The Epistemology of Plato: The Theaetetus and Knowledge

hey guys what's up this is Chad Haig from southern India I wanted to resume the series of videos on the dialogues of Plato now this was one of the first things that I started the new channel with when I brought it back last April and I do want to visit every one of the Platonic dialogues over the course of time but I want to start with what I consider to be the best one so obviously I did the krita lists about a month ago great dialogue on language and I want to do the theta truce today the great epistemological dialogue by Plato Plato's theory of knowledge well sort of in that there's not so much one consistent line of thought that's developed in this dialogue so much as there's a number of really fascinating attempts at a theory of knowledge and it's really up to the reader to decide which one of those is the most convincing so in this video I'm just going to give you a general overview of some of the different pieces that are put forth by Plato on the question of how do we know things basically so Plato's Fayette a truce is one of the most fascinating pieces of epistemology really within the history of philosophy and it's definitely one of the greater works that Plato ever did it's a very long dialogue about 75 pages within the big book of collected dialogues about a hundred pages on Kindle so it's a really big a really big work and well worth reading on your own but I want to talk in this video about the sort of context of the debate and that is that it's kind of a dialogue read by a servant to these figures Euclid trips I on and at the beginning Socrates asks his friend Theodore's if he knows of any rising geometrician Zoar philosophers in the area so in response Theodore's presents him with a young man in theaters web nearby as a young geometry gist mantis is quite knowledgeable on a certain field of knowledge which is of course the OP three Ori have a mathematical knowledge that the Greeks were really getting interested in by developing like axiomatic geometry rather than being content with the type of measurement of the earth geometry that you had in ancient Egypt so the ancient Egyptians did geometry in the literal sense of measuring land for farming in the in the Nile Delta integrates were interested in turning that into an abstract axiomatic system that did not necessarily concern the earth but we might say a concern knowledge itself and the irony about this is a guy who's very knowledgeable on you know a certain field of knowledge has trouble defining what knowledge itself is okay so Socrates asks the young geometry whether knowledge can be defined be the same thing as maybe wisdom okay because he had suggested that wise men or wise in the subject which they know but subordinating wisdom to knowledge leaves unresolved what the definition of knowledge is and the young geometry responds to this request for the general definition of knowledge by making a very common error that you find a Platonic dialogues in that he finds it satisfactory to instead list out all the particulars ranch's of science which he knows of so he says hmm if we're just defined knowledge well there's the knowledge of geometry okay and then there's also the knowledge of the cobbler and the knowledge of the other craftsmen okay if we're using knowledge in this kind of broad sense that both means like a type of theoretical scientific or practical what in ancient Greek would be called tensioning or what we would call art and Socrates of course response that he'd asked for one simple thing which is the essence of knowledge but back many things and they're actually rather diverse okay and that is the result of asking people to use language in ways that they're not accustomed to as Vicki's language say about the Socratic method okay so the question what is knowledge is something which Socrates points out that if someone were asked what is clay you could answer with a list of all the different kinds of clay you say well there's one type of clay for Potter's there's one for oven makers so there's another one for brick makers but that would kind of be ridiculous because it would assume that adding an extra qualification would make the phrase intrinsically clear without providing a definition for the main term so saying clay for making ovens would be unclear if you left unresolved what clay is okay so the young geometry actually confuses several different questions the question what is the nature of knowledge in the abstract is quite simply not the same question as what are the subjects or which ones are they that count as knowledge little in the question how many arts and sciences count as legitimate examples of it you can't paradoxically enough get the essence inductively by building up I'm assuming the paradox is that you can't inductively build up the abstract essence with a huge list of examples since you have to already have it in order to even begin the process of listing them out okay so Plato therefore is going to critique what I call linguist to vacation okay the ancient Greek notion that you also find in Aristotle that essence or nature is not primarily made up out of words it's not that essence and definition are quite the same thing despite the fact that for most people those are synonyms and Plato asks the serious question how can a man understand the name of something if he doesn't know the nature of it grasping the nature is some prerequisite in other words for understanding the name we have to have a type of acquaintance with the essence as a foundation upon which higher-order linguistic formulations must depend in order to be intelligible in other words you can only build up these larger linguistic messages such as the clay for brick making if you already have an acquaintance with the essence of clay as a type of foundation for that systematic knowledge built on top of it the difficulty therefore is we must already know what knowledge is if we're to start listing the knowledge of geometry along with the knowledge of blacksmithing and the knowledge of shipbuilding in other words we not only have to have a type of acquaintance with this concrete thing like clay which you could argue could be gained from your you know empirical experience but we also kind of have to have an acquaintance with the abstract essence of knowledge which is much more tricky in its origin therefore rather than diversify the different kinds of knowledge --is that are available you have to find the common root under which any kind of knowledge is denominated therefore he finally lands on a definition of knowledge by supplementing this unclear term knowledge with a more clear predicate this is something you find in explanations of fundamental ontology because the word being is inherently ambiguous you will supplement an unclear word like ontology by equating it with a more familiar term so for Deleuze you have the ontology of difference indifference and repetition because everybody has some understanding of what differences even though an understanding of being is going to be vague even for the people who've put a lot of thought into it okay you find the same method recurring in Dziedzic saying its incompleteness that's what being is or Budd you would set theoretical mathematics that that's what being is well for me it's limitation although that might even be more unclear than being so anyway what what they do in this dialogue is they say so knowledge is unclear but the word perception is clear so we kind of pair the two together in which perception will give you a clearer idea of what knowledge is okay but of course Protagoras a great pre-socratic philosopher complicates that in that he had the doctrine that man is measure of all things since things will appear one way to you but they'll appear another way to me and in fact this is easily confirmed the same wind might be blowing on one day that feels cold to you but it doesn't feel cold to me so if man is the measurable things the difference in perception is due to one man actually being cold and the other not being cold Heraclitus also disrupts the formula showing that it is intrinsically wrong according to him to ask whether the wind in itself is absolutely anything it's wrong to ask whether the wind is absolutely cold or whether it's not absolutely cold because there is no absolute all is relative according to Heraclitus therefore there really is no being so much as there's a flux of the coming because motion is the most fundamental characteristic of all that there is therefore all the great pre-socratics except of course Parmenides who had the formula it is really were basically in agreement about emphasizing motion over the type of stability which is implied in being but if we extend this emphasis on motion to perception then color is not so much in the eye as it arises from the eye meeting the appropriate motion which passes between active and passive elements of perception this is the outcome that Plato has to reach by following through with this formula of knowledge is perception in light of the pre-socratic emphasis on motion of course perception is going to fail and proof this is in more contemporary examples the is that a duck or is that a rabbit image that I have on the screen but in Plato's era this emphasis on motion in perception inevitably forces the young geometry to admit that the thing never even appears exactly the same to the same subject since the subject himself is never exactly the same from one moment to the next perception therefore is categorically devalued as unstable and epistemological a devalue it is unreliable still if we accept the perception reveals the flux and motion which dissolves particulars from a state of being to one of becoming we're still forced to extend this to aggregates so not only particulars or dissolved in this transition from being to becoming but you lose universals as well for example the abstract concept of man the abstract universal stone the names of animals themselves classes those are all as universals also just dissolved from a state of being into a state of becoming so then what is there left in this formula of perception is knowledge that still can be dignified with the term of knowledge with kind of lost knowledge in the process okay if perception really is the best definition of knowledge then you'll have to be forced to include hallucinations and dreams as legitimate examples of knowledge in a certain sense because they're actually examples of perception and yet logically speaking they're by definition false so you've run yourself into a number of contradictions here so Socrates and the young geometry importantly actually prefigured Descartes by finding themselves logically unable to prove that they're not dreaming or hallucinating at the very moment that they find themselves having to defend the thesis that knowledge is perception therefore memory is also going to complicate this Socrates asks the perfectly legitimate question so we have the formula that man is the measure of all things and figures like Protagoras but why do we have to limit it to man what about a dog-faced baboon since they also have perception and all of the animals that are sentient really could be included in that as well and yet Socrates also notes the irony that theaetetus is a rising geometry and yet despite the fact that he's been trained in the science of geometry whose purpose is to replace empirical probability with a type of purified certainty from the start he has only supplied probabilities and yet there's another problem with the formula that perception has the equal knowledge if you hear a language for example that you don't understand spoken on the street so for example where I live here in India you might occasionally hear Tamil spocky down the street because I live on the border of Tamil Nadu and Kerala if we equate perception with knowledge you'd have to either say that you hear the language but you don't know the language which is what we would normally say or we have to say that you don't hear it at all because hearing and knowing are the same thing okay so memory is also going to be a problem and let me just make sure this memories also problem because one can still know what one no longer literally sees so you might know that Donald Trump was elected president on November something of 2016 because you remember it but you don't literally see it right now so how can you know things which you remember and still dignify them as being true okay so therefore the example of another great pre-socratic philosopher bailey's is going to show that perception is actually a fairly poor formula for knowledge precisely in the case of philosophers Bailey's was among the earliest of all Greek philosophers of course yet he's most well known for falling into a well while searching after the abstract essence of man he was busy in inquiring what belongs to such a nature in general and he was so busy with the abstract that he didn't notice a hole right in front of his feet and he fell into it and was laughed at everybody around him and yet he's not an exception to the way that philosophers are he's actually the norm for philosophers because Socrates says the Flusser is often derided by the vulgar people because he's ignorant of what is right before him and he's always at a loss instead of focusing on universals such as justice instead of focusing on what's before him he thinks about universals like justice and injustice happiness in general misery in general and the difference between one thing in all things is which is as general as you get type of a priori concept of difference right so the formula in knowledge equals percentage and is ironically enough the least fitting precisely for the philosopher still the notion of perception is complicated by the senses do we really perceive colors with the eyes or do we perceive colors through the eyes if we say through rather than width we imply that the senses are not to any type of an artistic scattered forces but a rather instruments United in the service of the mind and if they're United in the service of the mind as this thing with one nature then the formula of emphasising motion flux and becoming stripes break down and in fact if we grant that the senses perceive different types of sense data in other words the eye perceives colors the nose perceives smells the ear perceives sounds then we have also a type of need to determine which one of the senses is it that perceives the universal notion such as being and non-being universal notions like likeness and unlike nurse or sameness and difference or unity and number but then again asking which organ sees even numbers and odd numbers and other arithmetic or conceptions also arises these are however not seen by any one organ of the mind in that they're not sense that I've seen by the eye or heard by the ear or whatever you rather just perceived by the mind itself likewise you have to divide seeing into two different classes even for the same object a division will exist the mind for example will feel the softness of an object through the instrumental sense of touch but it'll see the essence of the thing through the mind itself knowledge therefore only lies in one okay it's not in the sensation of sense contents knowledge is rather in the contemplation of things by the mind so the formula perception equals knowledge is therefore thoroughly misleading with regard to this crucial distinction which is left unconsidered in the process therefore we have to change our definition of knowledge what if it's not so much perception as now it is opinion again so having abandoned perception as the definition of knowledge they instead turn to opinion as something more promising now opinions can be either true or false even with regard to objects which really exist so in certain sense to place an existent object in the wrong place if you place it in the in the place where another is supposed to go let's just say you see Plato okay and you mistake him for Aristotle or vice first as the first time I learned about Plato's cave in middle school my teacher of eighth grade history told us about Aristotle's cave okay so in this case both of those guys in a certain sense are real you're not talking about a fictitious entity like I don't know like Superman or Batman okay you have in a certain sense a true object but you could still have a false opinion about them by by placing one in the space of the other and yet confusing empirical objects for one another and therefore having a wrong opinion about them is not the same kind of error as mistaking universal abstract notions for one another that's kind of a different thing even in a dream for example did you ever say that an odd number was even even in a dream would you be able to mistake number three for an even number or would you be able to mistake the Nobel for the base or the unjust for the chest and to explain this he brings up the myth of the wax in the mind something which actually prefigures the example in Aristotle's day anima of wax and a gold ring and for Plato he's interested in how this relates to the concept of memory what he calls the mother of the muses in that when you have memory there's a type of imprint left in a piece of wax in the mind such that when we wish to recall an object that was seen sometime before in the past we can retrieve it from the imprint that was left memory lasts precisely as long as that image does okay so it has a type of shelf-life when it fades out of the wax we've forgotten in him and therefore truth might be thought of as this type of matching up between the wax imprint and the recognized object if I see an old acquaintance from 10 years ago on the street and I still have the imprint and the wax in the mind I can match the two up okay but if I miss recognize person I think that my 8th grade history teacher is actually my 8th grade math teacher or something like that I might fail to match a memory in the piece of wax with the real object that is out there and he says maybe that what false opinion is and therefore the piece of wax might be fundamental to understanding what knowledge as opinion is okay ideally therefore having a good and deep pluck wax in your mind will help you have a better memory which will in turn lead to true opinion which will in turn lead to true knowledge some men actually have better wax than others we can admit that some people have better memories than others and in conclusion of that some people have better access to knowledge than others okay and yet this leads us back to seeking unity between perception and thought we've found ourselves back with the same problem again yet what about objects only known in thoughts such as eleven can eleven be mistaken for twelve through the kind of misrecognition of an object with with its wax impression the numbers need no accord with the objects since they can be contemplated pearly within the realm of wax itself which a priori rules out error if we follow this formula so this is getting complicated you don't recognize the number eleven when you see it on the street because there is no number eleven walking around on the street and yet you still have to access it within the wax in this case wax is not being accorded with the thing out there it's kind of left to itself and yet you still have the possibility of error even without having to match it up with something on the outside okay therefore he says maybe the mind is not so much a piece of wax with imprints that have to be matched up with stuff out there on the outside maybe the mind as still something filled with objects it's filled with a different kind of object what if the mind is filled with birds and is therefore more like an aviary okay one could accidentally grab eight will fit is flying around your mind when you meant to grab an eleven okay one therefore can be deceived even within one's own mind because the mind is filled with thoughts or one might say it's filled with ideas that are flying around but it's complicated because some of them are true and some of them are not there for the young geometry responds that it is because not only forms of knowledge are flying in the mind but forms of ignorance are flying around there as well that you could grab a mistake by accident therefore knowledge and ignorance or not so much failures to accord the piece of wax with the real thing in other words they're not inherently relational so much as he says maybe knowledge and ignorance are substantive things in themselves you have knowledge as a type of idea in itself flying around your mind which you can grab successfully and have knowledge and ignorance or error is also a type of substantial thing in itself flying around your mind which can grab on accident therefore true opinion might be the achievement of grabbing knowledge but you still need to add something subjective to it to have a true opinion and he calls that knowledge so um simile he calls that reason reason + knowledge equals true opinion and the privation of reason leads to an opinion that is not knowledge okay so an example of this is the raw letters of the alphabet don't have a meaning even though they can be grasped you can have in language a set of random letters but you don't have a meaningful message there although you can still grab the individual letters like if you have you know a set of what is that called alphabet soup you know in your bowl okay adding reason which he calls explanation to that raw stuff is a condition for you to have knowledge so in conclusion perhaps above all it's the following Socrates says that enumerated the particular features of phytate juice might be empirically correct we could say for example he has a notes he's got two eyes he's got a mouth he's got two legs then again so does every other man in Athens so you haven't really grasped fayette a truce by listing out those Socrates says what if the thing that enables him to record that will enable him to recognize him when he sees him tomorrow is the impression and the memory of his snub-nosed the distinctive feature they mentioned at the beginning which he has that sets him apart from all the other men so maybe knowledge is the registration of difference Socrates finishes by leaving for the porch if King are gone where he must meet mellitus any asks their doors do you like to meet again and continue this winding path of false starts so let me check let me check the chat real quick so looks like there are no comments but everybody thank you for watching and look forward to continuing the series

Channel: Chad A. Haag Peak Oil Philosophy

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Keywords: plato, theaetetus, chad haag, chad african philosophy, chadafrican, #hangoutsonair, Hangouts On Air, #hoa

Id: e78kN_jpdY4

Length: 27min 36sec (1656 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 04 2019