▶︎ 0:00 All right. This is our next to last session on Plato's Theaetetus. We're reading it today through 196c. So, where are we? Well, we nearly defeated relativism last time. There were several interesting arguments against it.
▶︎ 0:19 One was the self-refutation argument. If everybody's right, then people who disagree with you are right, so you're wrong. Maybe a little bit cheap, but interesting. There was getting to the point about time, what about predictions? Aren't some people better predictors than others, better prophets the way Socrates was at the beginning of the dialogue? He's a good predictor of how somebody will turn out. Well, that can't just be a matter of private perception, it seems. Some people understand what's going to happen better than others.
▶︎ 0:51 And then there was an indirect argument that sort of went around the long way via Heraclitus. So knowledge as perception implies supposedly Heraclitanism. Everything is changing. Everything's altering its qualities at every moment, therefore you really can't say anything durable. All your statements will be disproved in the next moment, and so the very statement that knowledge is perception will disprove itself. Interesting, but perhaps not a definitive argument because it's so indirect.
▶︎ 1:25 And then we also looked at this digression where Socrates describes the philosopher as opposed to the legal man, and I think we concluded that the "philosopher," quote unquote, there is a caricature of somebody who just has his head in the clouds and is a complete nerd, and it's not really a portrait of Socrates himself, who's rather savvy about people, but it's more of a portrait of Theodorus, who, I have to say, is satirized here pretty strongly. He is the one who doesn't know that he doesn't know. He's the one who can't recognize individual humans. In fact, he can't even recognize himself in the mirror when Socrates is holding up a mirror to him saying, "Look at this guy." So, it's a pretty funny passage.
▶︎ 2:14 So today we get to the final argument, finally, against the idea that knowledge is perception, and it begins at 184b. "With what does a man see white and black? With what does he hear high and low notes? You would reply, I imagine, with his eyes and ears. Well, strictly speaking, no. You do not see colors with your eyes." What's his point?
▶︎ 2:43 You see colors through your eyes, and there's some unifying thing that puts together all the sensory information through which you experience the world into a soul, I think he says, with which you experience. Yes, okay.
▶︎ 3:02 He uses this word, psyche, traditionally translated as soul, but he says, "Call it a psyche or whatever you want to call it." He's not dogmatic about this. There's certainly no religious doctrine implied here necessarily. You could call it the psyche, the mind, the consciousness, the brain if you want to be materialistic about it, the frontal cortex, whatever you think, your CPU. Whatever is doing the central processing, however you think about it, which is actually you. That's your consciousness. That's you.
▶︎ 3:37 And you are going through your eyeball, for instance, to see colors, et cetera. We might as well add the other organs. Go through your nose, through your tongue, through your ears, and we'll use a hand to represent the organ of touch, even though, of course, it's almost your whole body that is the organ of touch. But the point is, there's a central psyche that's actually having these perceptions and integrating them, and he says, "It would be a strange thing if there were a number of senses sitting inside us as if we were wooden horses." Is that allusion clear? What's that about? Trojan Horse?
▶︎ 4:32 Yeah, right. Probably everybody watching this film knows, but beware of Greeks bearing gifts. They left this wooden horse in front of the gates of Troy after 10 years, and the Trojans were foolish enough to think this was a gift. They brought it into Troy, and of course it was a hollow horse full of the best Greek warriors. But in that case, the horse has no consciousness. The horse has no unity, really. It's just this empty shell for independent agents, and it's not like that.
▶︎ 5:04 It's not like you're seeing and you're hearing, or your eyes and your ears are just sort of thrown into a box together. There's you. This is progress. And now there's another very important premise in his argument at 185a.
▶︎ 5:23 "What you perceive through one power, you can't perceive through another." So you can't hear colors, for instance, or see sounds. The idea, which is not entirely true. Well, yeah, let's challenge that a bit, but let me just represent this schematically. It's as if each sense organ discloses a certain domain. This is the domain of the visible. There's no overlap between that and the olfactory, or what you can taste, or the audible, or the tangible. Each of them has its own separate domain.
▶︎ 6:06 Now, is this actually true? Or can there be genuine synesthesia where you hear colors or whatever?
▶︎ 6:14 Audience: No. But it's as simple as, if you're close enough and a firework goes off, you feel it. You don't just hear it.
▶︎ 6:24 True. So you're feeling the noise in some sense. Couldn't we say, "Well, these are really distinct sensations, but they're coordinated in your experience, and so this is why you associate them strongly"? It's an argument. I'm not sure I buy it.
▶︎ 6:41 Audience: In modern terms, we would say that it's the same source.
▶︎ 6:46 Yeah. It's a wave.
▶︎ 6:47 Audience: It's a wave form. But they're two different interpretations of.
▶︎ 6:51 And you're perceiving that wave form in two different ways. Another thing I could argue against Socrates is, smell and taste are tremendously related. Taste is apparently 90% smell, or it's the other way around. We can posit that they're different senses, but I do think that they overlap.
▶︎ 7:12 Another, maybe counterexample to Socrates is let's say a cube. Let's just say for the sake of argument this is a cube. I can feel that it's a cube, and I can see that it's a cube. Do the senses in fact cross over? Or should we say those are distinct sensations, separable sensations of a single object? It is one single object, but my perceptions are different. Different in kind. A lot is gonna hinge on this, so we should talk about this a little bit.
▶︎ 7:44 Audience: I was thinking of synesthesia originally. But as far as I understand, that's more of a psychological confusion of different sensory inputs, and it happens in the psyche rather than actually smelling color.
▶︎ 8:00 Yeah. My son has synesthesia, and especially had it when he was very young, and would say things like, "Oh, the number four, it's so shrill, and it tastes really sour, and it's all yellow." Not sure how that's happening, but yeah, there's a lot going on in that psyche. But I guess according to Socrates' theory, you're still taking distinct inputs, to use computer language, and you're putting them together, and they feel as if they're one and the same thing, but you can analytically separate them out.
▶︎ 8:31 In normal life, we just go through using all the senses we have available, and they're all synchronized, they're all coordinated. We don't really need to distinguish usually what we're getting from the sense of smell, the sense of taste or whatever. But maybe by paying attention, we can make that distinction.
▶︎ 8:50 Another interesting case would be people who've been blind from birth, but then sometimes they can have an operation to give them sight for the first time, and they're adults. It's rare, but it happens. If you give this newly-sighted person, or you show this newly-sighted person a cube and ask them, "What's this?" do you think they will be able to tell you? They have no clue. If they're just raw, if they're new to the visual world, they don't know that that's a cube. They need to actually learn that. If you let them hold it, they'll say, "Oh, of course, a cube." Right?
▶︎ 9:26 And it's actually easier for them to get around by closing their eyes and using their cane for a while. It gives them a terrible headache to have to process visual imagery. So these things that come so naturally to us, maybe we just learned them in infancy to coordinate all these things, but they're not simply handed to us. So, if this is true, let's say for the sake of argument, that when you get through one sense, you can't get through another,
▶︎ 9:56 What are we going to do about what Socrates calls the things that are common to more than one sensory domain? Let's take the number two, which he mentions at 185B. So you can see two hash marks. You can hear two sounds. But can you see or hear the number two?
▶︎ 10:29 Well, can you say, "Sure," "Here's the number two right there. I see it." Is that a good answer? In fact, that is not the number two. That's the numeral two. That's the Arabic numeral two. The argument would be you don't see the concept of two. And you can't get that concept through perception, according to his argument.
▶︎ 10:55 Why not? It's because of this specialization idea that the senses are specialized, and they don't overlap. So if the number two were in fact something visible, then it would never apply to sounds, because it would just be a visible thing and would be valid only within that domain, and so on. So anything that can be applied to both the visible and the audible must be something that comes neither from sight nor from hearing, but from where?
▶︎ 11:28 Well, Theaetetus says, "I don't know, I guess the psyche is working on its own." And this is the moment in the dialogue when Socrates apparently sincerely says, "I love you. You're beautiful. That's what I believe." You're not ugly. You're not ugly. He's never forgotten that Theodorus called Theaetetus ugly. That keeps coming back.
▶︎ 11:48 Audience: But isn't this a distinction between a thing and a concept? I can say there's one, or two glasses of water, but there's a concept of two that can be applied to a variety of different settings that doesn't require sense.
▶︎ 12:06 Yes. That's good. We're done here. My job here is done. I think what you're saying is very much in line with what Socrates is arguing. And then the question is, well, where do we get those concepts?
▶︎ 12:17 Now, they're easy to get obviously. A little child can easily learn, normally, to learn to count one, two, three, four. And we teach this by means of sensory examples. Like, here's two cherries, three cherries. Still, the number three is not a piece of fruit. So you're either, and of course philosophy of mathematics can go in various directions, you're either discovering something in the intelligible realm, or maybe you're just carrying out a procedure, a mental procedure. But in either case, it's not something that's handed to you by your sensation.
▶︎ 12:49 Audience: This idea of, like you said, about accounting and all these other things, or anything that's just separate from perception. Is it essential? Is this just an entrée into discussing more, or is it really essential for the theory that these things have to be separable?
▶︎ 13:03 I think it's essential. I think we'll see why. He's gonna do this with the concept of being, which is the key. Now of course, a true empiricist, somebody who's basing all knowledge on experience would say, "No, no." So maybe you don't directly see the number two, but it arises through various different kinds of sensory inputs, which then get combined or processed in some way. But really, it's coming from your perceptions and the mind, without these perceptions would be a blank slate.
▶︎ 13:32 Audience: But it would require multiple... So I couldn't understand two if I only saw? If it was only coming from one sense?
▶︎ 13:41 Well, we don't have an empiricist concept of knowledge here in this dialogue, so I'd have to make it up on the spot, but you might argue that, yeah, if you just get enough sensations from different sources, and maybe combined with action in the world, these concepts spontaneously arise. But they're based on experience. But somebody who's more of a rationalist, these are modern labels, empiricist and rationalist, would say, "No, it fundamentally doesn't come from experience. It comes from something that's mental, that's irrational or happens in the psyche." We are actually actively contributing these concepts to experience and forming experience.
▶︎ 14:26 Audience: Everything you make, say makes perfect sense. I just still don't understand why the separation of the senses input was so essential to this conversation.
▶︎ 14:37 Well, let's say that the visual and the auditory overlapped a lot, so that you could in fact hear colors and see sounds. Then anything that applies to both colors and sounds, could come from either your eyes or your ears, right? So at least you'd have a concept that was an empirical concept based on experience that would've come from one of those two senses. And if they all overlap and somehow you can use any organ to pick up on any perception, then you really don't need the psyche at all for these common concepts like numbers, because they could come in through your smell and apply to your touch or whatever.
▶︎ 15:25 Audience: So is this essentially a still in the moment kind of conversation? Is that why it's so essential?
▶︎ 15:33 I have to think about that one. Although he doesn't. Well, there, he is going to refer to time, at 186C. And here he's referring to the concepts of being and advantageousness or goodness. "Calculations regarding these things come when they do only as the result of a long and arduous development involving a good deal of trouble and education." So there's the theme of temporal extension becoming explicit. I suppose this argument is about what can happen in an instant. And if it can't happen in an instant, then it must happen not only within the psyche itself, but over some period of development.
▶︎ 16:18 Audience: But to me it's like when you make that break away from going into the psyche, it didn't seem to me like it was essential to separate the senses, and he makes a big deal out of it. It's like, you can't do this through this, can you? And I still don't quite understand how that's essential.
▶︎ 16:36 Well, yeah. Let's look at 185B. So he's mentioned several common concepts there. Being: they both are, sound and a color both are or exist. There's difference, there's sameness, there's numbers one and two, there's the concept of like and unlike. "Now what is it through which you think all these things about them? It is not possible, you see, to grasp what is common to both, either through sight or through hearing." Why isn't it possible? Because they don't overlap, because they're distinct.
▶︎ 17:10 Audience: I was just gonna say, I feel like you might be using this separation as a setup for the psyche so that then we can use the psyche to come up with the idea that there are concepts that are separate from the world.
▶︎ 17:20 Yeah.
▶︎ 17:20 Audience: It feels to me like a stepping stone in the conversation, but not necessarily theoretically necessary for where we go. It feels like psyche is so much bigger that it kind of trumps all this other stuff, this foreplay.
▶︎ 17:33 Yeah. Well, there is a huge question here. What is this psyche? Right?
▶︎ 17:36 Audience: Yeah.
▶︎ 17:37 And so really the entire history of philosophy is a footnote to not just Plato, but to these pages in Plato, like, what is the complete list of these common basic concepts? Some philosophers call them categories. Can we come up with a complete list? Is there a system to them? Where do they come from? Maybe they do come from perception, and this is a bogus argument. Or if they don't come from perception, how do we develop them? And by what right?
▶︎ 18:07 This is Kant's question in the Critique of Pure Reason. What right do we have to impose concepts like, another major one would be causality. One thing causes another. Well, where does that come from? Do I have the right to say that everything must be the result of some causal law? Why? So it's something that a lot of philosophers have struggled with. And maybe I'll leave it at that since this is supposed to be an introduction to philosophy, but we can dig deeper if you wish.
▶︎ 18:41 Now, the biggest question, the biggest topic, the biggest category that the argument hinges on is being, which seems to be something very simple. We say all the time, I see that, here's a book. Here's a book. How do you know? Well, I see it. Well, strictly, no, according to this argument, you do not see the being of the book. You see colors, shapes, et cetera. And then being is one of these concepts that you can apply to smells, sounds, textures, whatever.
▶︎ 19:14 So it must be something that the psyche is developing on its own and that then you're applying to your sensations and making a judgment, this exists, some object exists here. And it's become so natural and easy to us that we do it without ever reflecting on it. But he's getting us to think about where we get this concept being and what even does it mean? I quoted this passage where he says, "It takes a lot of education and reflection and maybe a bit of luck to have a good conception of being."
▶︎ 19:51 The concept has come up earlier in the dialogue, where Socrates playing Protagoras said, "We have to get rid of this very idea because being suggests some sort of endurance and some sort of independent existence." I think this is broader though, whether you want to read that into being or not, we have some sense of what it means for things to exist or to be something rather than nothing. And whatever you mean by that, it must be something that the psyche is responsible for and judgment.
▶︎ 20:25 Now, if knowledge has to be true, which they're assuming throughout this dialogue, there's no such thing as false knowledge, then knowledge has to get to being. Because to reach the truth is to grasp how things are and that they are, then you have to use the psyche in order to get knowledge because you need this concept of being, and what the senses give you cannot possibly be enough to provide being and truth.
▶︎ 21:01 So, again, Socrates seems to really believe this. He gets very enthusiastic. I bet Plato believes it. Personally, I'm convinced. So if you're convinced too, then it seems we've defeated the idea that knowledge is perception finally, at least if by perception we mean sense perception.
▶︎ 21:21 The conclusion then at 186E is, at least in this translation, it seems to go a little too far. Socrates says, "Perception has no share in the grasping of truth since it has none in the grasping of being." I checked the Greek, I think it maybe could be softened a little bit. You could say that it does not belong to perception to get hold of truth on its own by itself. That's maybe a little safer.
▶︎ 21:53 To say that we don't need it at all seems rather absurd. Could you be born with no sensations, God forbid, and you're never going to get any knowledge? You'll just be a blob. That's a very different statement. I think so. And many of these statements are open to a range of readings, but I think this one, as translated here, it has no share, goes too far in my view.
▶︎ 22:24 We can now make a distinction then between perception and judgment. Before, they were using perception to mean both, I see red and, I have an opinion that I'm a wise person or something. No, that's not a perception. That's something that necessarily involves the psyche, and it's forming a thought actively rather than just passively receiving sensations.
▶︎ 22:48 So, can we say that knowledge is judgment? Well, there's a distinction made at the bottom that knowledge has to be true judgment, because, and then for a while, I lost track, but there's a lot of talk about false judgments and how exactly a judgment can be false. But it seems like knowledge equals true judgment is a pretty basic claim they're making. And they keep that in place for a while, and then Socrates goes on one of his tangents, "How is false judgment possible anyway?" Which turns out to be a more interesting question than whether true judgment is knowledge, because true judgment is not knowledge, and a little reflection will show that.
▶︎ 23:31 What's an example of a judgment, or it could also be translated as an opinion, a belief, the word is doxa, which is correct or true, but which clearly is not knowledge? I think you could have a scenario where you stumble into something by chance.
▶︎ 23:51 Like, I have a clock which is broken, but I'm not aware that it's broken. I look at it at 2:30, and I have this judgment, oh, it must be 2:30. It is true because it really is 2:30, but did I really know that it was 2:30 just because I looked at this broken clock? No, that's an unusual situation, but don't we, in fact, very often just get lucky in our judgments? As I walk down the street, do I absolutely know that the pavement isn't some sort of hologram, that I'm not going to fall down into the sewer? I don't know. I'm taking it on faith. And 99.99% of the time, I'm going to be right, but it's still a true judgment, it's not knowledge.
▶︎ 24:34 So in The Republic, Socrates compares true judgment without knowledge to a blind man who's stumbling down the right road. He's doing great. He's on the right path, but he has no clue what's going on. Another example would be, you're given a multiple-choice test. You take a guess, and you turn out to be right. You didn't know the answer. So, this sort of thing happens all the time, and it's in fact going to be quite easy for Socrates to refute this.
▶︎ 25:02 But being the wise midwife that he is, he delays. He doesn't abort the baby right away. He lets it sit for a while, and he goes off on this tangent. Let's look at how Theaetetus introduced his idea too. This is 187B. And as you said, he rules out judgment in general because there's also false judgment, but true judgment may well be knowledge, so let that be my answer. If the same thing happens again, and we find as we go on that it turns out not to be so, we'll try something else.
▶︎ 25:38 It seems very reasonable. But didn't he, in that, provide the counter-example to the very thing that he's saying? Because what he's saying is, "I don't know if I'm right, but this is my judgment, and I might be right. I might have a true judgment, but I don't know. And my judgment is that true judgment is knowledge." So again, he just gave us an example of what might be a lucky guess without knowledge, therefore he disproves himself.
▶︎ 26:10 The same thing happened, and I only noticed this, by the way, on like the 17th reading of this dialogue. The same thing happens when he introduces knowledge as perception, and he says, "The way it appears to me now, at any rate, is that knowledge is perception, but I don't know." So again, he's not quite clear on what it is that he is claiming.
▶︎ 26:31 What else is needed? Let's just anticipate the last part of the dialogue for a moment. If true judgment is not enough, because it could just be a lucky guess, or blind man stumbling down the right road, what else do you need to get knowledge? I think you need some kind of rationale.
▶︎ 26:51 Audience: Like in your sidewalk example, you would need to know that it's really concrete, and that you know the properties of concrete, and that you're not gonna fall through the sidewalk, and then you seem to have to already have some, because you already need knowledge to build upon.
▶︎ 27:08 That sounds right. Some sort of investigation or rationale or justification. So that is in fact where they're gonna go. The last part of the dialogue is gonna be that knowledge is true judgment plus a logos, translated as account. So also, it can be translated as justification or explanation or reason.
▶︎ 27:32 Audience: It almost feels a little experimental, maybe the logos is the endpoint of it, but that this stumbling that they do, and this trying of this, almost testing a hypothesis and another hypothesis.
▶︎ 27:45 I like that. And then the whole dialogue is an example of at least trying to give an account, and at least trying to reach knowledge about the very nature of knowledge. So, I am pretty sure that something like that is going on, some sort of self-exemplification of the problem at hand. So, they go off on this tangent now about false judgment.
▶︎ 28:12 There are several arguments that would seem to suggest that false judgment is impossible. Now, these are all bad arguments. They're all sophistical arguments, but the challenge is to explain exactly why they're sophistical and to break through them to understand the real nature of error. I'll go through them fairly quickly, but stop me if you want me to do them in greater detail.
▶︎ 28:38 The first apparent problem is that either you know something or you don't. It's a binary state. So what's going on in false judgment? You're not going to think that something you know is something you don't know because either you'd know it or you don't. If you know it, then you're not going to confuse it with something you don't know, and vice versa. If you don't know it, you're not going to confuse it with something you know. Terrible argument, but initially puzzling.
▶︎ 29:11 The second argument is put in terms of being, and here there's shades of Parmenides who said, "There can be no non-being. Non-being is unthinkable, incomprehensible." So you could try to describe false judgment as, well, it's when you judge something that doesn't exist. Your judgment is about non-being. It's about nothing. The problem is, how can you judge nothing? That sounds like not judging at all. Doesn't all judgment have to be about something, and therefore it's about being, and therefore it's true? By the way, there is a sequel to the Theaetetus that everybody's going to want to read called the Sophist, where they get into this question of non-being more deeply.
▶︎ 30:01 The third suggestion is, maybe what you're doing in the false judgment is you're taking two things that really exist, two beings, but you're swapping one for the other in your judgment. Let's say you're mistaking a cow for a horse. They're both real, but the problem is, isn't a judgment talking to yourself in a way, telling yourself something, and you never tell yourself, "A cow is a horse," right? Whoever says that? Who would think that? Or, "Justice is injustice." Nobody's ever going to think such a thing.
▶︎ 30:32 So what's going on here is that we're sort of being caught up in these sophistical arguments. At 191A, Socrates says, "If we find what we're after and become free men, then we'll turn around and talk about how these things happened to other people, having secured our own persons against ridicule. If we can't find any way of extricating ourselves, then I suppose we shall be laid low like seasick passengers and give ourselves into the hands of the argument and let it trample all over us and do what it likes with us." An interesting counterexample to what Theodorus said in the digression where he said, "Our arguments are our slaves. We can make them do whatever we want." Now Socrates is saying, "No, sometimes the logic of the argument steps on you and enslaves you." So what's going to get us out, maybe, of these problems is
▶︎ 31:33 The wax block model of memory. Let's say that in our souls, we have this chunk of wax. And when you perceive something or if you think something too, it can leave a mark in the wax like that. And that's what memory is. Of course he doesn't mean this literally, the only wax in your head is in your ear canal. But don't we still talk this way? We talk about, "It made a big impression on me," or somebody who's very impressionable, and it does seem that there must be something in our brains which is wax-like, that it can somehow receive the stamp of things.
▶︎ 32:41 Not the matter, because if you remember what the building looks like, that doesn't mean that a bunch of bricks got into your head, but the form of it. And this is why we talk about information. We're getting information from things which forms something in our neurons, our wax, whatever you want to talk about, whatever you want to call it, and leaves that mark, that impression within us. It's a useful model.
▶︎ 33:06 In the ancient world, there would be a couple of familiar models for this. One would be, if you look at ancient artworks, you'll sometimes see these ancient Greeks and Romans working on a laptop. And it's not really a laptop but it's a hinged wax tablet. And on each surface there would be a coating of wax, and papyrus and ink were these expensive things, but you would have a little stylus, you would mark in the wax your temporary notes, and then you could wipe it clean again, when you wanted a fresh surface.
▶︎ 33:45 Audience: So the ancient version of an Etch A Sketch?
▶︎ 33:49 Yeah.
▶︎ 33:49 Audience: Easier to use though.
▶︎ 33:51 Yeah. And another common thing would be sealing wax for a letter. And then you have a signet ring with your unique pattern that you can stamp into the wax to show that you're the one who sent it and that it hasn't been opened, so these would be familiar things. So far so good with this model of memory? Seems kind of plausible.
▶︎ 34:13 Audience: Is this particular metaphor of wax, do you know if it's been used before?
▶︎ 34:17 I don't know whether anyone before Plato introduced this. I'm not enough of a philologist to say. But certainly, Plato seems to develop it pretty far. There are several features of wax that seem to model features of memory. In some people they don't have much wax. They just can't remember that much. Others have incredible amounts. There are some people with hyper memories who can remember what they had for breakfast 14 years ago, no problem.
▶︎ 34:48 Sometimes the wax is too soft and then the impressions don't stay very long. Or sometimes it's very hard and it's very hard for something to make an impression, but when it does, it's there for life.
▶︎ 34:58 Audience: I also love when they talk about impurities in the wax.
▶︎ 35:01 Yes.
▶︎ 35:01 Audience: And how that prevents impressions, complete impressions.
▶︎ 35:04 Some people have dirty minds and they don't remember very well.
▶︎ 35:09 How is this going to help us address the question of false judgment? Using this sort of diagram, which by the way, I'm borrowing from Seth Benedetti who has a very interesting translation and commentary on the Theaetetus which is often quite intricate, but this is very straightforward. This kind of picture, this could represent a true judgment. Let's say you're seeing a triangle, you correctly fit it into the existing slot, and that's a correct judgment. Here, there's no judgment true or false. You just have a memory and you're not perceiving anything that you're fitting into that slot. No false judgment.
▶︎ 36:11 Here's a case where you're seeing a circle, but you're not making a mistake. You're not leaping to the conclusion that it's a triangle, that's why I don't have an arrow there. Again, no false judgment. Socrates goes through a long list of situations where false judgment is impossible and it's maybe deliberately abstruse and confusing. This is 192A through C. And Theaetetus very honestly says, "You're totally leaving me in the dust here. I have no idea what you're talking about."
▶︎ 36:42 But the basic point is not hard. When is false judgment possible? It could be that you've never seen a circle before and you say, "Oh, that's a triangle," and you actually make that judgment. There's a falsehood. What are some other possibilities? Maybe you do know what a circle is, and you know what a triangle is, and you look at a circle and say, "That's a triangle." Exactly, it's not an unfamiliar object, but somehow you put it into the wrong slot.
▶︎ 37:36 In this case, it seems silly, but maybe you have two friends. You see one at a distance and you get confused about which one it is, especially if they look like each other. He talks about one more scenario. You've got these two friends, Mr. Triangle and Mr. Circle, but they're at some distance and you get them mixed up. He says it's like putting your shoes on the wrong feet. You swap them.
▶︎ 38:08 What do all of these have in common? They're wrong. Yes. But they all also involve both perception and memory, and they're all cases of misidentifying what you're currently perceiving. And in this sense, it is possible not to know what you know, which sounded impossible according to the first sophistical argument. I know my friend Mr. Circle in the sense of know that means I'm familiar with him. I've had the impression of him. But I don't know him, meaning I don't recognize him correctly, and I think that somebody else is him and he's somebody else.
▶︎ 38:57 Audience: None of these require shortcomings of the wax, right?
▶︎ 39:05 It could be a difficult perceptual situation.
▶︎ 39:08 Audience: So you can have all these kinds of misjudgments without any of this impression issue with the wax?
▶︎ 39:17 I suppose so, yeah. Or maybe you do have defective wax in some way, and then you'd be more liable to this kind of thing. Likely.
▶︎ 39:23 Audience: Is it possible to make a false judgment when there's no impression? Like, if you are told, in this room there's a guy Tom and there's a guy Frank, and you walk in there and you have zero impression of either of these guys, and you say, "Tom, Frank," and you get it wrong, that still seems like a false judgment, right?
▶︎ 39:41 Yeah, good objection. That's not a mis... Well, it is a misidentification, but not fitting it into a previous memory. You have no previous memory. I guess, technically, you could have the memory of being told their names, which might count as an impression. I don't know. Yeah, that's an interesting one that hadn't occurred to me. Now, the problem that Socrates brings up is that sometimes we have false judgments that don't involve perception at all.
▶︎ 40:13 The example being, doing a little mental arithmetic, seven plus five is 11. No, probably that's a little too simple for anybody, but that's his example. With more complicated calculations in your head, you could easily make a mistake. Now, you know the numbers, but you pulled out the wrong one. The wax block model doesn't seem to allow for that very well.
▶︎ 40:44 Remember it can take impressions of thoughts and concepts as well as perceptions. So maybe this is your impression of the number 11, this is your impression of the number 12. How would you ever get them mixed up? There they are. They're both these marks in your wax block. There is nothing you're misidentifying in your perception. How could you ever be mistaken? And yet often you are.
▶︎ 41:07 So it seems that our model of memory here, even though it's so plausible and seems so useful, has to be inadequate. What more do we need to have in a model of memory to account for this kind of error where your, it's just happening in your mind? In other words, error has to be possible not only in thinking that something you perceive as something that you remember, but in the act of recollection itself, in the act of. You have to have a mind. What do you mean? Sometimes.
▶︎ 41:42 Yeah. Sometimes. Well, it isn't. This is happening not by misapprehending reality. It's happening in some other place. Yeah. Whatever that place is, mind, psyche, soul. Yeah, yeah. That's the argument. I see, yeah.
▶︎ 42:00 And the psyche has to have levels. It has to have depth. Here there isn't that much depth in the wax. I suppose you could have deeper imprints, but there have to be levels of memory that are difficult to access, and you have to sometimes struggle to reach into your memory and pull out the right piece of knowledge as it were. So that's what he's gonna try to model with his next model. And it has to be more dynamic, because your knowledge can elude you. It can slip away.
▶︎ 42:31 So with that, I think we've reached the conclusion of this part of the dialogue. If you'd like to add anything, please do.
▶︎ 42:41 Audience: One thing that's bothering me, and maybe it will come up in the final part, but it seems like they're assuming, or Socrates is assuming, that truth is a unified thing. So, I wonder if it's gonna arrive anywhere with that, or are we gonna have to go with him that truth is apparent?
▶︎ 43:06 Well, I'm sure I believe, being a fan of Socrates, that he would welcome your question. But I agree that he hasn't said much about it other than that in order to get truth, you have to get to being. But of course the meaning of being is a rather big question too.
▶︎ 43:23 One traditional understanding of truth is that it's a sort of correspondence. That it's a correspondence between your judgment and the way things are, the being of things. And what does that mean exactly? These are very different sorts of things. A mental event, and let's say a building made of bricks. How do they correspond? What's similar? They seem quite different. Or is it that you make a statement and not your mental state, but your statement itself, somehow a sentence or a proposition matches the way things are. Again, what does that mean?
▶︎ 44:00 Heidegger tries to say, "Well, a deeper concept of truth is the revelation, the showing of things." So only if showing happens through your assertion or your judgment is there truth. And he points to the Greek word for truth, aletheia, which literally means unconcealment or unblivian.
▶︎ 44:21 Audience: And is that the word that's used here?
▶︎ 44:24 Yes. That's what's translated. Aletheia. It's a very common everyday word, but interestingly, the Greek philosophers never, never point out that it means non-lethe, non-concealment. There's one passage in Plato in the Cratylus which is all about language and etymology where he talks about the etymology of aletheia, but Socrates is just having fun there. He makes up this phony etymology. He says it means thea ale, meaning divine wandering. And he's playing with Heraclitanism there saying, "See, Heraclitus got it all right. Everything is about flux." And he's just having some fun, but I think etymologically, philologically, it's pretty clear that it means non-concealment. And Heidegger, again, made a big deal out of this.
▶︎ 45:16 Do you think, now, none of you have cheated, none of you have cut to the chase. Do you think they're gonna answer this question of what knowledge is successfully? I think it's unlikely.
▶︎ 45:29 All right. Well, we will find out tomorrow, and again, as a general preview, they're going to be working with this idea that it's true judgment plus an account, an explanation. The difficulty, of course, will be, well, how do you give an account of an account? What counts as a genuine account? And there will be some very abstract arguments along those lines and we'll see whether any of them work out.