Plato's Conception of Knowledge

What we discover in the course of Theaetetus is that truth is something that if it cannot be found, it can be looked for and appreciated in a systematic way. In Theaetetus, Plato is not concerned with what is real, which belongs to an exercise of ontology, but with what is true, which belongs to an exercise of epistemology. The core of the readerÆs exercise in discovery is not so much the attempt to determine what or whether X or Y is true as a method that has legitimate application to a whole range of philosophical investigations and intellectual disciplines that aim at truth or, at minimum, at a strategy for being able to recognize the possibility of truth, or to make a critical, informed judgment about truth when the opportunity or need to do so arises. It is as if the principal implication running through this examination of knowledge has as much to do with moral structures informing experience as with the certainty of knowledge and experience per se.

What makes this enterprise so difficult is that by mean

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hilosophical meaning if Y is unknown (138). The philosophical importance of this is not to suggest that what might be conveniently be called knowledge of shoes is irrelevant to human experience; indeed, it may be useful. But where the project is epistemology, such knowledge is merely information, which from a philosophical point of view makes it trivial. Implicitly, therefore, the first thing that one discovers about learning, where learning can be considered relevant to knowledge, is that it is not the equivalent of acquiring a skill set--however useful (for a cobbler) or beautiful (for a musician) that set might be. What has to be further inferred from this is a point that Waterfield makes, that the definition of a general principle cannot be derived from particular examples The second part of Theaetetus deals with knowledge and perception, developing the insight that if individuals' perception, whether based on rational processes or sense experience, were the equivalent of truth, there would be no need to learn anything, which from one point of view is a patent absurdity since perceptions are perforce idiosyncratic, and from another would be "tedious nonsense" (Plato 48). The third part deals with knowledge and belief. The logi
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