a horse with no name?
Mixed up media, a collage or a college for the advancement for the study of the feminine mistique:
aka: just horsing around .
There is only one exit I found that can get out through the no exit sign : & that consists of lots of horsing around, some even cried out to 7th heaven and would give his kingdom for .
The birth of tragedy may have signaled the death knoll of comedy, Aristophanes is always a welcome relief:
The bit about the faux pregnant woman I failed to clarify, proved everything I suspected about how laughter can not necessarily e image from internal sources of the one you are trying to infect with it, they are more likely to suppose some bad humor as a motive. n shut off reaction until all exploitative shave been excluded.
So the woman mentioned, looked incredulous in spite of her rather massive blobs of flesh pinked out of the enormity of her costume fitted for the Big Lady, , and incidentally that has developed colloquially into a metaphor implying the lawless and the judicial::
‘Don’t conclude anything until tha fat lady stops singing’
So she had a kind of pained expression develop a painted masks of, hey that was dumb and I am hurt, but we’ll let it go, except as we later did have a converse beneat awareness about that, found that she gained weight em for her infertility. Ouch!
Anyway maybe this format was meant to be a part collage of supporting stand up that may support the tragedy and sadness way below it in a feeble attempt to develop style , and in that way can build flesh unto the formalistic attempt of strictly a tragic mohay.gergely.btk.ppke.hu/refera … %20Thought%20(2008)%20-%20libgen.li.pdf
Too bad I don’t have a left nut to give for a baby to sit with:
youtube.com/shorts/n1MhP8x5Pj4?feature=share
O, kid o ke
Got it but then there is the white and it’s unseen shadowed dark horse, living inside of it’s own mouth
Guess could do stand up if not stood up
on hind legs , one nut retracted
Note: do not even try to ask how deep cause no one on earth could ever laugh.
The Matrix Is The Real World
An analysis of Plato and Rene Descartes’s philosophical arguments in The Matrix (1999).
Morpheus presenting Neo with the red and blue pills. Source: The Guardian 1280.jpg
“And now,” Plato says, “let me show in a figure how far our nature is enlightened or unenlightened.”
Plato personifies this ‘unenlightenment’ of human nature through his famous “allegory of the cave” — the allegory of prisoners chained in a cave whose entire perception of reality is but shadows cast on a wall in front of them. For Plato, the shadows on the wall are not reality but rather mere reflections of more real objects. 17th-century French philosopher René Descartes similarly hypothesized in the early meditations of his “Meditations on First Philosophy” that all of the human world is but a world of shadows orchestrated by a deceitful “evil genius.” For both Descartes and Plato, this world of shadows, the cave, the simulation, or Matrix if you will, is illusory and devoid of value.
The 1999 film The Matrix by the Wachowskis is largely Platonic and Cartesian; the film explores the journey of one man from the Matrix, a simulation ruled by deceitful robots, into the enlightenment of the ‘real world.’ While Plato and Descartes’ skepticism of the existence of the external world seems to be at the forefront of the film, The Matrix also argues the anti-Platonic possibility that perhaps the Matrix isn’t any less real than the ‘real world’. Through analyzing Descartes’ later meditations, the work of anti-Platonic philosopher Stanley Cavell, and the motivations of the character Cypher in the film, one may argue that the Matrix is indeed reality unto itself and retains the same value as the “real world.”
The Matrix and Plato’s Allegory of The Cave
The Matrix, in large part, is an embodiment of Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave.” Plato’s allegory is reflected through a dialogue between fictional versions of Glaucon, Plato’s brother, and Socrates. Plato, speaking through Socrates, explains the allegory: In a cave, there are prisoners chained so that all they have ever known is a wall in front of them onto which shadows of objects moving in front of a fire behind them are cast. Socrates says,
“For them…the truth would be literally nothing but the shadows of images.”
Socrates then explains the various reactions of the prisoners when they are released — their trouble adjusting physically and mentally to their new reality. In The Matrix, Thomas Anderson is a computer programmer who leads a double-life as a hacker under the alias Neo. After being deemed “The One” by Morpheus, Neo is presented with two choices; either take the blue pill and stay in his illusory world; or take the red pill and be reborn into the truth of reality. Neo chooses the red pill and plunges into the ‘real world’ — a post-apocalyptic dystopia where the human race is grown and harvested for energy by a supreme class of artificial intelligence.
Neo realizes that his previous ‘reality’ was no more than a simulation. Through a Platonic lens, the Matrix, and all the humans in it are akin to the prisoners watching shadows on the cave wall. Plato says of a freed prisoner,
“When he approaches the light his eyes will be dazzled, and he will not be able to see anything at all of what are now called realities.”
When Neo first leaves the Matrix, he asks Morpheus, “ Why do my eyes hurt?” to which Morpheus replies, “Because you’ve never used them before.”
Plato and the “Divided Line”
Plato’s concept of “The Divided Line”
Plato’s notion of the “Divided Line” reveals within his allegory the hierarchy of truth and reality. In the cave, the empirical world of our senses/images, the shadows on the wall are the least real things there are. More real than the shadows are the objects that cast them — the men, statues, and animals passing in front of the fire. Both the shadows and the objects, however, are still illusions of the cave. Reality (or at least a more real-world) exists outside of the cave and is known as the intelligible world or the world of numbers and forms. This is the transcendent world of the intellectual mathematics behind the objects of the physical world. At the highest end of the divided line is the idea of The Good, or God.
When Neo leaves the Matrix, it can be said that he leaves the cave and enters the world of forms in which the objects of the Matrix, the cave, can be manipulated. Neo, being The One, represents the closest to “The Good”. This is reflected at the end of the film where after being resurrected, Neo is able to see beyond the shadows of the Matrix, the ideas/forms behind them and sees the world as numbers, mathematical objects. The iconic green numbers cascading down the screen are the realization of Plato’s view of enlightened transcendence from the human world of the senses.
Descartes “Meditations on First Philosophy”
The Platonic philosophy of the Matrix is abetted by Cartesian skepticism. Rene Descartes’s “Meditations on First Philosophy” chart Descartes’ philosophical journey from doubting the existence of the external world to finally arriving at his conclusion that God, the external world, and minds do indeed exist.
Before Neo is exposed to the ‘real world’ there are several Cartesian hints scattered throughout. When the goth punks arrive at Neo’s door to retrieve the illegal software Neo engineered, one of the punks assures Neo, “Don’t worry, this never happened. You don’t exist.” This is a direct allusion to Neo’s Cartesian doubts of his own existence.
Descartes’ first Meditation deals with the “things which may be brought into the sphere of the doubtful.” Among these things to be doubted is the existence of one’s own mind. Descartes ganders with the idea that perhaps nothing is real, even himself. In the same scene, Neo asks, “Have you ever had the feeling where you’re not sure if you’re awake or still dreaming?” This is another direct reference to Descartes’ first Meditation where he similarly asks, “How often has it happened to me that in the night I dreamt that I found myself in this particular place, that I was dressed and seated near the fire, whilst in reality, I was lying undressed in bed!”
Descartes argues that if we can feel as if we are awake during sleep, it is quite possible that we could always be in a sleep state and are merely imagining consciousness, like those in the Matrix. Neo’s skepticism proves true after he takes the red pill and discovers his old world was a simulation devised by malicious artificial intelligence known as sentinels. Descartes had a similar inkling about his world. In Meditation 1, Descartes supposes,
“I shall consider that the heavens, the earth, colours, figures, sound, and all other external things are nought but the illusions and dreams of which this evil genius has availed himself in order to lay traps for my credulity.”
The sentinels are to Neo as the “evil genius” is to Descartes.
Enter: Cypher
Cypher from The Matrix. 4967d6d255abe8deb3b8eae9db0aec73.jpg
By Platonic and early-meditation-Cartesian standards, the Matrix is the paragon of the illusion and deception of our sensible world. For Plato and Descartes, reality has a particular value that shadows on the wall or dreams do not. In the Matrix, one character in particular, argues against the Platonic and Cartesian skepticism that the film seems to endorse.
Cypher is a crew member on the Nebuchadnezzar who betrayed the last human city, Zion, by helping Agent Smith hack into its’ mainframe. In return, Cypher wanted to go back to the Matrix with his memory wiped of the ‘real world’. In one of the film’s most important scenes, Cypher meets with Agent Smith over a steak dinner. Cypher says,
“You know, I know this steak doesn’t exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, you know what I realize? Ignorance is bliss.”
This line not only calls into question how we experience ‘reality” and ‘existence’ but also the value we attach to it. For Cypher, the Matrix and its blissful ignorance are more valuable than the ‘real world’.
What does it mean to be perceived on film?
To understand the ideology behind Cypher’s thinking, one need only look to the very art form that most resembles the Matrix — film, itself.
Pioneering film philosopher Stanley Cavell discusses the ontology of the cinematic image in his essay “What Becomes of Things on Film.” For Cavell, the cinematic image (the projections of people, places, and objects on film) are not only reflections of the “real world” but the mere fact of their filming brings life into those projections themselves. When a person is filmed, their essence is radically changed by their on-film representation. Cavell would argue that a popular actor, Jimmy Stewart for instance, is but an amalgam of his various on-screen appearances as L.B. Jefferies, Rans Stoddard, John Ferguson, etc.
As humans, we attach value to what and who is seen or perceived. Philosopher George Berkeley argued that in fact, “To be is to be perceived.” Film is perceived and thus, is. When Cypher is requesting to be put back into the Matrix, he adds, “And I want to be someone important, like an actor.” As an audience, this meta line makes us aware of our own gaze; we watch the projection of an actor playing a character who exists in a fictional cinematic world who wishes to be placed in a simulation of that fictional world where he wants to make a living as an actor. In other words,
We watch a projection seeking to go back into a world of projections so that he can be a projection.
For Cypher, like Berkeley and Cavell, reality is dependent upon our perception of it to which we attach its value.
Descartes believes the matrix is real
Descartes himself, whose skepticism is the philosophical base of the film, disproves his own doubtful findings from the earlier meditations, thereby acknowledging the reality of the Matrix.
In the 5th and 6th meditations, Descartes proves that not only do other minds exist but so does the external world and himself. This conclusion is summated by the infamous phrase, “I think therefore I am.” This sentiment can be seen lingering under the film’s veil of Platonic philosophy.
The Matrix is not full of automaton bots deceiving Neo, the one true mind; Rather, the Matrix is populated by real minds who, like Neo, share the experience of the Matrix. Morpheus himself, can’t even deny the reality of the Matrix. The Platonic Morpheus, claims the Matrix to be but shadows and like shadows on a cave wall, the Matrix can bear no consequences to the real world. After Neo leaves a training module in the Matrix and finds himself bleeding he asks Morpheus, “I thought it wasn’t real.” Morpheus says,
“Your mind makes it real.”
Neo then asks, “If you’re killed in the Matrix, you die here?” and Morpheus answers, “The body cannot live without the mind.” Just as Descartes disproves himself in his later meditations, Morpheus contradicts his Platonic argument of the artificiality of the Matrix. We see that not only can one perceive the Matrix with all senses but consequences of the Matrix translate into the ‘real world.’ It would seem that the Matrix then, is literally just as real as the real world, or even as Cypher says, “The Matrix can be more real than the real world.”
The Matrix can be seen as a trojan horse, parading as a child of Platonic and Cartesian external world/other mind skepticism but in reality containing the proof of the external world’s existence as seen in the later findings of Descartes. Not only is the Matrix as real as the ‘real world’, but it may even have more value.
Cypher says, “I’m tired, Trinity. Tired of this war, tired of fighting… I’m tired of the ship, being cold, eating the same goddamn goop every day.” The post-apocalyptic dystopia of the ‘real world’ that Cypher and the others live in inhibits agency and freedom so much that it resembles more clearly the imprisonment of Plato’s cave. It is worth investigating the ‘real world’ and life on the Nebuchadnezzar as the illusory sleep state, while the Matrix may actually be reality itself. As Descartes said in his first meditation,
“I dread awakening from this slumber, lest the laborious wakefulness which would follow the tranquillity of this repose should have to be spent not in daylight, but in the excessive darkness of the difficulties which have just been discussed.”
Cinemania
A home for conversations about all things cinema.
medium.com
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Okiedokie.
Will read later.
The thing about Socrates… he knew/knows when the egg/cocoon is empty… when it’s premature… and when it’s got something in it that’s ready to fly.
Cuz he was an oldie but goodie.
Yes agreed, but…
you may be reluctant to progressively do to restrictions that recommend viewing to older audiences.
- may entail return to a cave that may delight those seein in darkness, but, attain the opposite, - and that is probably to a large part the essence behind the limits of unreasonable doubt, reverting the comic to it’s unintended tragic birth.
this is not meant to delimit the sensible, but only as a cautionary signal toward the unwary, who may be affected.
Isn’t it ironic how some paint it that a) he wanted to get rid of the poets rather than correct them, b) he could drink his interlocutors under the table into the dawn, AND c) he flirted with young boys rather than abstaining and teaching others to abstain?
Only 1/3 of those things is actually true.
The crossing of Plato’s line has been crossed, that is I/ we have to start from baseline of the descent where the familial and the familiar intersect: conditionally agreed to when the abating resources to get to the source were merged with your conditions , that now advertantly or not have like the rubicon been crossed.
Ok? Am willing ThE PLATONIC DIALoGuBS are not treatises in disguise. They are protreptic and proleptic instruments, positioning the reader dis- positionally and providing hints for the work of completing the di- rection of thought by attending to “the things themselves,” the phenomena to which human beings, properly attuned, have native access. Plato, I would contend, is a protophenomenologist whose dialogues yield significant coherent results when approached from
that point of view. In this paper, I will focus on the center of one dialogue, the Line of Knowledge in the middle of the Republic. It contains a set of assertions or “poetic proclamations” and is embedded in a context of what seem to be even more arbitrary assertions concerning the Good as the object of philosophic study. Paul Shorey goes so far as to say that they belong “to rhetoric rather than to systematic metaphysics.” Properly understood (and, of course, that means understood in the way this paper will attempt to clarify), the Line allows us to cash in on the proclamations. It is a pedagogical device that not only invites reflection, but that leads us to a connected sequence of ever more comprehensive levels of sparknotes.com/philosophy/meno/context/
…video’s gone now -which was of a [makeshift] Satyr and a brown cow?
I think it went because of a ‘brown - out’, therefore I can only comment now: how now brown cow?
….and this may only be a wild guess, but Meno serves as some kind of water boy between Plato and a cynical Socrates.
One indication based on more extensive searc will automatically retract or nullify it.
Da f…
Is that coming straight from the hung arian’s mouth? lol
I was just about to delete that, when I realized the uncommon allusion, and then, sought splice from being totally spaced out from time’s immediacy, and my own regrettable half bred situation.
Intentions to attend sensitivity training perhaps will help me get over the unpretensious nature of the will to survive this and many other farther gone conclusions that inspire to enormous set backs.
Forget and forgive is all I can say, and if I can ever get to expose my fallacies to you MagsJ, You will totally concurr, and/or drop me no like a hot potato=meaning I really did not elicit any sensible conclusion, honest!
Or is the genetic genius still playing de-signing my mind’s eye. Either way
HOk DOES PLATO SOLVE THE PARADOX OF IDQUIRÏ IK THE HERO?
Michael Morgan, Indiana University SAGP West, 1985
In this paper I sha 11 focus on a passage in Plato’s dialogue, the heno, that has received wide ana serious attention of late. It is that stretch of the Heno (80d-
86c) that incorporates Meno’s eristic puzzle, the doctrine of recollection, Socrates’ interrogation of Meno’s slave-boy, and thesequeltothatinterrogation. Ishalltrytoshowthatthis text is transitional and doubly so, for, on the one hand, within the context of the heno it marks the transition between the earlier elenehoi concerning the nature of arete and the employment of the method of hypothesis concerning whether arete is teachable and, on the other, within the early and middle dialogues as a whole it marks the transition between largely elenctic, Socratic inquiries and Platonic discussions with greater epistemological and metaphysical weight. This latter claim is controversial in a way that the earlier one, about the text’s transitional role in the dialogue, is not, but the claim is defensible in a way that I shall try to demonstrate in subsequent sections of this paper.
THE PARADOX Ûi IKt,UIRY
At Heno 80d a frustrated heno tries to stall his conversation with Socrates by setting up a roadblock. If you do not know something, he asks, how can one search for it? lor if you don’t know it, either you can’t set it up as the object of your search or, even if one could, you wouldn’t know that what you found is what you were looking for. Socrates acknowledges the gambit as a familiar one, though his own reformulation of the puzzle differs from Reno’s version in an important way. To Meno, the puzzle about inquiry or searching is a dilemma about how, given an original ignorance, one can either begin or conclude a search. To Socrates, the puzzle is a dilemma about initiating such a search; to begin with knowledge of the object sought makes searching for it unnecessary (and perhaps impossible) and to begin without knowledge of it makes searching impossible to iniate. So for Heno the problem concerns the unacceptable consequences of initial ignorance; for Socrates it concerns, more radically, the impasse that results from either initial knowing or initial ignorance. Since it is Socrates’ version that is addressed in the text that follows, we shall concern ourselves with it alone.
Many commentators, among them Grube, Burnet, Shorey, Ritter, and Taylor, treat the puzzle lightly as comic relief or a mere interlude, the dramatic setting into which the doctrine of recollection is introduced but itself of no serious import. But other commentators, including Cornford, Bluck, Phillips, Moravcsik, Irwin, White, and Allen, agree that the puzzle is
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important in itself, although they are not always sensitive to the differences between Reno’s version and Socrates’ restatement.
The issue about the puzzle’s seriousness is not a minor one. Socrates recalls the doctrine of recollection because he is seeking a solution to the current paradox. If the paradox is a dramatic interlude with no real philosophical role to play, then one must look elsewhere for the genuine difficulties which the doctrine of recollection is intended to address. On the other hand, if the paradox is a serious one and the real reason for
introducing the doctrine of recollection, then what that doctrine is and how it should be understood will depend upon how it solves the paradox. And in so far as the doctrine has implications for Plato’s epistemology and the stage it has reached by the time the heηo was written, the paradox begins tc take on greater significance still.
It is both plausible that Plato intended the paradox cf inquiry as a serious puzzle and likely that he did so. lirst, this would net be the only case where an eristic puzzle played a serious philosophical role for Plato. While the tuthyderous is a collection cf sophistical puzzles and paradoxes that are not typically addressed in that dialogue as serious philosophical problems, other dialogues show Plate wrestling with sophistical puzzles with great concern and with impressive results. The paradoxes about contradiction and relativism in the Cratylus come to mind, as do the puzzles about aitiai in the Phaedo and the paradox of phi1dsophica1 rule in the Repub1ic. hot all of these, of course, can be confirmed as conventional eristic tropes, but some surely can be. Most impressive of all in this genre are the puzzles about false belief and false speech that generate such rich results in the Craty1us. Thesetetus, and Sophist. This last case by itself would stand as dramatic evidence that a commonplace eristic puzzle could take on grand importance for Plato and stimulate his own philosophical inquiries in very
significant ways.
Secondly, the current puzzle, because cf its specific content, does have serious implications for Plato and his Socratic inheritance. Socrates’ reformulation, is an attempt tc argue that inquiry is impossible. but if that were true, the result would be some form of skepticism, relativism, or some whimsical, unsystematic acquisition of moral knowledge. These would not be welcome alternatives to Socrates or Plato and hence the challenge of the puzzle would not have teen viewed as a facile one. lurthermore, in so far as moral knowledge is necessary for human excellence and thereby for human well-being,
the puzzle is of momentous importance. Tor Socratic dialectic is both a check on whether one has such moral knowledge and a method for acquiring it. But, if true, the paradox destroys the possibility of Socratic inquiry and thereby the possibility of either confirming one’s moral knowledge or acquiring it.
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I
THE DOCTRINE Of RECOLLECTION AND THE SOLUTION TO THE PARADOX
At 86c Socrates says, “…we are agreed that it is right to inquire into something that one does not know.” This statement shows that somewhere between 81a and 86c the paradox had been solved. But what is the solution, and how does it work?
Those who read Guthrie, Cornford, Allen, and Bluck, among others, will find there what we might call the “traditional view.” According to this view, the paradox is a dilemma about one’s epistemic resources at the outset of inquiry and the role those resources play at the inquiry’s conclusion. The alternatives that the dilemma proposes are beginning with (1)total, explicit knowledge or with (2)absolute ignorance. The doctrine of recollection provides the solution with its proposal that all inquiry begins with something intermediate between
(1) and (2): latent, unconscious, or implicit knowledge. When these commentators speak of “total knowledge,” they seem to have in mind “self-consciously clear” or “conscious” knowledge. They speak of implicit knowledge being aroused or made explicit — presumably by a process akin to the questioning that Keno’s slave-boy undergoes.
The traditional view, as we have it, is flawed by imprecision, weak or nonexistent argument, and faulty assumptions. No attempt is made to clarify whether (1) and (2) concern the object of knowledge or the act of knowing in some occurrent sense, to clarify, that is, what exactly the paradox is about and what a solution ought to provide. No attempt is made to examine the text carefully and systematically in order to defend the accuracy of the proposal. It is assumed rather than argued that Plato means explicit knowledge or complete ignorance,
that the slave-boy interrogation is evidence for the doctrine of recollection and not an illustration of it, that learning is intended by Plato to be identical with and not similar to recollection, and that the kind of knowledge at issue is exclusively a priori. And there is tendency, not always made explicit, to read the Phaedo account of recollection uncritically back into the Meno. These are substantial difficulties and while they do not of course refute the traditional conclusion, they do weaken the case for it.
Recent treatments, notably those of Koravcsik, White, and the brief one by Irwin, remedy many of these deficiencies. They involve penetrating, subtle, and thorough argument and scholarship. Right or wrong, they provide careful examination of what the paradox is and hence what it would take to solve it and scrupulous consideration of the text. These discussions are an excellent foundation for further work.
Rather than simply survey these accounts, let me try to identify their most significant common features and differences. First, they agree that the paradox and hence the doctrine of recollection are not about all kinds of inquiry and learning. Rather they concern only that type of inquiry that is a
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searching, and they are about that kind of learning that is the result of an inquiry directed to a goal that is fixed in some way in advance. Both Moravcsik and White emphasize this feature. We might call this “purposive learning,” but it is purposive
learning with the added condition that the learner must either initiate the learning him or her self or at least have in some way appropriated the task or goal of the learning for himself. In seme sense, then, the paradox is about knowing what one is looking for and yet not knowing it yet.
Secondly, Moravcsik, following tradition and Gregory Vlastos in a paper on this subject, believes that the paradox and the doctrine of recollection are solely concerned with a priori knowledge and its acquisition via inquiry. This brings the heno into line with the Phaedo and the later Platonic employment of the doctrine of recollection; it makes the Meno the initial Platonic statement on an issue of perennial philosophical interest. White and Irwin, however, believe that the text of the Meno is at best indecisive on this restriction and that while the particular context for the paradox and what follows is definitional inquiry, the paradox and doctrine as presented are neutral with respect to their object. Part of their reason for saying this is that neither the dialogue with the slave-boy nor the notion of an aitias 1ogismos, introduced later as the mechanism whereby true belief is converted into knowledge, seem
to require £ priori objects.
Ihirdly, Moravcsik takes recollection to be a metaphor for learning via inquiry. For him, the solution to the paradox is that learning works like remembering. In recall, we apprehend an image, concept, etc. now, after having once apprehended at some earlier time and since forgotten it. Some feature of this activity must account for why it is recall, however, and not simply two distinct apprehensions of the same thing. This feature he calls a mental or physical factor in the rememberer that is causally related to both the original apprehension and the recall. When a new stimulus is experienced, it triggers a recollection because of this “entitative factor” in the rememberer. In learning, a question triggers an analogous factor that issues in understanding and a response. Hence, for Moravcsik the paradox is solved by grabbing both horns of the dilemma: the truths, i.e., sets of concepts cr beliefs, are in us, and learning serves to bring them to consciousness. So, in a
sense, at the outset of inquiry, the learner does know the answer, and in a sense he or she does not. by treating learning as similar to recall, then, Moravcsik has given us a sophisticated version of the traditional view in which learning a priori truths is like remembering and begins with implicit but not explicit knowledge of those truths.
Fourthly, for White and Irwin, the paradox is about recognition, and because it is about recognition, it is also about reference and identity of reference. How does one recognizeasuccessfuloutcomeofaninquiryalreadyframed? One cannot recognize it without in some sense already having known
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it. Self-initiated inquiry and recognition require knowledge of a specification or description that directs the search from the outset. The paradox is this: without knowledge of such a specification, inquiry is impossible, but with such knowledge one already knows what is being sought. White describes a case of searching for a pair of gloves with a specification already in hand and compares it to searching for a Form with a definition in hand. The analogue shows how Plato might have thought that having the specification looks like already having the goal. For White, then, the paradox is very precisely about the epistemic
conditions necessary for getting a search or inquiry underway. How, he asks, can one have a specification of the object of the search without already knowing that object?
The traditional solution, and Moravcsik’s as well, has Socrates grab both horns of the dilemma. White disagrees. Plato is wrong, he says, to think that with a specification of the object sought we already have knowledge it. The specification does not refer to the precise object sought but rather to the sort of thing; it applies to the office and not the office holder, to the position and not the candidate. In short, the second horn of the dilemma is false, and to see this would solve the paradox by dissolving it.
According to White, however, Plato chooses another route.
He solves the paradox by denying one horn of the dilemma – that we do know in a sense, for inquiry is recollection. In the case of inquiry, specification counts as knowledge of the outcome, but in the case of a directed recollection, specification does not count as such knowledge.
Fifthly, Irwin agrees with White but only up to a point. Inquiry is directed search, and the paradox does say that with total ignorance or total, complete knowledge such a search is impossible or unnecessary. Hut whereas White has Plato reject one horn of the dilemma as false, Irwin has him nose between the two. While ignorance makes inquiry impossible and knowledge makes it unnecessary, true belief redeems inquiry and makes it possible. What we need to initiate inquiry are enough true beliefs about x to fix the reference cf the term “x” so that when the inquiry is completed, we can see that we are still referring to the same thing. What disarms the paradox is the explicit distinction between knowledge and true belief made at S7e-S6b and the implicit employment of that distinction earlier in the dialogue with the slave-boy.
One important feature of Irwin’s account is that Plato’s answer to the paradox does not come in the doctrine of recollection. Itcomesfirstinthediscussionwiththeslave- boy where the boy answers with true beliefs that are his own. These beliefs involve specifications that are not knowledge. The recollection thesis is not Plato’s solution to the paradox. It is one explanation – and not necessarily the best one — of how the boy can answer the way that he does, with these true beliefs, but the real solution to the paradox comes in that answering,
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with what Irwin calls “quasi-recollection,” and with those beliefs. In short, the paradox is solved by a fact and not by a theory, and that fact is belief and the way in which it can be employed to get inquiry started and carry it through to its completion.
taca TO THE MEtiO
A careful reading of the Meno, especially that passage (8i)b8-8t>b4) in which Plato describes what had taken, place in the interrogation of the slave-boy and draws inferences from that description, gives us a view of the text that is indebted to these interpretations but not wholly like any one of them.
Let us do two things. First, let us consider where Moravcsik, White, ejt a_l. are correct and where the text shows them to be wrong. Secondly, we should look at the passage just mentioned to assess what it contributes to our understanding how Plato in fact does solve the paradox.
iirst. White, Moravcsik, and Irwin are surely right to restrict the paradox to purposive inquiry or directed search. Socrates’ reformulation of the dilemma and his own dialectical interests encourage this restriction, as does the interrogation of the slave-boy, which is simply a model of a full Socratic elenchos. This, however, is not only the most important restriction on the type of learning in question; it is also the only restriction. Contra Vlastos and Moravcsik, the evidence that the paradox and the doctrine are solely concerning with the
learning of a priori truths is simply not secure. White and Irwin are right in this regard. Wot only is it doubtful that Plato would have treated geometrical inquiries as a priori; the formulation of the doctrine of recollection (81c) and the later discussion about true beliefs and knowledge of the road to Larissa show that Plato did not in the heηo yet have in mind what would later come to be treated as a distinction between empirical and a_ priori truths. The fact that something of this order is already present in Parmenides’ poem does not by itself entail that Plato, at this point in his career, had appropriated it, nor does the further fact that by the time he had written the Phaedo he had done so. To assume so is to disregard the possibility cf serious intellectual development on Plato’s part.
Secondly, the absence of the restriction to a priori knowledge in the heno is matched by but perhaps not related to the absence of the separated forms of Plato’s middle dialogues, and the separated forms are certainly missing from the heno. It is not decisive of course that the nomenclature for the torms is not present in the Keno. What is decisive are the facts that the objects of belief and knowledge can be the same and that they are spoken of as iji the soul. What are recalled as the result of directed inquiry, contra Vlastos, White, e_t a^., are truths,
i.e., true accounts that answer what-is-x questions, theorems, and similar statements. We shall have more to say about these
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truths, their role and nature. For the moment, it is sufficient to notice that later Plato will indeed allude to the Meno account of recollection – in the Phaedo and Republic especially – in ways that locate Forms in it. But without decisive evidence in favor of such an interpretation, we should be reluctant to take Plato’s word, as it were; he would surely not be the last philosopher to read his more developed views into his own earlier writings. It is in the Phaedo and not earlier that the doctrine of learning as recollection, adopted previously, is adjusted to suit the requirements of a newly developed metaphysical view and specifically the existence of the Forms.
Thirdly, the burden Irwin places on belief is too great for
it to bear. In the heno, the difference between believing and knowing is a difference in our activity of answering questions correctly when called upon to do so and in general of affirming the truth of a statement when such affirmation is called for. True believing and knowledge are both directed to truths; they differ because the one who merely believes what is true has not yet worked out fully for himself why the truth is true and so will
not reliably affirm that truth when the situation calls upon him
to do so. The result of learning is not merely true believing, although even at that stage the learner does have the truth in mind. Real learning, as Plato explicitly says, is completed only when the truth is so firmly fixed in the learner’s mind that he will always, reliably affirm it when the situation calls for its affirmation. Furthermore, if belief solves the paradox, then why does Socrates continue with his description cum argument after 85b8-c8? If Irwin is right, the doctrine of recollection is artistic trapping and not serious philosophy, for, as he says,
the paradox is solved by the phenomenon of quasi-recollection; the doctrine of recollection is merely one possible explanation of how that quasi-recollection takes place. Irwin does not say, in addition, that as a religious explanation it is fanciful and not to be taken seriously, but he might very well have thought it.
Fourthly, while Irwin is wrong about the role of belief in Plato’s solution to the paradox, he is more right than White is about Plato’s general strategy. Plato solves the dilemma not by grabbing one horn and rejecting the other but rather by either grasping both or nosing between them. This is a matter of Socratic and Platonic style. White’s interpretation gives us a different Plato and one whose solution is rather inexplicable and arbitrary. For White cannot really explain why Plato would have thought that having a prior specification is not knowledge in the case of recollection whereas it _is knowledge in the case of inquiry. WearenotreallyshownwhyPlatoshouldhavetaken this to be a solution at all. White’s analysis depends on the supposition thet Plato would have thought that having a specification in the case of directed recollection would not count as knowledge. But the crucial kind of recollection, for Plato,isnotdirectedorpurposive. Eveniftolearnisto recall, it is hardly the case that trying to learn is trying to recall.
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Finally, Koravcsik is mistaken to think that learning is only like recollection. At 65c-d Plato moves from his account that the beliéis were in the boy to the conclusion that knowledge is in him – which must mean that the truths, i.e., the objects of believing and knowing are in him – and then to the further conclusion that this is reco1lection. It is, he says, recovering again knowledge that is already in one’s soul. Koravcsik may be right that analyses of recall and learning reveal that they can be interpretated as having an analogous structure. but in the Meno Plato gives no indication that he has that analogous structure in mind. In fact, what he does indicate is that directed inquiry is possible not because it is like recall but because it is in fact a case of reca11(b¿¡c9-d8). If you have something in your ken, was it possible for you to look for it
before you had it without already having it? Only, Plato says, if having it now is having it once again or calling it to mind once again and if the search began with that something already in your mind but not yet in your ken.
All of these recent interpretations of the doctrine of recollection and how it is intended to solve the paradox of inquiry rest on the same foundation. They all agree that the doctrine must be about the epistemological conditions necessary for inquiry and directed learning. This is most vividly present in White and Irwin where the issue is taken to be one of reference and identity of reference and hence how the learner’s
referential capacities in terms of certain specifications at the outset of inquiry are related to his referential successes at the end. Eut if, in a sense, Plato is interested in reference, in the learner’s thinking of something, he is interested not in its epistemological conditions but rather in its metaphysical ones. He is concerned, that is, about the object of reference and not how the referring gets done. For this mental referring, for Plato, is like any kind of grasping; without an object, it is just a matter of waving the hand. But if at the outset of inquiry, one has the object in one’s grasp, then it is unnecessary and perhaps even impossible to look for it. And if not, then where does it come from. In Socrates’ reformulation of the paradox, he says of the inquirer that if “he does not know,
[then] he does not even know what he is to look for.” This means that if he does have what is to be grasped, then how is he to grasp it – for all this mental grasping goes on in the soul.
One of the keys that unlocks the paradox of inquiry and the doctrine of recollection is the realization that for Plato the objects of true believing and knowing are truths. These truths he detaches from the world and places in the soul, and believing and knowing are grasping truths in one’s soul. Inquiry or
learning is a matter of searching for these truths, and the paradox of inquiry, to Plato, is a puzzle about how directed searching
can succeed. The doctrine of recollection is the doctrine that having a truth does not imply grasping or knowing it but that knowing or grasping it implies and indeed requires having it. Beliefs do not solve the paradox, for true ones are already a
8
matter of grasping, though tentatively, truths whereas false ones are no better than ignorance. Nor do sufficiently accurate specifications do the job, for the issue is not what directions one takes to getting the grasping or pointing started but rather what is there to be grasped or pointed at. The only thing that will solve the paradox is to show that the truths that are the objects of true believing and knowing are ^n the soul always, which is just what Plato shows at 85d-86b. The best Platonic
image of how the doctrine of recollection is intended to solve the paradox of inquiry comes from Plate himself – the image of birds in the aviary of the soul and the distinction between having and holding. But the kinship between the Meno and the Theaetetus on this as on other issues has not gone unnoticed by other commentators, nor is it surprising. tor the Theaetetus is
about what knowledge is, which on the Meno’s own principles is a question prior to the question how it is got. And the aviary is proposed as an answer to the problem of how false belief is possible, an answer offered perhaps because it had already served with some satisfaction to explain how true belief and inquiry
are possible.
The paradox of inquiry is solved by recognizing that the truths apprehended and affirmed at the culmination of inquiry are always in the soul, always available as objects of our mental grasp.But this boldly metaphysical solution may seem gratuitous. Why require Plato to have introduced an otherwise unattested metaphysical entity when the Forms are at hand? Indeed, what is this thing that he calls “the truth of things (.that] is always in the soul?” tahat is the structure of these truths? What is their nature?
A short answer to these queries would be that Plato simply does not explore or illuminate the ontological status of these truths or their structure. They are introduced to solve a serious epistemological puzzle and are derived by inference from the doctrine of inquiry and learning as recollection, a doctrine appropriated from Orphic lore and tooled to Plato’s purposes.
But this is the short answer; more can be said, although it is conjectural and speculative. As Plato begins to explore seriously epistemological matters concerning believing, knowing, their relations and objects, equipped as he is with a Socratic view of the soul as the seat of personality, character, and intellect, he comes to see that the objects of knowing and believing, permanent and stable truths, cannot be in the world. Eventually he will dictate the terms of these objects’ status; they will be ungenerated, imperishable, immutable, pure, and so on, all attributes appropriate to the certainty of knowledge. In the Meno, however, he has not yet reached that momentous metaphysical discovery. Here Plato is groping for a solution to a precise puzzle and, if only temporarily, locates truth not in a Platonic heaven but rather in the soul, within the soul’s easy reach. Later, in the Theaetetus and Sophist, he will say that a logos is the external expression of a doxa, and in the Parmenides he will propose and then dispose of the suggestion that Forms are
9
thoughts (noemata) in the soul. Perhaps, then, the Meno’s truths are internal sentences or thoughts – examples surely include true theorems of geometry and true answers to what-is-x questions – although Plato gives no helpful clues or advice concerning
their structure. All of this notwithstanding, the truths in the soul, the objects of true believing and knowing in the Meno, are soon abandoned in favor of the separated forms, only to resurface in different guises throughout the course of Western philosophy.
In the passage immediately following the interrogation of Meno’s slave-boy (85b8-86b4), Plato indicates clearly that this is how he understands what he has written. If we look first at &5b8-c8, we see that in this passage Plato has incorporated an important transition, from a seemingly harmless description of the slave-boy’s behavior – the beliefs are “his own” — to a potentially serious epistemological and possibly metaphysical claim – they are “in him” (85c4)· And what “in him” must mean at this stage of the dialogue is “not in another,” e.g.,not in Socrates. The boy’s beliefs, that is, are believings about things in him and not about things in another. Later Plato writes that among the beliefs in the boy are true ones (85c6-7), and that if this is so (86a6-7), then what is in him is hë aletheia ton onton. “In him” is explicitly said to mean “in the
soul” [8bb1-257 and so what Meno agrees to ultimately is that the objects of the boy’s believing are truths in his soul.
At 85c9-d8 Plato has Socrates use this conclusion, that the objects of believing are in the soul, to generate the conclusion that the boy’s “recovering knowledge that is in him [is] recollecting” (85d?). Meno casually accepts the proposal that beliefs, newly aroused like a dream, can be converted into knowledge, for he finds no difficulty in agreeing that once a truth is in the mind, then the transition from believing it to knowing it is not insurmountable. Hence, the boy can be said to “recover the knowledge out of himself” (85d3-4)» where “knowledge” clearly refers to the object of the knowing, the
truth about the diagonal on the given square. heno is so casual about accepting the word “recover” that its meaning must be the most obvious. Prior to the boy’s being asked a question, a given truth is in his soul but unattended to. When the question is asked, the boy responds by assenting to the truth, first as a belief, later as knowledge. And he does so by grasping again
what he already had but only in an unapprehended fashion, and such a grasping again is an act of recovery. This is Socrates’
line of reasonings from belief to knowledge to recovery to recollection, with his attention always on the truths that are the objects of all four.
The final section of this sequel to the slave-boy discussion (65d9-86b5) is exceedingly difficult. In his final speech Socrates recites the conclusions associated with the doctrine of recollection— that the soul is immortal, that inquiry is recollection, and that one ought to be bold and confident in undertaking inquiry into what one does not presently know (8bb1-
10
4). But while these are the results of this entire stretch of the dialogue, it is far from clear how they are got.
There is a very precise argument developed in this passage. This is the argument:
(1) Recollection is the recovery of truths which one once knew but which one does not currently apprehend.
(2) These truths either (a) were grasped or seized at a particular time or (b) were always in one*s possession.
(C) The truth of things is always in our soul.
The conclusion is given in the protasis of a conditional at bbbl- 2. In interpreting this argument there are two possibilities,
that (C) is the same as (b) or that (c) follows whether (a) or (b) is true. A careful reading of the intermediate dialogue shows, I think, that the latter alternative, though more difficult to see, is indeed the correct one.
If we were to assume that (C) is the same as (2b), then the most natural way to arrive at (C) from (1) and (2) would be to show that (2a) is false. Unfortunately, at 85d12-86a10 Socrates does net do this. The argument of this intervening stretch of dialogue is this:
(j>) If one always had the truths (=2b), then one would also always be a knower.
(4) If one grasped the truths at a particular time (=2a), that time was when one was not a human being.
(i>) Some true beliefs are in the boy during the time when he is a human being and during the time he is not a human being.
(6) tor all time, the soul is or is not a human being.
(7) Therefore, the boy’s soul has truths for all time
(=2b ).
The upshot of this line of reasoning, then, is that the boy recalls truths which he once learned only if he always has them. The truths are iri his soul for all time, always. It seems to be Socrates’ strategy to show that if learning is recollection, then
the recollected truths are always in the soul. There is no alternative.
This argument helps us to see what Plato has in mind as the solution to the paradox of inquiry. Consider again step (3): what does it mean to say that “he would also be a knower?” we have argued that Irwin is wrong about the solution to the paradox. hhile it may be plausible to think that the solution comes at 65cb-7 with so-called quasi-recollection, this is not Plato’s solution. but if belief does not make inquiry possible, what does? Öbd12 may be the core of the answer to that question. Inquiry is possible only if the boy can recall truths already within him. But he can do this only if he always possessed those truths. The argument we are currently examining shows this to be the only condition for such recollection; one cannot recall something that is not in one’s own mind but rather in another’s, from the fact that the boy has always possessed these truths, we can infer that in a sense “he is also always a knower.” But this disarms the paradox; inquiry is not unnecessary even when one
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knows. Indeed, such knowledge is a necessary condition for the possibility of such inquiry, even though the boy, at the same time, is not a knower in the sense that he knows the truths and knows that he knows them. There is here, as it were, no act of knowing at all, only once-having-known and possession. This, I think, is the only kind of knowing that the word
(85d12) can refer to. ’
In this examination of 8i>b8-86t4 we have shown that Plato first describes the slave-boy’s behavior in such a way that it can be said to be a case of recollection and then argues that what is recalled, the truths first believed and eventually known, are always in the soul to be recalled. Plato is concerned about getting inquiry started only in so far as he believes that without the truths present in the inquirer’s soul it can neither start nor succeed. It is in this sense that his interest in inquiry is metaphysical and net epistemological; Plato’s problem about reference is the referrent and not the referring. Directed inquiry is possible only in so far as that referrent is always in the soul and coming to know it is a matter of recollection.
In some ways the solution 1 have developed rennovates the traditional view of how Plato solves the eristic puzzle, but it does so, 1 hope, with greater attention to the details of the text and the course of Plato’s reasoning that are carefully examined by more recent commentators. but it has an advantage over the latter whose interpretations require of Plato a more nuanced interest in language and epistemology than the Meno by itself warrants. My interpretation does not require Plato to have distinguished tetween empirical and a priori truths, nor does it thrust the burden of the solution to belief rather than knowledge. It does not treat the doctrine of recollection as an unnecessary appendage nor as a metaphor but instead sees it as the precise vehicle for identifying these truths whose ongoing presence in the soul ultimately solves the paradox. And finally it takes seriously the discussion following the slave-boy dialogue, at &5b8-86b4, in which important conclusions are drawn from that dialogue and from the doctrine of learning as recollection. lo my mind, the emergence of Platonic genius is in
large part the emergence of Plato’s metaphysical thinking. On the interpretation that I have offered the Meno is a crucial stage in this process, a fact which will, among other things, I
HOk DOES PLATO SOLVE THE PARADOX OF IDQUIRÏ IK THE HERO?
Michael Morgan, Indiana University SAGP West, 1985
In this paper I sha 11 focus on a passage in Plato’s dialogue, the heno, that has received wide ana serious attention of late. It is that stretch of the Heno (80d-
86c) that incorporates Meno’s eristic puzzle, the doctrine of recollection, Socrates’ interrogation of Meno’s slave-boy, and thesequeltothatinterrogation. Ishalltrytoshowthatthis text is transitional and doubly so, for, on the one hand, within the context of the heno it marks the transition between the earlier elenehoi concerning the nature of arete and the employment of the method of hypothesis concerning whether arete is teachable and, on the other, within the early and middle dialogues as a whole it marks the transition between largely elenctic, Socratic inquiries and Platonic discussions with greater epistemological and metaphysical weight. This latter claim is controversial in a way that the earlier one, about the text’s transitional role in the dialogue, is not, but the claim is defensible in a way that I shall try to demonstrate in subsequent sections of this paper.
THE PARADOX Ûi IKt,UIRY
At Heno 80d a frustrated heno tries to stall his conversation with Socrates by setting up a roadblock. If you do not know something, he asks, how can one search for it? lor if you don’t know it, either you can’t set it up as the object of your search or, even if one could, you wouldn’t know that what you found is what you were looking for. Socrates acknowledges the gambit as a familiar one, though his own reformulation of the puzzle differs from Reno’s version in an important way. To Meno, the puzzle about inquiry or searching is a dilemma about how, given an original ignorance, one can either begin or conclude a search. To Socrates, the puzzle is a dilemma about initiating such a search; to begin with knowledge of the object sought makes searching for it unnecessary (and perhaps impossible) and to begin without knowledge of it makes searching impossible to iniate. So for Heno the problem concerns the unacceptable consequences of initial ignorance; for Socrates it concerns, more radically, the impasse that results from either initial knowing or initial ignorance. Since it is Socrates’ version that is addressed in the text that follows, we shall concern ourselves with it alone.
Many commentators, among them Grube, Burnet, Shorey, Ritter, and Taylor, treat the puzzle lightly as comic relief or a mere interlude, the dramatic setting into which the doctrine of recollection is introduced but itself of no serious import. But other commentators, including Cornford, Bluck, Phillips, Moravcsik, Irwin, White, and Allen, agree that the puzzle is
1
important in itself, although they are not always sensitive to the differences between Reno’s version and Socrates’ restatement.
The issue about the puzzle’s seriousness is not a minor one. Socrates recalls the doctrine of recollection because he is seeking a solution to the current paradox. If the paradox is a dramatic interlude with no real philosophical role to play, then one must look elsewhere for the genuine difficulties which the doctrine of recollection is intended to address. On the other hand, if the paradox is a serious one and the real reason for
introducing the doctrine of recollection, then what that doctrine is and how it should be understood will depend upon how it solves the paradox. And in so far as the doctrine has implications for Plato’s epistemology and the stage it has reached by the time the heηo was written, the paradox begins tc take on greater significance still.
It is both plausible that Plato intended the paradox cf inquiry as a serious puzzle and likely that he did so. lirst, this would net be the only case where an eristic puzzle played a serious philosophical role for Plato. While the tuthyderous is a collection cf sophistical puzzles and paradoxes that are not typically addressed in that dialogue as serious philosophical problems, other dialogues show Plate wrestling with sophistical puzzles with great concern and with impressive results. The paradoxes about contradiction and relativism in the Cratylus come to mind, as do the puzzles about aitiai in the Phaedo and the paradox of phi1dsophica1 rule in the Repub1ic. hot all of these, of course, can be confirmed as conventional eristic tropes, but some surely can be. Most impressive of all in this genre are the puzzles about false belief and false speech that generate such rich results in the Craty1us. Thesetetus, and Sophist. This last case by itself would stand as dramatic evidence that a commonplace eristic puzzle could take on grand importance for Plato and stimulate his own philosophical inquiries in very
significant ways.
Secondly, the current puzzle, because cf its specific content, does have serious implications for Plato and his Socratic inheritance. Socrates’ reformulation, is an attempt tc argue that inquiry is impossible. but if that were true, the result would be some form of skepticism, relativism, or some whimsical, unsystematic acquisition of moral knowledge. These would not be welcome alternatives to Socrates or Plato and hence the challenge of the puzzle would not have teen viewed as a facile one. lurthermore, in so far as moral knowledge is necessary for human excellence and thereby for human well-being,
the puzzle is of momentous importance. Tor Socratic dialectic is both a check on whether one has such moral knowledge and a method for acquiring it. But, if true, the paradox destroys the possibility of Socratic inquiry and thereby the possibility of either confirming one’s moral knowledge or acquiring it.
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I
THE DOCTRINE Of RECOLLECTION AND THE SOLUTION TO THE PARADOX
At 86c Socrates says, “…we are agreed that it is right to inquire into something that one does not know.” This statement shows that somewhere between 81a and 86c the paradox had been solved. But what is the solution, and how does it work?
Those who read Guthrie, Cornford, Allen, and Bluck, among others, will find there what we might call the “traditional view.” According to this view, the paradox is a dilemma about one’s epistemic resources at the outset of inquiry and the role those resources play at the inquiry’s conclusion. The alternatives that the dilemma proposes are beginning with (1)total, explicit knowledge or with (2)absolute ignorance. The doctrine of recollection provides the solution with its proposal that all inquiry begins with something intermediate between
(1) and (2): latent, unconscious, or implicit knowledge. When these commentators speak of “total knowledge,” they seem to have in mind “self-consciously clear” or “conscious” knowledge. They speak of implicit knowledge being aroused or made explicit — presumably by a process akin to the questioning that Keno’s slave-boy undergoes.
The traditional view, as we have it, is flawed by imprecision, weak or nonexistent argument, and faulty assumptions. No attempt is made to clarify whether (1) and (2) concern the object of knowledge or the act of knowing in some occurrent sense, to clarify, that is, what exactly the paradox is about and what a solution ought to provide. No attempt is made to examine the text carefully and systematically in order to defend the accuracy of the proposal. It is assumed rather than argued that Plato means explicit knowledge or complete ignorance,
that the slave-boy interrogation is evidence for the doctrine of recollection and not an illustration of it, that learning is intended by Plato to be identical with and not similar to recollection, and that the kind of knowledge at issue is exclusively a priori. And there is tendency, not always made explicit, to read the Phaedo account of recollection uncritically back into the Meno. These are substantial difficulties and while they do not of course refute the traditional conclusion, they do weaken the case for it.
Recent treatments, notably those of Koravcsik, White, and the brief one by Irwin, remedy many of these deficiencies. They involve penetrating, subtle, and thorough argument and scholarship. Right or wrong, they provide careful examination of what the paradox is and hence what it would take to solve it and scrupulous consideration of the text. These discussions are an excellent foundation for further work.
Rather than simply survey these accounts, let me try to identify their most significant common features and differences. First, they agree that the paradox and hence the doctrine of recollection are not about all kinds of inquiry and learning. Rather they concern only that type of inquiry that is a
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searching, and they are about that kind of learning that is the result of an inquiry directed to a goal that is fixed in some way in advance. Both Moravcsik and White emphasize this feature. We might call this “purposive learning,” but it is purposive
learning with the added condition that the learner must either initiate the learning him or her self or at least have in some way appropriated the task or goal of the learning for himself. In seme sense, then, the paradox is about knowing what one is looking for and yet not knowing it yet.
Secondly, Moravcsik, following tradition and Gregory Vlastos in a paper on this subject, believes that the paradox and the doctrine of recollection are solely concerned with a priori knowledge and its acquisition via inquiry. This brings the heno into line with the Phaedo and the later Platonic employment of the doctrine of recollection; it makes the Meno the initial Platonic statement on an issue of perennial philosophical interest. White and Irwin, however, believe that the text of the Meno is at best indecisive on this restriction and that while the particular context for the paradox and what follows is definitional inquiry, the paradox and doctrine as presented are neutral with respect to their object. Part of their reason for saying this is that neither the dialogue with the slave-boy nor the notion of an aitias 1ogismos, introduced later as the mechanism whereby true belief is converted into knowledge, seem
to require £ priori objects.
Ihirdly, Moravcsik takes recollection to be a metaphor for learning via inquiry. For him, the solution to the paradox is that learning works like remembering. In recall, we apprehend an image, concept, etc. now, after having once apprehended at some earlier time and since forgotten it. Some feature of this activity must account for why it is recall, however, and not simply two distinct apprehensions of the same thing. This feature he calls a mental or physical factor in the rememberer that is causally related to both the original apprehension and the recall. When a new stimulus is experienced, it triggers a recollection because of this “entitative factor” in the rememberer. In learning, a question triggers an analogous factor that issues in understanding and a response. Hence, for Moravcsik the paradox is solved by grabbing both horns of the dilemma: the truths, i.e., sets of concepts cr beliefs, are in us, and learning serves to bring them to consciousness. So, in a
sense, at the outset of inquiry, the learner does know the answer, and in a sense he or she does not. by treating learning as similar to recall, then, Moravcsik has given us a sophisticated version of the traditional view in which learning a priori truths is like remembering and begins with implicit but not explicit knowledge of those truths.
Fourthly, for White and Irwin, the paradox is about recognition, and because it is about recognition, it is also about reference and identity of reference. How does one recognizeasuccessfuloutcomeofaninquiryalreadyframed? One cannot recognize it without in some sense already having known
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it. Self-initiated inquiry and recognition require knowledge of a specification or description that directs the search from the outset. The paradox is this: without knowledge of such a specification, inquiry is impossible, but with such knowledge one already knows what is being sought. White describes a case of searching for a pair of gloves with a specification already in hand and compares it to searching for a Form with a definition in hand. The analogue shows how Plato might have thought that having the specification looks like already having the goal. For White, then, the paradox is very precisely about the epistemic
conditions necessary for getting a search or inquiry underway. How, he asks, can one have a specification of the object of the search without already knowing that object?
The traditional solution, and Moravcsik’s as well, has Socrates grab both horns of the dilemma. White disagrees. Plato is wrong, he says, to think that with a specification of the object sought we already have knowledge it. The specification does not refer to the precise object sought but rather to the sort of thing; it applies to the office and not the office holder, to the position and not the candidate. In short, the second horn of the dilemma is false, and to see this would solve the paradox by dissolving it.
According to White, however, Plato chooses another route.
He solves the paradox by denying one horn of the dilemma – that we do know in a sense, for inquiry is recollection. In the case of inquiry, specification counts as knowledge of the outcome, but in the case of a directed recollection, specification does not count as such knowledge.
Fifthly, Irwin agrees with White but only up to a point. Inquiry is directed search, and the paradox does say that with total ignorance or total, complete knowledge such a search is impossible or unnecessary. Hut whereas White has Plato reject one horn of the dilemma as false, Irwin has him nose between the two. While ignorance makes inquiry impossible and knowledge makes it unnecessary, true belief redeems inquiry and makes it possible. What we need to initiate inquiry are enough true beliefs about x to fix the reference cf the term “x” so that when the inquiry is completed, we can see that we are still referring to the same thing. What disarms the paradox is the explicit distinction between knowledge and true belief made at S7e-S6b and the implicit employment of that distinction earlier in the dialogue with the slave-boy.
One important feature of Irwin’s account is that Plato’s answer to the paradox does not come in the doctrine of recollection. Itcomesfirstinthediscussionwiththeslave- boy where the boy answers with true beliefs that are his own. These beliefs involve specifications that are not knowledge. The recollection thesis is not Plato’s solution to the paradox. It is one explanation – and not necessarily the best one — of how the boy can answer the way that he does, with these true beliefs, but the real solution to the paradox comes in that answering,
5
with what Irwin calls “quasi-recollection,” and with those beliefs. In short, the paradox is solved by a fact and not by a theory, and that fact is belief and the way in which it can be employed to get inquiry started and carry it through to its completion.
taca TO THE MEtiO
A careful reading of the Meno, especially that passage (8i)b8-8t>b4) in which Plato describes what had taken, place in the interrogation of the slave-boy and draws inferences from that description, gives us a view of the text that is indebted to these interpretations but not wholly like any one of them.
Let us do two things. First, let us consider where Moravcsik, White, ejt a_l. are correct and where the text shows them to be wrong. Secondly, we should look at the passage just mentioned to assess what it contributes to our understanding how Plato in fact does solve the paradox.
iirst. White, Moravcsik, and Irwin are surely right to restrict the paradox to purposive inquiry or directed search. Socrates’ reformulation of the dilemma and his own dialectical interests encourage this restriction, as does the interrogation of the slave-boy, which is simply a model of a full Socratic elenchos. This, however, is not only the most important restriction on the type of learning in question; it is also the only restriction. Contra Vlastos and Moravcsik, the evidence that the paradox and the doctrine are solely concerning with the
learning of a priori truths is simply not secure. White and Irwin are right in this regard. Wot only is it doubtful that Plato would have treated geometrical inquiries as a priori; the formulation of the doctrine of recollection (81c) and the later discussion about true beliefs and knowledge of the road to Larissa show that Plato did not in the heηo yet have in mind what would later come to be treated as a distinction between empirical and a_ priori truths. The fact that something of this order is already present in Parmenides’ poem does not by itself entail that Plato, at this point in his career, had appropriated it, nor does the further fact that by the time he had written the Phaedo he had done so. To assume so is to disregard the possibility cf serious intellectual development on Plato’s part.
Secondly, the absence of the restriction to a priori knowledge in the heno is matched by but perhaps not related to the absence of the separated forms of Plato’s middle dialogues, and the separated forms are certainly missing from the heno. It is not decisive of course that the nomenclature for the torms is not present in the Keno. What is decisive are the facts that the objects of belief and knowledge can be the same and that they are spoken of as iji the soul. What are recalled as the result of directed inquiry, contra Vlastos, White, e_t a^., are truths,
i.e., true accounts that answer what-is-x questions, theorems, and similar statements. We shall have more to say about these
6
truths, their role and nature. For the moment, it is sufficient to notice that later Plato will indeed allude to the Meno account of recollection – in the Phaedo and Republic especially – in ways that locate Forms in it. But without decisive evidence in favor of such an interpretation, we should be reluctant to take Plato’s word, as it were; he would surely not be the last philosopher to read his more developed views into his own earlier writings. It is in the Phaedo and not earlier that the doctrine of learning as recollection, adopted previously, is adjusted to suit the requirements of a newly developed metaphysical view and specifically the existence of the Forms.
Thirdly, the burden Irwin places on belief is too great for
it to bear. In the heno, the difference between believing and knowing is a difference in our activity of answering questions correctly when called upon to do so and in general of affirming the truth of a statement when such affirmation is called for. True believing and knowledge are both directed to truths; they differ because the one who merely believes what is true has not yet worked out fully for himself why the truth is true and so will
not reliably affirm that truth when the situation calls upon him
to do so. The result of learning is not merely true believing, although even at that stage the learner does have the truth in mind. Real learning, as Plato explicitly says, is completed only when the truth is so firmly fixed in the learner’s mind that he will always, reliably affirm it when the situation calls for its affirmation. Furthermore, if belief solves the paradox, then why does Socrates continue with his description cum argument after 85b8-c8? If Irwin is right, the doctrine of recollection is artistic trapping and not serious philosophy, for, as he says,
the paradox is solved by the phenomenon of quasi-recollection; the doctrine of recollection is merely one possible explanation of how that quasi-recollection takes place. Irwin does not say, in addition, that as a religious explanation it is fanciful and not to be taken seriously, but he might very well have thought it.
Fourthly, while Irwin is wrong about the role of belief in Plato’s solution to the paradox, he is more right than White is about Plato’s general strategy. Plato solves the dilemma not by grabbing one horn and rejecting the other but rather by either grasping both or nosing between them. This is a matter of Socratic and Platonic style. White’s interpretation gives us a different Plato and one whose solution is rather inexplicable and arbitrary. For White cannot really explain why Plato would have thought that having a prior specification is not knowledge in the case of recollection whereas it _is knowledge in the case of inquiry. WearenotreallyshownwhyPlatoshouldhavetaken this to be a solution at all. White’s analysis depends on the supposition thet Plato would have thought that having a specification in the case of directed recollection would not count as knowledge. But the crucial kind of recollection, for Plato,isnotdirectedorpurposive. Eveniftolearnisto recall, it is hardly the case that trying to learn is trying to recall.
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Finally, Koravcsik is mistaken to think that learning is only like recollection. At 65c-d Plato moves from his account that the beliéis were in the boy to the conclusion that knowledge is in him – which must mean that the truths, i.e., the objects of believing and knowing are in him – and then to the further conclusion that this is reco1lection. It is, he says, recovering again knowledge that is already in one’s soul. Koravcsik may be right that analyses of recall and learning reveal that they can be interpretated as having an analogous structure. but in the Meno Plato gives no indication that he has that analogous structure in mind. In fact, what he does indicate is that directed inquiry is possible not because it is like recall but because it is in fact a case of reca11(b¿¡c9-d8). If you have something in your ken, was it possible for you to look for it
before you had it without already having it? Only, Plato says, if having it now is having it once again or calling it to mind once again and if the search began with that something already in your mind but not yet in your ken.
All of these recent interpretations of the doctrine of recollection and how it is intended to solve the paradox of inquiry rest on the same foundation. They all agree that the doctrine must be about the epistemological conditions necessary for inquiry and directed learning. This is most vividly present in White and Irwin where the issue is taken to be one of reference and identity of reference and hence how the learner’s
referential capacities in terms of certain specifications at the outset of inquiry are related to his referential successes at the end. Eut if, in a sense, Plato is interested in reference, in the learner’s thinking of something, he is interested not in its epistemological conditions but rather in its metaphysical ones. He is concerned, that is, about the object of reference and not how the referring gets done. For this mental referring, for Plato, is like any kind of grasping; without an object, it is just a matter of waving the hand. But if at the outset of inquiry, one has the object in one’s grasp, then it is unnecessary and perhaps even impossible to look for it. And if not, then where does it come from. In Socrates’ reformulation of the paradox, he says of the inquirer that if “he does not know,
[then] he does not even know what he is to look for.” This means that if he does have what is to be grasped, then how is he to grasp it – for all this mental grasping goes on in the soul.
One of the keys that unlocks the paradox of inquiry and the doctrine of recollection is the realization that for Plato the objects of true believing and knowing are truths. These truths he detaches from the world and places in the soul, and believing and knowing are grasping truths in one’s soul. Inquiry or
learning is a matter of searching for these truths, and the paradox of inquiry, to Plato, is a puzzle about how directed searching
can succeed. The doctrine of recollection is the doctrine that having a truth does not imply grasping or knowing it but that knowing or grasping it implies and indeed requires having it. Beliefs do not solve the paradox, for true ones are already a
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matter of grasping, though tentatively, truths whereas false ones are no better than ignorance. Nor do sufficiently accurate specifications do the job, for the issue is not what directions one takes to getting the grasping or pointing started but rather what is there to be grasped or pointed at. The only thing that will solve the paradox is to show that the truths that are the objects of true believing and knowing are ^n the soul always, which is just what Plato shows at 85d-86b. The best Platonic
image of how the doctrine of recollection is intended to solve the paradox of inquiry comes from Plate himself – the image of birds in the aviary of the soul and the distinction between having and holding. But the kinship between the Meno and the Theaetetus on this as on other issues has not gone unnoticed by other commentators, nor is it surprising. tor the Theaetetus is
about what knowledge is, which on the Meno’s own principles is a question prior to the question how it is got. And the aviary is proposed as an answer to the problem of how false belief is possible, an answer offered perhaps because it had already served with some satisfaction to explain how true belief and inquiry
are possible.
The paradox of inquiry is solved by recognizing that the truths apprehended and affirmed at the culmination of inquiry are always in the soul, always available as objects of our mental grasp.But this boldly metaphysical solution may seem gratuitous. Why require Plato to have introduced an otherwise unattested metaphysical entity when the Forms are at hand? Indeed, what is this thing that he calls “the truth of things (.that] is always in the soul?” tahat is the structure of these truths? What is their nature?
A short answer to these queries would be that Plato simply does not explore or illuminate the ontological status of these truths or their structure. They are introduced to solve a serious epistemological puzzle and are derived by inference from the doctrine of inquiry and learning as recollection, a doctrine appropriated from Orphic lore and tooled to Plato’s purposes.
But this is the short answer; more can be said, although it is conjectural and speculative. As Plato begins to explore seriously epistemological matters concerning believing, knowing, their relations and objects, equipped as he is with a Socratic view of the soul as the seat of personality, character, and intellect, he comes to see that the objects of knowing and believing, permanent and stable truths, cannot be in the world. Eventually he will dictate the terms of these objects’ status; they will be ungenerated, imperishable, immutable, pure, and so on, all attributes appropriate to the certainty of knowledge. In the Meno, however, he has not yet reached that momentous metaphysical discovery. Here Plato is groping for a solution to a precise puzzle and, if only temporarily, locates truth not in a Platonic heaven but rather in the soul, within the soul’s easy reach. Later, in the Theaetetus and Sophist, he will say that a logos is the external expression of a doxa, and in the Parmenides he will propose and then dispose of the suggestion that Forms are
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thoughts (noemata) in the soul. Perhaps, then, the Meno’s truths are internal sentences or thoughts – examples surely include true theorems of geometry and true answers to what-is-x questions – although Plato gives no helpful clues or advice concerning
their structure. All of this notwithstanding, the truths in the soul, the objects of true believing and knowing in the Meno, are soon abandoned in favor of the separated forms, only to resurface in different guises throughout the course of Western philosophy.
In the passage immediately following the interrogation of Meno’s slave-boy (85b8-86b4), Plato indicates clearly that this is how he understands what he has written. If we look first at &5b8-c8, we see that in this passage Plato has incorporated an important transition, from a seemingly harmless description of the slave-boy’s behavior – the beliefs are “his own” — to a potentially serious epistemological and possibly metaphysical claim – they are “in him” (85c4)· And what “in him” must mean at this stage of the dialogue is “not in another,” e.g.,not in Socrates. The boy’s beliefs, that is, are believings about things in him and not about things in another. Later Plato writes that among the beliefs in the boy are true ones (85c6-7), and that if this is so (86a6-7), then what is in him is hë aletheia ton onton. “In him” is explicitly said to mean “in the
soul” [8bb1-257 and so what Meno agrees to ultimately is that the objects of the boy’s believing are truths in his soul.
At 85c9-d8 Plato has Socrates use this conclusion, that the objects of believing are in the soul, to generate the conclusion that the boy’s “recovering knowledge that is in him [is] recollecting” (85d?). Meno casually accepts the proposal that beliefs, newly aroused like a dream, can be converted into knowledge, for he finds no difficulty in agreeing that once a truth is in the mind, then the transition from believing it to knowing it is not insurmountable. Hence, the boy can be said to “recover the knowledge out of himself” (85d3-4)» where “knowledge” clearly refers to the object of the knowing, the
truth about the diagonal on the given square. heno is so casual about accepting the word “recover” that its meaning must be the most obvious. Prior to the boy’s being asked a question, a given truth is in his soul but unattended to. When the question is asked, the boy responds by assenting to the truth, first as a belief, later as knowledge. And he does so by grasping again
what he already had but only in an unapprehended fashion, and such a grasping again is an act of recovery. This is Socrates’
line of reasonings from belief to knowledge to recovery to recollection, with his attention always on the truths that are the objects of all four.
The final section of this sequel to the slave-boy discussion (65d9-86b5) is exceedingly difficult. In his final speech Socrates recites the conclusions associated with the doctrine of recollection— that the soul is immortal, that inquiry is recollection, and that one ought to be bold and confident in undertaking inquiry into what one does not presently know (8bb1-
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4). But while these are the results of this entire stretch of the dialogue, it is far from clear how they are got.
There is a very precise argument developed in this passage. This is the argument:
(1) Recollection is the recovery of truths which one once knew but which one does not currently apprehend.
(2) These truths either (a) were grasped or seized at a particular time or (b) were always in one*s possession.
(C) The truth of things is always in our soul.
The conclusion is given in the protasis of a conditional at bbbl- 2. In interpreting this argument there are two possibilities,
that (C) is the same as (b) or that (c) follows whether (a) or (b) is true. A careful reading of the intermediate dialogue shows, I think, that the latter alternative, though more difficult to see, is indeed the correct one.
If we were to assume that (C) is the same as (2b), then the most natural way to arrive at (C) from (1) and (2) would be to show that (2a) is false. Unfortunately, at 85d12-86a10 Socrates does net do this. The argument of this intervening stretch of dialogue is this:
(j>) If one always had the truths (=2b), then one would also always be a knower.
(4) If one grasped the truths at a particular time (=2a), that time was when one was not a human being.
(i>) Some true beliefs are in the boy during the time when he is a human being and during the time he is not a human being.
(6) tor all time, the soul is or is not a human being.
(7) Therefore, the boy’s soul has truths for all time
(=2b ).
The upshot of this line of reasoning, then, is that the boy recalls truths which he once learned only if he always has them. The truths are iri his soul for all time, always. It seems to be Socrates’ strategy to show that if learning is recollection, then
the recollected truths are always in the soul. There is no alternative.
This argument helps us to see what Plato has in mind as the solution to the paradox of inquiry. Consider again step (3): what does it mean to say that “he would also be a knower?” we have argued that Irwin is wrong about the solution to the paradox. hhile it may be plausible to think that the solution comes at 65cb-7 with so-called quasi-recollection, this is not Plato’s solution. but if belief does not make inquiry possible, what does? Öbd12 may be the core of the answer to that question. Inquiry is possible only if the boy can recall truths already within him. But he can do this only if he always possessed those truths. The argument we are currently examining shows this to be the only condition for such recollection; one cannot recall something that is not in one’s own mind but rather in another’s, from the fact that the boy has always possessed these truths, we can infer that in a sense “he is also always a knower.” But this disarms the paradox; inquiry is not unnecessary even when one
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knows. Indeed, such knowledge is a necessary condition for the possibility of such inquiry, even though the boy, at the same time, is not a knower in the sense that he knows the truths and knows that he knows them. There is here, as it were, no act of knowing at all, only once-having-known and possession. This, I think, is the only kind of knowing that the word
(85d12) can refer to. ’
In this examination of 8i>b8-86t4 we have shown that Plato first describes the slave-boy’s behavior in such a way that it can be said to be a case of recollection and then argues that what is recalled, the truths first believed and eventually known, are always in the soul to be recalled. Plato is concerned about getting inquiry started only in so far as he believes that without the truths present in the inquirer’s soul it can neither start nor succeed. It is in this sense that his interest in inquiry is metaphysical and net epistemological; Plato’s problem about reference is the referrent and not the referring. Directed inquiry is possible only in so far as that referrent is always in the soul and coming to know it is a matter of recollection.
In some ways the solution 1 have developed rennovates the traditional view of how Plato solves the eristic puzzle, but it does so, 1 hope, with greater attention to the details of the text and the course of Plato’s reasoning that are carefully examined by more recent commentators. but it has an advantage over the latter whose interpretations require of Plato a more nuanced interest in language and epistemology than the Meno by itself warrants. My interpretation does not require Plato to have distinguished tetween empirical and a priori truths, nor does it thrust the burden of the solution to belief rather than knowledge. It does not treat the doctrine of recollection as an unnecessary appendage nor as a metaphor but instead sees it as the precise vehicle for identifying these truths whose ongoing presence in the soul ultimately solves the paradox. And finally it takes seriously the discussion following the slave-boy dialogue, at &5b8-86b4, in which important conclusions are drawn from that dialogue and from the doctrine of learning as recollection. lo my mind, the emergence of Platonic genius is in
large part the emergence of Plato’s metaphysical thinking. On the interpretation that I have offered the Meno is a crucial stage in this process, a fact which will, among other things, I
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