▶︎ 0:01 Well, today we're finishing up the dialogue, and we're going to see whether maybe they managed to answer what knowledge is. And where we are with the definition of knowledge that's on the table is that knowledge is true judgment. But Socrates has set that aside for now, for now because actually, the question of false judgment is more interesting. How is it even possible to make a mistake?
▶︎ 0:24 And one attempt to explain that was in terms of memory pictured as a wax block that can take impressions, and so maybe false judgments happen when you're perceiving something and you try to fit it into some existing impression on your wax block and you misidentify what you're perceiving. That certainly seems like a very nice model for certain kinds of mistakes, but not all mistakes are like that. We're not always making a mistake about what we're perceiving currently. We also make mistakes trying to recall a piece of information or just thinking within our own minds, and the wax block doesn't really picture that.
▶︎ 1:04 To picture that, Socrates does something shameless, he says. This is in 196d. "It's shameless to say what knowing is like, to describe knowing." Shameless because we don't even know what knowledge is. We don't have a definition of knowledge. How can we describe what knowing is like? And he says, "Well, we're hopeless, we're shameless, we'll just go right ahead." So, what do y'all think? Is this illegitimate? Is it in fact shameless to try to describe something that you haven't defined yet?
▶︎ 1:40 Audience: No, because you're still learning.
▶︎ 1:43 So maybe definitions are not essential for progress?
▶︎ 1:46 Audience: Well, I just think that they are part of how you know something. It's the process. And maybe they are the terminus of the process, and along the way, we have to try to describe the experience, so I think it's perfectly fine for him to do this.
▶︎ 2:04 But it's interesting because I think this is the prototypical situation in philosophy. We're talking about something that we don't understand, and yet we are able to talk about it. We're able to raise a question. Philosophy is never about new information. It's never about the teacher or the book or something, or the video has something you've never heard of and then you're trying to understand this brand new matter. No, it's about very familiar things, like knowledge. Everybody is familiar with knowledge. And yet, we can't seem to grab it and define it and explain exactly what it is.
▶︎ 2:46 Another way that Socrates talks about this, in several other dialogues is that, in fact, philosophy, since it's not a matter of new information, it's a kind of recollection.
▶︎ 2:59 It's an attempt to remember, in a way. There's a dialogue called Meno where Meno, who's a real jerk, asks Socrates what virtue is. And Socrates says, "Well, I don't know. Let's look for it together." And they try various answers, which of course don't work, and Meno gets frustrated and he says, "Well look, we're just wasting our time here because if we don't know what virtue is, how would we even recognize it when we found it? So this is a complete waste of time."
▶︎ 3:29 And Socrates says, "Well, I've heard from certain wise men and women that what happens is that we actually get reborn. This is not our first time around the block. And before we were incarnated in this body, we knew all things, and then we forgot, but not irretrievably. And so what we're doing in philosophy is we know somewhere deep down what virtue is and we're just trying to recollect."
▶︎ 3:57 People call this Plato's Doctrine of Recollection, which is absurd because we don't know what Plato believed and it's clearly a rather fanciful myth that may or may not be true, this story of reincarnation, but I do think it's a good description of what it feels like to do philosophy. You're trying to remember, recollect something that you already sort of know.
▶︎ 4:21 This brings us to the aviary model of memory, which is exactly about this experience. It's about having something in you, but not being able to quite grasp it. This has some advantages over the wax block model because now memories are more elusive and now they're more mobile, now they're more dynamic. And simply having something in your memory isn't enough to guarantee that you can recollect it.
▶︎ 4:55 So what's going on then when, to use Socrates' example, somebody says, "Oh, 7 plus 5 is 11," and makes that mistake? In terms of the aviary, what's our metaphor for that? They just grabbed the wrong bird? They grabbed the wrong bird, right. So in you there are birds in flocks or singly, and people debate what that might symbolize but he doesn't say. But you simply reached into your mental birdcage and you grabbed an 11 bird when you meant to grab a 12 bird.
▶︎ 5:30 Well, several problems with this, of course, come up. First of all, 199d, "A man who has knowledge of something is ignorant of this very thing, not through want of knowledge but actually in virtue of his knowledge." In other words, these are knowledges, these are pieces of knowledge, items of knowledge that are in your birdcage. How could grabbing knowledge make you wrong or make you ignorant?
▶︎ 5:58 Well, in one of his brighter moments, Theaetetus has an answer. He says, "Okay, well then they're pieces of ignorance flying around in your head too." And the Greek is even funnier. It's a made-up word called non-knowledges. So there are knowledges and non-knowledges fluttering around in your head, and sometimes you grab a non-knowledge when you meant to grab knowledge.
▶︎ 6:19 This doesn't look very promising to me, but maybe it will work out. Well, no, of course, it does not. So, what did you make of the passage in 200A and B, where Socrates basically says, "Well, now we're back at the original difficulty. We've come full circle. We haven't answered anything"? Why not? It seems like we got somewhere. There's this mental aviary. There are pieces of knowledge in it, flying around. We're supplementing that now with pieces of ignorance. And our explanation of false judgment is, well, you reach in and you grab an ignorance bird when you meant to grab a knowledge bird.
▶︎ 7:22 Now, here's the thing. When you did this, you must have thought that this was a knowledge bird, and that means you made a false judgment about it. So you were reaching in to your aviary thinking that this was a knowledge bird when it was an ignorance bird. Now, have we really explained false judgment then? We're saying false judgment happens when you make a false judgment about a bird in your birdcage. Isn't that circular?
▶︎ 8:00 So what's going on in the mind of you as you do this? Is there another aviary in here? Is there another wax block? And so this is going to lead to a, it's a circle that is going to lead to an infinite regress. And as often happens, we've sort of presupposed what it is that we're trying to define. So this is a subtle point, I think, but an important one.
▶︎ 8:28 And the moral I draw from it is that these objectifying models of mental acts are often problematic or misleading. Like, "Oh, well, you just have this stuff in your head that takes impressions," or, "You have this collection of things in your head that we can picture as if they're objects." But then, wait, what about the mental act of consciousness that actually is involved here, of understanding or not understanding or making mistake, making a judgment? Is that really something that can be pictured as a thing? Maybe, maybe not, but this is an ongoing, maybe eternal debate, between monism and dualism, or between those who want to explain everything materially and those who believe that consciousness cannot
▶︎ 9:21 Well, unless you have more on the aviary or the wax block, maybe we can return as they do to the definition of knowledge as true judgment. Maybe false judgment was just too much to deal with. But here, Socrates has an easy counter-example. The jury who is persuaded to pass a correct judgment, but, in fact, do not know that it's correct.
▶︎ 9:59 So they might convict somebody who in fact is guilty of a crime and might be guilty, as we say in our system, beyond reasonable doubt. That's still not the same thing as actually knowing that he did it because you weren't there and the evidence could perhaps be interpreted otherwise. And as I said last time, very often in life, we're making these judgments which turn out to be true but they're lucky guesses, or maybe educated guesses, but they're less than knowledge.
▶︎ 10:34 What is knowledge going to be? It's got to be a judgment. It's got to be true, but you also have to back it up with a logos, an account, as they say. And I've talked about this word logos. It can mean all sorts of things. They've used it in this dialogue to mean argument, words. It can mean an explanation. It can mean a ratio. And in this context, it means anything that you're going to add to a true judgment to back it up so that it's not just a lucky guess.
▶︎ 11:06 So knowledge then is true judgment plus an account, and this is still a very common definition that's bandied about and debated in today's philosophy. It's usually stated as justified true belief. There was the luckiest philosopher in history, Edmund Gettier, who actually called this into question. I think you know something about this. Gettier in 1963, he's an academic nobody. His chair says, "You know, you really gotta publish something." And he says, "Well, I guess I've had this idea in the back of my head. I'll write it up and send it to a journal and see what happens."
▶︎ 11:43 So he writes up this little three-page article and it's published, and the philosophical world goes wild. And people 60 years later plus are still writing about this because what he did is challenge the definition of knowledge as justified true belief. Do you want to add anything or...
▶︎ 12:03 I think my favorite example of the Gettier problem is you're wandering through the desert and you see a mirage. And you think there's water over there, and you get to the mirage and discover that behind a rock there miraculously is water. So, it was true and you really believed there was water over there, and that's why you walked over there. And you had a justification, which is that you saw what you believed was water. So, it's a justified true belief, but did you really know there was water there or did you just get very, very, very lucky?
▶︎ 12:31 That one sounds like it wasn't much of a justification to me. Well, yeah. I had a perception and I made a judgment. But in some other situations, you could have a rather elaborate bit of reasoning to lead you to the correct answer, and yet it wouldn't be the right reasoning. So in epistemology or theory of knowledge today, there's a lot of debate about what's a justification that's really going to work.
▶︎ 12:55 And I think Plato would be very happy to see that because he's anticipated this kind of debate in this last part of the Theaetetus. Yes, we need an account, but what counts as a good account, and can we give a good account of an account?
▶︎ 13:11 Now, there are four theories of an account that they consider. And this is a bit puzzling to me. The first account of an account is the most complex and confusing and developed one. The second one is the most straightforward. The third one is like number one, except a bit simpler. And then there's four, which is different.
▶︎ 14:01 I almost feel like originally Plato just had two, three, and four, and then at some point in later life, he decided, "Oh, I have a bright idea, and I'll stick in this number one." I'm not very happy with that because I think Plato should be assumed to be a better stylist than that who has a reason for everything he does, but I haven't found a good explanation.
▶︎ 14:22 So in order to ease into this, I'm going to start with number two, which is the simplest. So what is an account, a logos? Well, logos can just mean language. So, the second one is putting your judgment into words. Well, why isn't that enough to be an account? An account, you remember, is supposed to get us over the hill from true judgment to actual knowledge.
▶︎ 15:02 Every judgment can be put into words essentially, right? That's what he says, yeah. Anybody can do that. Now, maybe that's not strictly true. Some people have trouble expressing themselves, and maybe they have an opinion which they can't quite say and so on. But certainly, it very often happens, normally happens that we can express our judgments. That doesn't make them knowledge, so it's got to be more than that.
▶︎ 15:28 Let's go to number three. And that is listing the elements of a thing. Now, that sounds more impressive. What's an element? It's the simplest possible unit from which something is built up. So, if you could break things down into their simplest units and state what they all are, that seems to be a cut above just having any old opinion.
▶︎ 16:05 A couple of models for this. One would be when we talk about the elements in chemistry, the periodic table of the elements, and we all know at least the most popular formula for a molecule, H₂O. Two hydrogens and an oxygen. So that's this sort of account of water. To say that is to know what water is. You're spelling water, as it were.
▶︎ 16:33 And that the model for this that Socrates gives is in fact spelling. It was very important for the Greeks that they had an alphabet, because that led to relatively high literacy, and it's been argued that without literacy you wouldn't have Greek philosophy, at least as it exists. There's quite a difference between wisdom and traditional teachings in oral cultures and the sort of debate and analysis that you get in a literate culture. They owed their alphabet to the Phoenicians, by the way, who had a near alphabet. They didn't have letters for vowels, but everything else, and it's from the Phoenician alphabet that you get Hebrew, eventually Arabic, you get the Greek, Roman, Cyrillic alphabets.
▶︎ 17:24 So, the idea in version number three of the account is that if you can spell something, if you can list all its elements, then you know it. Here's a problem, though. I won't make you do it, but if you went up to the board and I asked you to spell the name Theaetetus, which is not the simplest name to spell, and you in fact spelled it correctly, does that guarantee that you actually know how to spell Theaetetus? Why not? Lucky guess. Right. Could be a series of lucky guesses. It could just be a bunch of true judgments in a row without any actual knowledge. And that's essentially his objection to number three.
▶︎ 18:14 Now, let's go back to number one,
▶︎ 18:16 because it's very similar to number three, but it's developed more elaborately. This is what Socrates describes as his dream at 201-E through 202-B. The elements, the primary elements of which we and everything else are composed have no account. In other words, you cannot explain them. You cannot break them down, but it can only be named. You don't want to say anything else about it, even that it exists. You don't want to add the concept being, which we've talked about in the past, to it, because you just want to keep it in its pure simplicity, and it turns out that it's perceivable.
▶︎ 19:08 Perception comes back in, not as equivalent to knowledge, but the simplest elements can be perceived. And then you can just give it a name, and an account would be a complex sort of weaving together of the names of these perceptible but unanalyzable elements. Now, again, spelling is the model. So, you're trying to give an account of the word Socrates, and with the Roman alphabet, you say S-O-C-R-A-T-E-S. The name S designates the sound ss, that hissing sound. Now, can you break that down further? Can you spell S? How do you spell S? It's just S. It just is what it is. It's the simplest possible sound.
▶︎ 20:04 Can the sound ss be known in this theory? Can you give an account of it? I guess you couldn't really if you couldn't break it down further, because giving an account basically means breaking things down to their simplest perceivable elements. Let me write that down. Analyzing it into perceivable elements, each of which themselves can't be known because you can't analyze it. If knowledge requires analysis, then there's got to be something at the basis of that which cannot be known because it can't be analyzed.
▶︎ 21:01 People have debated what exactly is going on here, whether Plato is committed to this. I don't think so. I think he's just putting it out there. They've pointed out some similarities to some 20th century movements in philosophy. Some logical empiricists tried to describe the very basic given sense perceptions and then construct reality on the basis of that. Or, you might compare it to the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl, who says, "We're gonna describe experience, but we're gonna bracket the question of whether it is or not. We're not gonna bring in the concept being." Very similar to what Socrates says here.
▶︎ 21:47 Now, explaining what's wrong with this is challenging. To me, it's the most challenging argument in the whole dialogue. I'm going to present what I think is the essence of the view, and then we can dig into it farther if you want, and you'll discover my limitations.
▶︎ 22:19 We're thinking about parts and wholes, because we're breaking a whole down into the parts. Now here's a question that you've probably heard. Is the whole more than the sum of its parts? I think that's what this argument hinges on. And what Socrates is doing is he's constructing a dilemma. He's hanging us on the horns of the dilemma. If you say yes, you're in trouble. If you say no, you're also in trouble.
▶︎ 23:11 Let's just talk about this question a little bit before we follow the text. Would you be inclined to say yes or no? This is an extremely abstract question, but to make it a little more concrete, Gestalt psychologists would say the whole is always more than the sum of its parts. Gestalt being German for an overall form or whole. For instance, we walk into this room, and we don't, as the logical empiricists would say, perceive, oh, patch of brown, white square, and then compute the totality from that. No, you walk in, and you're swimming in the midst of this overall environment that has a kind of holistic sense, and then perhaps you focus on one thing or another within that overall environment. But if you're a holist, you cannot then build that environment up in its original meaning out of isolated pieces.
▶︎ 24:13 Gestalt psychology works pretty well when it comes to faces, for instance. Most people, unless you have face blindness, you look at a face and just, oh, you instantly recognize this individual as having an overall configuration. You don't put it together out of, "Well, that eye is one millimeter higher than the other one." It's just there for you as a whole. Now, you might be inclined though to answer the other way and say, "Well, that's the way it appears to you," but before that there's been a lot of computation going on unconsciously, which is something like what a digital camera does maybe. It collects a lot of bits of data and then synthesizes those bits into an overall picture.
▶︎ 24:53 Which way should we go? Should we go with yes or no first and see what happens?
▶︎ 24:58 Audience: No.
▶︎ 25:00 Is that where you actually stand or? One more answer here. Would you like to justify that belief? Phone-a-friend?
▶︎ 25:07 Audience: So, just very simply, if I have a whole and I take my little hammer and I break it into pieces, if I put it all back together, it fits back in and it's fine.
▶︎ 25:17 So yeah. Sum up the pieces and you've got a whole. But, of course, depending on what that whole is, it might not work. If you have a camera and you smash a camera and then you put it back together, it'll look. Do you remember being a little kid breaking stuff?
▶︎ 25:35 Audience: Yeah, yeah.
▶︎ 25:35 It's like, "Oh, put this back together."
▶︎ 25:36 Audience: Yeah, yeah. Put it back together.
▶︎ 25:37 Like, "Who broke this?" And you can't put Humpty Dumpty back together. Maybe it depends on which kind of whole we're talking about or something.
▶︎ 25:44 Audience: Right. Yeah. We could get the exact amount of wood of this table and pile it up, but it wouldn't be a table.
▶︎ 25:51 That's an interesting situation too. You have a pile of lumber. It's not a table. What more do you need? Another ingredient? Another thing? No. You've got everything you need, but you need to put them together in a certain order so that they fit the form of a table. This is a distinction that's very important in Plato and Aristotle, form and matter. Matter is what things are made out of. Form is how the matter comes together to produce a particular kind of thing with a particular kind of order.
▶︎ 26:21 Well, let's just try the no answer though first. The whole is nothing more than the sum of its parts, all its parts, in other words. Well, in this case, remember that the parts, the elements are each of them unknowable, because you cannot break them down. Therefore, is the whole knowable? All it is is all the parts. None of the parts is knowable. Therefore the whole is unknowable. That doesn't sound very promising, so let's go with the gestalt theorists and the holists and say, "The whole is more than the sum of its parts."
▶︎ 27:21 In that case, Socrates argues in the most confusing part of the whole dialogue that the whole must have no parts if it's something distinct from its parts. I'm hoping that for you this is plausible enough that we don't have to dig into the nitty-gritty that I feel I'm not really understanding, but it can be homework for those watching this video. Why does a whole have no parts if it's more than its parts? This is the section where he's talking about the syllables and the letters in the syllables.
▶︎ 27:51 Audience: Yes. That one's a mystery. And that's also a useful model. It was until we got to this part. And I didn't quite understand it.
▶︎ 27:58 Right. Well, let me talk about that example too. It's useful to bring this down to concrete examples. I think people who are initially starting to spell, especially if they come from an oral culture that's really unfamiliar with the very idea of alphabetic writing, they find it quite hard, because if you're not literate, you don't experience a word as put together out of individual sounds. In fact, that's not even how we read, by the way. You just need the beginning and the end of a word and your mind fills in the rest.
▶︎ 28:32 But certainly orally you hear the word Socrates and it doesn't mean Ss, Ah, Kuh, Er, Uh. No, it means that guy over there. And it's just a whole that you perceive as a whole. So, is it in fact just put together out of the individual sounds that we symbolize with letters, or is there in fact a distinct kind of wholeness to a word that you perceive holistically?
▶︎ 29:00 Well, if you admit that that wholeness, the entire word Socrates, or let's say water as opposed to just H2O, but water-ness, if it has no parts, is it knowable? No. Once again you're back at the same problem. You can't break it down.
▶︎ 29:23 Audience: Can't break it down, so you can't give an account of it.
▶︎ 29:25 Exactly. So, either way here, you're going to run into a roadblock. It's a beautifully constructed dilemma. So quite a few philosophers, and scientists, I would say, for instance that's the whole idea behind chemistry, have tried to understand things through analysis, but if you think that's the only way to understand things, then maybe you run into this dilemma.
▶︎ 29:59 Descartes, by the way, has a related method. He says, "You take this complicated whole, break it down into its simplest parts, and you become absolutely sure of each of those parts." He insists on certainty. Then you build it up, and then you make sure you left nothing out, and that's it. That's my method.
▶︎ 30:17 I would say that Descartes avoids this trap though, because he doesn't say you have to understand everything by analyzing it. He says some things are simply self-evident. You do not have to give an account of everything. For instance, his famous, most basic elemental truth is, "I exist right now." Quote, "I think, therefore I am." But it's not really an argument, it's just this moment of self-awareness. How can you doubt your own consciousness?
▶︎ 30:47 Now, can I give an account of that? No, because this is so basic, he says, and so certain, and so indubitable that you don't need an account of it. And then, maybe you can build things up out of self-evident truths such as that.
▶︎ 31:04 And in fact in the text at 206 A and B, Socrates suggests that the elements may in fact be self-evident, and not need an account. So for instance, when you were learning to spell, or you were learning music, he claims that it was especially clear what each sound was and what each note was, rather than the complex. Here, by the way, is another interesting
▶︎ 31:40 Example for the whole part issue, a melody. Does a melody consist simply of the notes or is there an overall unity to it? And I'm a holist, I believe that there's a unity. So you can tell a beginning pianist because they're picking out the notes in the correct rhythm, in the correct order, but it just doesn't flow. It doesn't sound like a melody.
▶︎ 32:04 You're not going to make me go through the really hard part?
▶︎ 32:08 Audience: The idea you just said about the melody was interesting.
▶︎ 32:11 Yeah.
▶︎ 32:11 Audience: Because what you're describing seems like purpose, right? There was a purpose for stringing the little pieces together.
▶︎ 32:16 Right.
▶︎ 32:17 Audience: And that seems a little different than the conversation here.
▶︎ 32:22 Well, it's hard to say what the purpose of music composition is sometimes, but maybe so.
▶︎ 32:27 Audience: Well, an expression of something, right?
▶︎ 32:29 Yeah.
▶︎ 32:29 Audience: You say that it seems to move with something, it wants to say something.
▶︎ 32:32 Mm-hmm.
▶︎ 32:32 Audience: Different than the individual notes.
▶︎ 32:35 And so the idea that something has a purpose. And it has temporal unity, to go back to Rob's point about time that we were discussing. There's a case of a musicologist, Clive Wearing, who had such severe damage to his memory capacity that he basically has a seven-second memory span. Everything beyond those seven seconds is lost into darkness. And so it's this sort of nightmare that he's been living for decades in which he's constantly waking up into a world that feels utterly new to him.
▶︎ 33:11 Touchingly, the only thing he remembers, the only thing that left a strong enough impression in his wax block is his wife. So when she walks in the room, he's so delighted, even if she was only gone for one minute. Now I bring him up because he's a musicologist, he's a pianist, and if you give him a piece of music or ask him to play something, it's there in his memory. And he will play it continuously, remember the whole thing, it might last five minutes. And so music, Oliver Sacks describes him among others, music is the one thing that gives him temporal continuity and allows him to transcend that moment of experience, moment of perception that we were talking about, in relation to the idea that knowledge is perception.
▶︎ 33:56 Now, we had a fourth concept of an account. This is our last ditch effort. Comes in at 208 C, "Being able to tell some mark by which the object you are asked about differs from all other things." For instance, you're talking about the sun. Somebody says, "What do you mean by sun?" And you say, "It's the brightest of the bodies that move around the earth and the heavens." Which of course is false, but look, let's fix that a little bit. The brightest of the bodies that we see up in the sky during the daytime. And I think that's safe. That's a definite description. It picks out the sun. Would that be enough? Not only do you have a true judgment about the sun, the sun is very warm, but you can also identify it as the brightest of the things we see in the sky.
▶︎ 34:44 Audience: It seems almost like an account can just end up being already having knowledge, and so you need knowledge in order to justify knowledge.
▶︎ 34:55 Yeah, then we'll be in a circle, or one of these infinite regresses.
▶︎ 34:58 Audience: Or could we just say that you don't need knowledge, you need a true judgment about the fact that it's the brightest thing in the sky?
▶︎ 35:07 Hmm? Well, then you're just piling true judgment on true judgment. How are you gonna get to knowledge? But then as you said, if you say, but then you have to know that how it's different, well, then you're just defining knowledge in terms of knowledge.
▶︎ 35:17 Audience: Then you're already knowing on some other knowledge.
▶︎ 35:20 Yeah. Another way to think about this is he says, just in order to make a judgment about Theaetetus, I already need to be able to pick out Theaetetus as an individual that I'm having a true judgment about. So this definite description thing is already implied in any true judgment already. And so again, it doesn't get us over the hump to knowledge.
▶︎ 35:44 This brings us to the conclusion of the dialogue, 210 A and B. Theaetetus' knowledge is neither perception, nor true judgment, nor an account added to true judgment. All those babies have been proved to be wind eggs. Empty, infertile, false. Is that a fair conclusion?
▶︎ 36:14 Audience: They may not work as a model for what we want knowledge to be, but they're not entirely empty.
▶︎ 36:23 So have we made some progress?
▶︎ 36:26 Audience: In some way. I think so, yeah. Talked about some stuff.
▶︎ 36:30 He's introduced a lot of useful distinctions, and at least we've gotten from just me here now having a perception to forming a judgment, thinking, and then the need to justify and explain that judgment. And I would say they have not refuted the idea that knowledge is true judgment plus an account. They just haven't given an account of an account. They haven't found the right account. Maybe, for instance, the modern scientific method is the correct account, or maybe there's some other method. So it's a challenge, I think, for us to find the right way of explaining things.
▶︎ 37:10 What else is going on here in these last few sentences? Theaetetus says he's out of babies. And in fact, he says, "You've made me say far more than ever was in me," and I think we might agree that a lot of this has been perhaps Socrates putting words into Theaetetus' mouth and doing a lot of the labor himself. But he's out of ideas now, and so now there's an ethical question. Has Socrates harmed Theaetetus or benefited him? Remember, his life depends on this because he was accused of corrupting the youth. Has he been doing Theaetetus a favor?
▶︎ 37:52 He says so.
▶︎ 37:54 Audience: He says so, yeah.
▶︎ 37:56 So what's the supposed favor? Maybe that he will now know what he doesn't know. That's huge, because now he's like Socrates, not just in face, but in mind. Socrates knows his own ignorance. Now Theaetetus too is at least not going to assume he knows something he doesn't know. And maybe he's a bit closer to an answer.
▶︎ 38:23 If ever in the future he should attempt to conceive or should succeed in conceiving of the theories, they will be better ones as a result of this inquiry. He'll be able to make better distinctions. He'll be able to anticipate problems, know what may work and what may not. And even if he doesn't succeed philosophically, again, he develops this Socratic wisdom. By the way, early in the dialogue, Socrates said, "Wisdom is knowledge." Well, no. Or maybe it's a very specific kind of knowledge, knowledge of the absence of knowledge.
▶︎ 38:58 And he goes on to say, "I don't know anything." He reminds us of his own ignorance. "I don't know any of the things that other men know. All I have is this art of midwifery, which I use to deliver men that are young and generous of spirit all that have any beauty." Well, he never forgot that Theodorus called him and Theaetetus ugly. This is a little reminder, "No, we are beautiful." And now punchline, "I must go to the king's porch to meet the indictment that Meletus has brought against me." What? He's being put on trial for his life. This is it.
▶︎ 39:32 So we knew from the beginning this was near the end of Socrates' life, but we didn't know how near. He's about to be executed. Why do you think Plato threw in that? It's a little bombshell at the end.
▶︎ 39:45 Audience: I remember this banger line that Socrates had at the end of his trial where he says, "And now I'm going to die. Which is better, you to live, me to die? Nobody knows." And I was kind of thinking, the fact that he doesn't know how it's gonna go at his trial, and at the end of the trial he doesn't know what the outcome of death will be. It seems like knowledge might have something to do with the apology.
▶︎ 40:12 That's nice. I think it does, and that theme of knowing your own ignorance runs throughout the Apology, and he uses it to say that, "I'm not afraid of death because I don't know that it's a bad thing. Maybe it's nothing, or maybe it's good. There's no reason to be afraid." And then as you say, he doesn't know whether being alive or being dead is better. So this kind of Socratic wisdom can actually contribute to courage or tamp down fear at least.
▶︎ 40:44 "Let us meet here again in the morning, Theodorus." Apparently he's gonna have a little time. It's not clear how that works. There is in fact a sequel. There are two sequels that most people think Plato wrote considerably later because they're in a different style. They're less playful. They're less ironic. They're less dramatically fun. They're called the Sophist and the Statesman. But they're conceptually quite interesting. And Socrates is there. He meets Theaetetus and Theodorus again, but then there's a stranger who does most of the talking, a stranger from Elea, which was Parmenides' hometown. So I recommend those as well.
▶︎ 41:22 Now, it seems that this is a failure though. They did not get an answer, but I'm going to suggest maybe we can snatch victory from the jaws of defeat here. How can we do that? They agree that they don't know what knowledge is, right? They failed to give an account of knowledge. Well, what were they aiming at? How do they know that they failed? How do they know that they don't know? If we could answer that, we would know what knowledge is, right? Because they're trying to know what knowledge is.
▶︎ 41:58 What did they fail to do? If we identify that, we've got an answer. What would it have looked like to be able to give a good definition of knowledge? How would they know that they had one? If they came up with a definition that satisfied all of the examples of knowledge where it couldn't be disproven, I guess. That sounds promising, right? That sounds like you might be on the track of the truth. That could be the next thing for them to investigate, at least, right? That's what they were trying to do, in fact, give a definition that covers all cases and answers all possible objections.
▶︎ 42:44 Now, how do you know that you've answered all possible objections is a good question, but that seems to be the ideal. So, could that be our definition of knowledge or our definition of giving an account? Maybe so. So I think, in this case, as in some other apparently dead-end sort of dialogues by Plato, you can read between the lines to think, "Well, there's at least a suggestion of an answer, even within the way that they failed." So, what are our takeaways from this dialogue?
▶︎ 43:16 Audience: The problem I have with that, right, is that behind knowledge, then, you have this thing called a true perception with an account. So, those are the parts. So, it always falls apart on the whole and the part problem. So either, you know, even with your provisional answer that it's possible to give a definition of knowledge, I'm not sure it is. I think the problem with that is that it's like defining knowledge as something such that it couldn't be objected that it's not knowledge. That seems problematic to me though. That's like saying a fish is anything such that someone couldn't say, "Oh, that's not a fish." And then none of us really know what a fish is.
▶︎ 44:09 Does seem a bit unsatisfying. And, as I said, how do we know that the next good objection isn't just around the corner?
▶︎ 44:16 Now, again, we could relate this to modern concepts of science. One view of science is that what's distinctive about scientific knowledge is that it can be disproved, not that it's certain, but that potentially it can be disproved. We can say, "Well, under these circumstances, show me this experimental result, and if you did it right, and if it's valid, and it's confirmed, I'll give up my theory." So then maybe this very ideal of, quote, "knowledge" is just a phantom, it's something divine and not human, and the best things we humans can hope for is educated guesses that are disprovable. And in that case, some sort of Socratic wisdom would go along with science, because you know that you don't know in the strict sense of being able to deal with all comers and refute every possible objection, except perhaps in math, but not in empirical science.
▶︎ 45:18 Another takeaway for me from the dialogue is just that learning is hard and knowledge is hard. Maybe worthwhile, but it's going to take some work. It's not going to be as easy as sitting on the couch and having perceptions. I personally would also apply to the tendency we have today to attribute knowledge to things, to machines, artificial intelligence, for instance. If you start reading articles on AI, you'll see that so often people use anthropomorphic language. "It decides this, it wants this, it tries to do this. It understands or doesn't understand this." That's all metaphorical, unless you can really show me that it is doing what the soul does.
▶︎ 46:02 Now, of course, if I say this in public, I will be pilloried for being some sort of a superstitious religious dualist or something, but I know that I am a soul or a psyche, I'm a mind. Can the machine do what I do? Can it make a mistake? Can it have a perception even? I'm not convinced.
▶︎ 46:27 Well, thank you very much for your participation, your questions, and, again, because we're not gonna be live on video, we'll be recorded, the audience may have all sorts of problems and questions that the recording can't answer. But in that case, they should go out and have some dialogues of their own. Thanks.