is a far cry from what Plato actually thought he had established: the 'separation' of the Forms, their independent and logically prior existence. Still, it is worth recognising, given the prevalence of an over-crude empiricism that presumes that everything we think is available directly within present experience.
This may be the place to remind you of the contrast between Plato and Platonism. We cannot now take seriously a realm of supersensible Forms (though some continue to maintain something similar with respect to mathematical truth). One response is to give a minimalist interpretation of Plato's actual words, restricting ourselves to as much as he says and no more, and willing to suppose that he was seeking answers as much as reporting solutions. A more traditional approach attributes to Plato the kind of views typical of the Platonic tradition (one of whose branches historically moved into a kind of mysticism), and tries to understand how he might have come by them.
Plato's rejection of Protagoras
See C.C.W. Taylor's review of Mi-Kyoung Lee, Epistemology After Protagoras: Responses to Relativism in Plato, Aristotle, and Democritus. Giles Pearson has a brief lecture [Word document] on the topic. There is a detailed discussion by T.D.J. Chappell, "Reading the peritrope: Theaetetus 170c-171c" [a Word document].
We have seen that Plato rests his case for the separate existence of the Forms on considerations about the conflicting judgments we make about ordinary perceptible things. The Greeks were keenly aware of such conflicts and produced some of the major responses to them that still attract adherents. Plato obviously took the conflicting judgments people make about the same things as indicative of serious problems. Another approach that is perennially popular is to accept them wholeheartedly as the best we can do: there is no deeper truth to be found, only your view and mine. Plato discusses this type of view as it was enunciated by one of the Sophists, Protagoras. One discussion occurs in the Theaetetus, which discusses but never successfully defines knowledge.
Protagoras' dictum is that "man is the measure of all things" [152]; Plato elucidates it as saying that things are as they appear to be to me and equally they are as they appear to you. So a wind that warms me and cools you is warm for me and cool for you and there is no further question about what the wind in itself actually is. It is easy to say this much and think oneself safe, but Plato wants to uncover what it presupposes about reality and so he claims it is in effect committed to the far-reaching thesis that "nothing is one thing just by itself, and that you cannot rightly call it by a definite name or even ascribe to it any definite quality. No, if you call it large, it will be found also to be small;... because nothing is one thing or some thing or of any definite kind" [152]. Plato associates such a view with Heracleitus and offers a detailed account of some such physical view of the universe as a matter of constant becoming but no being, a Heracleitean theory of constant flux. Plato returns to the attack by invoking various normal practices that he thinks are unavailable to Protagoras. For instance, we usually suppose that madmen and the deranged are suffering from delusions and are mistaken in what they claim, whereas Protagoras has no basis for regarding how things appear to them as in any way deficient [157]. Plato then also notes that there is no way we can prove we are awake and not dreaming [158], so Protagoras has no way of invoking that normal contrast.
Later in the dialogue Plato argues that our assumption that some people know more than others, which leads us to seek expert advice when we need it, reflects an assumption incompatible with Protagoras' [170]. He then offers a self-refutation argument: if Protagoras is correct, and if most people think his view mistaken, then he must himself think his view mistaken, at least for them [171]. His next argument against Protagoras concerns the truth of beliefs about the future: if I believe X will happen, does that mean it always will? [178] When people differ as to what will happen, again we prefer the prediction of the expert, so it is not acceptable to say that what each person thinks is so is really so.
Plato then turns to present experience. He suggests that there are two sorts of change [181]: motion and qualitative change (e.g., growing old, or changing colour). He takes Heracleitus to maintain that things are always changing in both ways, so that "all things are at all times subject to every kind of change" [182]. But if so, how can we ever pin anything down to say anything significant about it? "If all things are in process of change, any answer to any question whatever is equally right: one may say it is so and it is not so or 'becomes', if you wish.... This 'so' is inadmissible: a thing which is 'so' would no longer be changing, and the same applies to 'not so'" [183]. So Plato's central contention against Protagoras seems to be that if you take his view seriously the possibility of language and discourse is lost. It is the same reason that Parmenides in the dialogue named after him invokes to encourage the young Socrates to persevere in thinking that, despite all the problems they have sketched, belief in the Forms is the way to go [135c]. We should add this concern for the meaningfulness of language to the various motivations we have noted that pushed Plato to postulate Forms.
Before leaving the Theaetetus, let us note an interesting section in which Plato concludes the attack on the equation of knowledge with perception by arguing that each sense provides a particular kind of perception and that "what you perceive through one faculty cannot be perceived through another" [185]. But, with respect to a sound and a colour say, we can enquire whether they are like or unlike, we think they exist and are different from each other. Plato's argument is that we do not have a sense organ to tell us these things, but that "the mind in itself is its own organ for viewing what is common to all things" [185] and that "knowledge is not in the impressions but in our reflection upon them" [186].
It is worth noting that what Plato does with Protagoras is to argue against his views taken in their full generality. Many of Protagoras' examples (differing sensible qualities produced by the same thing; conflicting customary beliefs about morality; etc.) may well argue for various relativizing or subjectivist moves. Indeed, one way of taking Plato himself is to see his downgrading of ordinary reality as reflecting a belief that it does verge on the incoherent in the way Protagoras suggests.
Knowledge and opinion
See Cohen's lecture for another discussion.
In Republic V, Plato has arrived at one of what he recognises to be a paradoxical conclusion, a conclusion going against everyone's settled beliefs: the only way to achieve the best society is to let the philosophers take charge. To defend this strange claim, he tries to show that philosophers, who grasp the Forms, are cognitively better off than ordinary people who only deal with the myriad things and do not recognise the unity of, say, beauty. As part of this argument he sets up a contrast between knowledge (epistκmκ) and opinion or belief (doxa). He first contrasts "what is completely" with "what is in no way", and suggests there might be an intermediate group of things that are and are not [477b]. Knowledge is contrasted with ignorance as knowledge of what is versus ignorance of what is not [477a]. If there is an intermediate set of thinkables, there should be an intermediate kind of state that deals with them. Plato introduces opinion as a state that is different from knowledge since knowledge is, he supposes, "infallible" whereas opinion is fallible [477e]. Knowledge is "set over" something different from opinion and does something different from opinion [477d] so "the knowable and the opinable cannot be the same" [478b]. But we do not opine what is not (i.e. nothing, which was allocated to ignorance) [478b], nor do we opine what simply is (since that belongs to knowledge) [478a], so it seems to be in between knowledge and ignorance. He then offers the account we looked at above of the things we find through perception which are both beautiful and not beautiful, large and small precisely the intermediates between being and not being for opinion to take as its special concern. People who do not rise above the content of their perceptions can only have opinions or beliefs, they are lovers of opinion (but NB these may be true beliefs for all that); those who can respond to the Forms, the lovers of wisdom, the philosophers, alone have knowledge [480a].
It is usual to draw attention to the possible ambiguities of Plato's thought in this passage. When he says that "knowledge is set over what is" one can formulate three alternatives (v. CCR's footnote):
The 478b argument to show that opinion is not the same as ignorance seems to rely on the existential reading of "what is".
I offer it in its entirety here, from Cornford's translation:It seems to be a matter of equating "ignorance" with some relation over "what is not" which is taken to be nothing. I am now inclined to think that part of the difficulty is due to the fact that ignorance comes in several varieties: I may be ignorant of p or of A because I have no thought about them at all, or because I do have a thought but it is false, and its falsity may either reflect a simple false belief about something that exists or involve a false presupposition that something exists that doesn't. When my ignorance reflects the fact that something doesn't exist at all (e.g. I am ignorant of the largest prime number, or that Zeus hurls thunderbolts), my ignorance could be said to be "set over" nothing, whereas in the other kind of case ignorance reflects possession of false beliefs and so is set over "what is not true".
if difference in faculty implies difference in the sphere or subject matter, [478b] and if, as we were saying, opinion and knowledge are distinct faculties, then the sphere of knowledge and of opinion cannot be the same.
Then if being is the subject-matter of knowledge, something else must be the subject-matter of opinion?
Yes, something else.
Well then, is not-being the subject-matter of opinion? or, rather, how can there be an opinion at all about not-being? Reflect: when a man has an opinion, has he not an opinion about something? Can he have an opinion which is an opinion about nothing?
Impossible.
He who has an opinion has an opinion about some one thing?
Yes.
And not-being is not one thing but, [478c] properly speaking, nothing?
True.
Of not-being, ignorance was assumed to be the necessary correlative; of being, knowledge?
True, he said.
Then opinion is not concerned either with being or with not-being?
As Irwin remarks (ftn 41, p. 333), the veridical construal does at least allow Plato to be saying something true: if you have knowledge that p then it is true that p, whereas if you believe that p then it may be true that p or it may be false that p. Items of knowledge are true; matters of opinion may be but equally may not be true. And Fine argues persuasively that the dialectical context of the argument requires it to be given minimally dubious premises. But I cannot agree that the veridical sense is the only one in play: as noted above, the 478b argument does seem to require that opinion and ignorance deal with different types of thing. But Irwin may only be claiming that Plato could have established the difference he needs on the basis of the veridical sense alone he needs only to show that opinion is not always of something false whereas ignorance is (believing p is not the same as knowing p because p may be false and it is not the same as being ignorant of p because it may be true). But Irwin's Plato has shown only that the sets of things known and things believed are not the same; it is probable that Plato himself thought he had shown their members are of different kinds and that the same item cannot appear in both sets. And the point remains that Plato has to show that knowledge is better than true belief, not merely that knowledge is different from belief.
Another mistake in Plato's account is the idea of infallibility. Cohen is probably right to think that it is due to a modal fallacy: from the truth that necessarily, if A knows that p then p, Plato takes it that if A knows that p then necessarily p, that A cannot be wrong about p. But infallibility is a matter of not being able to be wrong about p, and one can certainly be able to be wrong about something that one has got right.
Irwin points out that nothing in Plato's argument in Republic V says that knowledge is only of unchanging things. He does say that knowledge requires knowledge of the Forms, but "does not infer directly that there can be no knowledge about the sensible world" (p. 334), though in later works he does make such a claim. As we shall see, in the Republic, Plato needs to claim that the philosopher is better placed to deal with the ordinary world than the many who have not grasped the existence of the Forms. So, if this does not count as knowledge of changing things yet it ought to be intermediate between the many's opinions and real knowledge; as far as I know, Plato does not offer such a category. (It is not his "thought" contrasted with "understanding" within the intelligible realm, see below.)
Stepping back, we may say that philosophical discussion of knowledge has to run a course between our everyday "take" on knowledge (belief, evidence, etc.) and what the particular philosopher's theory leads him or her to say, because typically the philosophical theory makes more stringent demands than some of our everyday thinking.
The similes for knowledge (507-519)
Returning to Plato, the argument of the Republic proceeds to show that the lovers of Forms are the sort of people who should rule the ideal city. Plato's speaker makes a tentative claim that somehow the Forms are to be seen as subordinate to the Form of the Good. (Santas has suggested that the idea here is that a Form F is perfectly F, so It is good, and so Goodness, the Form Good, is that in virtue of which all Forms exist.) At this point in the dialogue, Socrates disavows proper knowledge of the Good, but offers instead some similes that try to display what he thinks the structure of our knowledge, and thus what reality itself is like.
The first simile invokes the sun. Plato begins by noting that our senses require a medium: eyes with sight and coloured objects are not sufficient for us to see without light. Light comes from the sun. "The sun is not sight, but isn't it the cause of sight itself and seen by it?" [508b]. The comparison Plato then offers is:
what the Good itself is in the intelligible realm, in relation to understanding and intelligible things, the sun is in the visible realm, in relation to sight and visible things [508c]and he elaborates on it to say that just as we see things clearly in the light but obscurely in the dark, so we understand things clearly when we focus on the Forms illuminated by the Good but we merely have shifting opinions when we direct ourselves to what we find in perception, things that come to be and pass away. The Good is the cause of knowledge and truth, but also an object of knowledge [508e], just as the sun is a cause of sight but also something we can see. Knowledge and truth are beautiful or fine, but the Good is more beautiful. Just as the sun is a cause of the growth of things seen (or at least of some of them), so "not only do the objects of knowledge owe their being known to the Good, but their being is also due to it, although the Good is not being, but superior to it in rank and power" [509b].
Plato goes on to another simile to elucidate the contrast between visible
and intelligible things. Take a line with two unequal sections (one, the
larger, stands for the intelligible realm, the other for the visible). Now
divide each section in the same ratio as the original line. The two sections
of the visible part of the line now stand for "images" (shadows, reflections,
etc.) and their originals (the things we see around us). "As regards truth and
untruth, the division is in this proportion: As the opinable is to the
knowable, so the likeness is to the thing that it is like" [510a]. So we have
a line like this:
visible world............................... intelligible world ----------|--------------------||--------------------|---------------------------------------- image .......original..........|| Forms..................... Form of the Good common sense...................|| sciences.................. dialectic/first principle imaging .... belief............|| thought................... understanding
There is disagreement about how to understand the visible part of this diagram. One approach is to contrast sophisticated common sense that can distinguish between things and the appearances they offer us and more generally seeks to sift appearances or common beliefs (section 2) with naive common sense that accepts appearances uncritically (section 1). When Plato says that most of us live at the lowest level he is not then saying that we spend most of our time looking in mirrors, but simply that we don't seek to move above the egocentric perspective, we don't interrogate the traditions of value we inherit, and so on.
Plato's account of the larger section of the line is that the intelligible world is divided up between the sciences we know of, in which hypotheses are framed and consequences drawn from them, and in which we may use ordinary objects (the things that feature in the second chunk of the line) but intend them to reveal something of the Forms themselves (Plato's example is geometry and his illustration is the use of rough diagrams to assist in proof), and a more profound type of inquiry, that Plato calls "dialectic", and which goes beyond the hypotheses of the sciences "to reach the unhypothetical first principle of everything" [511b], the Form of the Good, from which it then retraces its steps showing the links between the Forms themselves. Notice that Plato treats "thought" as intermediate between opinion and understanding. Full knowledge is restricted to the understanding that rests on a genuine first principle, but Plato admits that geometers, for instance, "arrive in full agreement about what they set out to investigate" [510d] even though they lack the unhypothetical first principle.
Aristotle tells us that Plato introduced another set of imperceptible objects, the mathematicals, alongside the Forms. They would serve as other possible objects of thought, corresponding to reflections in the visible world (Forms other than that of the Good seem to feature as objects of both thought and understanding).
See Cohen's lecture for another account of the Cave.
The most famous of these similes is that of the Cave (there is a neat picture of the Cave at a site devoted to Simone Weil). We are to imagine people bound motionless in a cave from birth, able only to see in front. Behind them there is a fire that gives the only light that reaches into the cave. Between the people and the fire there is a raised path along which artifacts (models of people and animals and things) are carried by people who sometimes speak. In this situation, what the bound people actually see are the shadows cast by the models; if they talk to each other they would suppose that their words applied to what they see, and that these shadows talked, if one was seen when its carrier spoke. So they would believe "that the truth is nothing other than the shadows of those artifacts" [515c]. Plato likens the process of education, especially philosophical education, to what would happen if such a person were freed and made to turn his head to see the models being carried in front of the fire, and later taken out of the cave into the real world with things themselves, which he would at first only be able to study in reflections and at night, but eventually in the full light of the sun. Plato stresses how confusing such a process would be, and how one would again be worse off initially than the permanent inhabitants if one were forced to return to the cave.
In fitting this story with the others, Plato says that the cave prison is the visible world, with the fire taking the place of our sun, and that the journey upward out of the cave is the journey to the intelligible realm. So the initial state, seeing shadows of models, corresponds to imaging, relying on appearances that too often present things as F and not F; being forced to see the fire and the models themselves represents what happens when one begins to question one's apparent certainties through the elenchos and can begin to distinguish what only seems F from what is really F. Such enquiry leads into the hypothetico-deductive activity of science and other enquiries, which correspond to the initial life outside the cave, looking at things reflected in water or at night. Through dialectic, this is transformed into the final understanding based on the Good, which corresponds to the final stage when the released prisoner can look at the sun. (I have followed Irwin's account here.) Plato's own conclusion to the story is:
In the knowable realm, the form of the Good is the last thing to be seen, and it is reached only with difficulty. Once one has seen it, however, one must conclude that it is the cause of all that is correct and beautiful in anything, that it produces both light and its source in the visible realm, and that in the intelligible realm it controls and provides truth and understanding, so that anyone who is to act sensibly in private or public must see it [517b-c].
Dialectic in Plato and the elenchos
The word "dialectic" has had a chequered history in philosophy (etymologically it is from dialegesthai, to converse). Plato uses it for the process behind the most advanced learning that builds upon the hypotheses that the other sciences rely on. It appears that what he has in mind is really another exercise of the elenchos, turned not now upon ordinary notions but upon the definitions and hypotheses of the sciences. It is an elenchos, not just as a method of arguing to contradiction, but, by proposing further hypotheses to explain unrefuted claims, as a sifting of putative explanations. And it functions within a general presumption that satisfying explanations will show that things are best as they are, that their being so contributes to the good. Irwin characterises the aim thus: "the conditions of adequacy for a dialectical account will be the same as usual; it must explain, and, as far as possible, justify, the beliefs under examination, by reference to some general teleological principles" (p. 223).
Is Plato's approach distorted by taking all knowledge to be by acquaintance?
There are some contrasts applying to knowledge that are nowadays standard (I use VP to stand for a verbal phrase, NP for a nominal phrase):
A number of scholars have thought that Plato's views were distorted because he took all knowledge to be knowledge on the acquaintance model, and thought that knowing is a kind of mental grasping of an object. Hare, for instance, has often argued for such an interpretation. He suggests that if one thinks that knowledge must be of an object, it is easy and tempting to postulate Forms to do the job.
Gail Fine is prominent among those who have tried to absolve Plato of this error. She notes that the metaphor of "insight" may simply be a way of referring to understanding, to "seeing" the point of something. We do not need to enter further into the question I offer it as one example of the contrast made earlier between minimalist and more traditional interpretations but I offer one comment on Fine's argument ("Inquiry in the Meno," in R. Kraut (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Plato): the model of acquaintance knowledge she is usually working with yields an exclusive contrast of complete knowledge of X and total ignorance, and this seems a grotesquely exaggerated demand to place on it. It perhaps goes with an idea of knowledge as an almost literal grasp of something either I have something in hand or I don't but that is not an idea that ordinary interaction with people, places, and things would suggest.
The particular argument in the Meno that raises the question may be of some interest. (See Cohen's lecture for another approach to it.) It is originally presented by Meno thus:How will you look for it, Socrates, when you do not know at all what it is? How will you aim to search for something you do not know at all? If you should meet with it, how will you know that this is the thing that you did not know? [80d]It is reformulated asa man cannot search for what he knows or for what he does not know. He cannot search for what he knows since he knows it, there is no need to search nor for what he does not know, for he does not know what to look for. [80e]Plato's reply is to tell a story about learning being really recollection:as the whole of nature is akin, and the soul has learned everything, nothing prevents a man, after recalling one thing only a process men call learning discovering everything else for himself, if he is brave and does not tire of the search, for searching and learning are, as a whole, recollection. [81d](The point of this is not, however, that we don't need to inquire since we know everything already; we do have to inquire, and we can do so reliably because what we venture upon is a process of stirring up memories.) He then offers to get Meno's slave boy to recollect some geometry by way of showing the truth of the recollection theory. Our concern now is whether Plato's interest in this paradox betrays an acquaintance model. Fine notes that the second premise (if you know, there is no point in inquiring) can be given a reasonable gloss if we don't assume acquaintance: if you know that p then there is no point inquiring whether p (ftn. 23, p. 220), but there is surely no plausibility in reading the third premise (if you don't know, you won't know when you've got the answer) in a similar manner, and it is the third premise that Plato concentrates on. Recollection provides Plato with an example in which "the man who does not know has within himself true opinions about the things that he does not know" [85c] and so can make progress in inquiry. Note also that Plato refers to repeating the exercise many times so that "in the end his knowledge about these things would be as accurate as anyone's" [85c] where this presumably refers to the generality of the knowledge arrived at: not that the square double this square is the one on the diagonal, but for all squares, the square double a given square is one on the diagonal. But again when Plato sees that as coming to knowledge of the Form Square he may well be in the grip of an excessive concentration on acquaintance knowledge.
Main References
Fine, G., "Inquiry in the Meno," in Kraut, R. (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Plato, Cambridge: CUP, 1992.
Irwin, T.H., Plato's Moral Theory, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977.
Santas, G., Goodness and Justice: Plato, Aristotle, and the Moderns, Oxford: Blackwell, 2001.
White, N.P., "Plato's metaphysical epistemology," in Kraut, R. (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Plato, Cambridge: CUP, 1992.
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Ed Brandon, February 7, 2001, last revised 17 February 2007.
© E.P. Brandon, 2001