The purpose of this research is to examine PlatoÆs conception of knowledge elaborated in the dialogue Theaetetus. The plan of the research will be to set forth in general terms what it appears Plato thinks knowledge is and then to discuss in more detail what can be discovered in the Theaetetus about PlatoÆs conception of learning, first in terms of the content of argument and second in terms of the shape that the argument assumes and the method by which it is developed.
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 means of the Socratic dialogue format, Theaetetus very much makes a project of developing the view that truth is impossible to determine. Or, it might be said that at the very moment the birth of truth and understanding seems possible, it is prevented from happening by none other than its midwife, Socrates (25), who frustrates the emergence of others' certainty by criticizing the foundations on which Theaetetus means it to rest. Waterfield's evaluation of the ...