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Plato's Socratic dialogues

The customary procedure in Plato's Socratic dialogues is for Socrates and another person to inquire into the nature of a particular virtue. But Plato's Socrates always begins these inquiries by announcing that he does not know beforehand what the nature of the virtue in question truly is. The question arises, therefore, how he can know, without any knowledge to guide him, how to conduct the inquiry and how he can recognize the correct answer if he manages to reach it. In the Meno Socrates' interlocutor Meno raises this issue and, after reformulating Meno's paradox, Socrates answers that all true knowledge is a matter of the recollection of knowledge obtained in previous lives and earlier forms of existence by the reincarnated soul. For true knowledge, therefore, the process known as learning is actually a process of uncovering or recollecting what the individual already knows. As a solution to the question of how one will know when the correct answer is found this is ingenious. But this is not Plato's essential answer to the paradox. The true resolution lies in Socrates' demonstration that one can, through inquiry, come to knowledge of an object even though one has no knowledge of it to begin with. This is demonstrated in the problem in geometry presented to the slave, but is dependent on Plato's distinction between knowledge and true beliefs, or opinions, rather than on his claim regarding recollected knowledge.

As Socrates puts it, during the discussion of what the slave has accomplished in the exercise in inquiry, "a man who does not know has in himself true opinions on a subject without having knowledge" (85c). Plato's theory of recollection may provide an explanation of how the individual is able to proceed along the path toward knowledge and how he knows when he has discovered knowledge. But recollection is, in itself, inadequate to the task of inquiry which is, as Socrates shows, essential to acquiring knowledge e...

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Plato's Socratic dialogues. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 06:33, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1713242.html