Plato's Socratic dialogues
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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 th
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y has knowledge of geometry, government, or virtue must still have much to learn, the individual who, like Socrates or, as Socrates has shown, Meno does not know what virtue is still has some opinions and beliefs about it.
But Socrates does not approach the problem in this way. Instead he tells Meno that he does not believe the paradox holds because, as he has heard from priests, priestesses, Pindar, and other poets, "the soul, since it is immortal and has been born many times, and has seen all things both here and in the other world, has learned everything that is" (81c). This is the line that Socrates pursues following the geometry demonstration. Meno admits that the slave answered only with opinions that were his own even though, as Socrates points out, "he did not know, as we agreed a few minutes ago" (85c). Socrates then insists that the opinions "were somewhere in him, were they not?" and Meno agrees to this (85c). This leads to Socrates' statement that a man who does not have knowledge still has "true opinions on a subject" and his point that if he were to continue to study the same question the slave would eventually possess as accurate a knowledge of this particular subject as anyone. Socrates also points out that
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Approximate Word count = 1802
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)
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