Theaetetus by Plato: “What Is Knowledge?”

hi everybody I'm Jack Tramiel raconteur I'm here with the discussion of the dialogue theaetetus by Plato it is a challenging very challenging dialogue centers around the question what is knowledge it's so challenging in fact that I wore my t-rex hits push-ups t-shirt because it felt like mental push-ups reading parts of this it's all round what is knowledge that that and the idea of being able to teach virtue are sort of two main ideas that run through so many of the Platonic dialogues a huge number of them it's very short you can see it's 90 pages so it's it's a sort of a one afternoon read summer so some of the dialogues are so short that there are one sitting reads I enjoyed it I was fascinated by it I'm gonna have to reread it I know at some point maybe next year maybe in two years I've read I think this is a 15th dialogue I've read and I've reread almost every single one that I've read in the past I enjoy going into those arguments and being challenged by them so of course Socrates is a major character we don't have any actual writing from Socrates we might have some quotes from Socrates not just in Plato but in Xenophon as well this is a middle or sort of late middle dialogue so we're farther away from maybe what Socrates was actually questioning people about what his actual words were those seem to be more the early dialogues this is very much more plato's so Plato is using Socrates as a character for many of his own his own Plato's own ideas now that there are as always Plato has a couple of really brilliant images throughout his dialogues the allegory of the cave is probably the most famous within this one there are two that stood out really really well one was the idea of what memory is and so there he has this idea that memory is like a giant piece of wax that's in your soul and he really means mind when he says that but throughout the Daigo dialogue it's the word soul and so you have this piece of wax and so when you learn something you go and make an imprint on the wax and it's there for you and if you have a good memory the wax keeps its shape so it keeps that imprint of knowledge you can remember you can recall it you can go back and look at it and it's a really beautiful image because he extends it and then says okay there are people who seem to learn things quickly but then almost immediately forget them so in their soul mind is this softer piece of wax so you can make the imprint on it but the wax is kind of gonna melt and reform and be reshaped and that imprint will be gone somebody who might be distracted well they don't just have wax that person has maybe some dirt or crud or rocks in the wax that make it harder to form it and and then what's there is a little bit distorted it's a little bit strange somebody who really struggles to learn something that wax is very hard and so it's possible to make imprints but you really have to spend a lot of time making the imprint and it was such a beautiful image of how different people learn and how what that would almost be like intra in terms of the time and effort spent to learn something and to remember something the other one he has that was really gorgeous is this idea of all of the knowledge imagine that every piece of knowledge we have is represented by a bird and so your memory is this humongous bird cage and you want to remember something so you reach in to go get that piece of knowledge you reaching to go get that bird now sometimes you get that bird other times you might be looking at it and you make because the argument that he brings up is the idea of simple mistakes so you mean to say 12 you know that the number that you've counted or that has been added or subtracted or whatever is 12 but you make a quick mistake you've just a very simple mental mistake and you say the number 11 well what's happened is the birds that look like 12 another that represent 12 an 11 are very similar to each other and so you reach in to get 12 and you accidentally grabbed you know the bird that represents 11 out of the cage and you it wasn't until you brought it out and saw it oh I didn't make a mistake so he has these two just really beautiful images wrapped up into this as I said highly highly complex dialogue this would not be the dialogue I would ever recommend to anyone as your first like platonic dialogue and I do recommend Plato so those are the two really gorgeous images again the theme is what is knowledge so we have a quick jump out with the idea that knowledge is perception and that there might be some issues with that but the reference of perception comes from a pre-socratic Sophists protagonist and so Protagoras made a statement man is the measure of all things and so if you can measure something you perceive it you have knowledge of it and Socrates points out some issues about like what if you have a perception I have a reception of the same thing but we have different perceptions can we both have knowledge of it like clearly one of us would need to be wrong there is the idea of Heraclitus who was almost a hundred years earlier jumps in Heraclitus famously had argued he was more of a philosopher than Sophists had argued no no man can walk through the same river twice because you know you you cross a stream while the water that was flowing through it has passed through so it's different water it's a different stream you know you're different things have changed things have happened to you so you're not the same person when you cross to this dream so you know everything is constantly in flux that was famously used as an argument in a I believe it was an Athenian Court where someone who'd incured a bunch of debts said oh I can't be responsible to pay those debts I now I'm not the same person as the person who incurred all of those debts like I've changed you know everything has changed like I'm not that same person Heraclitus would tell you oh so you can see some of the issues that Sophists created in in Athens so the first argument is all around perception how accurate our perceptions it's very long it's very sophisticated so Plato's sort of in this one connects the dots for us we were taken through every level of the argument we're given a piece we examine it we move on to the next part of the argument you know this is our perception of something a perception of the thing over somewhere else is it the perception that's in our mind is that the perception that's somewhere in between us this idea of becoming and if it's becoming is it then you know where is this knowledge is the knowledge outside of the mind is it inside the mind is between and so he kind of just slowly picks apart each layer of the argument and it's all spelled out for us it's by far the longest section of the book and it's all Socrates with this student this like adolescent student theaetetus then we get a quick interlude where Theodorus the teacher weighs in often Socrates would like to question the teacher the teachers don't want to be questioned and then once their student can't really you know out argue Socrates the teacher weighs in and then usually is is back off the stage pretty quickly and realizes like I don't I don't want to be involved in this and that happens with Theodorus very quickly then we get the second idea which is the idea of true judgment okay so you know if people could have misperceptions then the knowledge is when you both perceive it and now you can give a true judgment and it seems like that works like Socrates goes through and he'll often provide a rationale and that's it that's what I wanted to say yes you've got it I'm sorry geez yeah but there's one problem and it's just like you can tell it's kind of infuriating for the characters like you you rescued these the argument no no you just let this to another trap and so he goes well what about in a court so like what if a jury that doesn't have knowledge of anything is persuaded to correct and true judgment and therefore knowledge by the lawyer but but it's all just persuasion and being convinced it's not any evidence there's no they haven't learned anything they have no knowledge of it they just were convinced to make one judgment instead of another that judgment happens to be correct but they don't haven't learned anything would we say that they have knowledge even though they made true judgment and fuses like oh yeah okay hold on what if it's true judgment with an account so I get the true judgment I perceive it I give the true judgment and I can give an account I can explain why it's correct and Socrates like yeah yeah that's great like I've heard that to talk about those like goes oh but wait and so in that first layer we had this really long sophisticated argument we sort of every stone was over turned for us in the argument in the second one it's much shorter it's just as sophisticated but Plato does not take us through every layer of it he's sort of asking us to participate in the argument now he's not asking us to just read and perceive the argument he's asking us to participate in the argument we have to fill in a few blanks there now in this third and final portion we're going to see that Socrates ends up disabusing theaetetus of the idea the true judgment with an account is what knowledge is because he argues that the account gets made up of constituent parts and if you're we're talking about the parts you're not talking about the whole and and so it's it's a little bit of a tedious argument I'm not sure that it entirely works but in the end we're sort of left with this aspect of we haven't defined what knowledge as Plato has not told us what knowledge is Socrates has not told us what knowledge is all we have are some examples of what knowledge is not and Socrates Plato leaves us with Socrates saying oh we haven't learned it but we'll be better equipped for the next argument around knowledge that will have come back and that's where that's where the extra challenge comes in is Plato essentially challenges us and says ok what do you think knowledge is I've I've shown you some arguments around how you could talk about this I've shown you that I don't have an answer for this what are your answers and so if you engage in it at that level it becomes very very challenging very strong and then we're left with this almost like tragic irony where having talked about people being persuaded to true judgment Socrates says oh I've got to head off I've got to go answer some charge that Meletis has tossed against me in the court and that ultimately is going to be the trial at which Socrates will be condemned and so that's a very intentional aspect by Plato but it was a good dialogue it was very complex like he said the images around the wax and the image around the birds in the cage I thought those were beautiful ways to think around memory there are there examples that I have tried to put into the wax of my memory and I hope they'll stay there so this is not the dialogue I would recommend you start with the one I would actually recommend this Hippias minor it's a fairly short dialogue and it revolves around the idea of like Socrates argues the best wrestler is the one who loses because only the best wrestler is capable of sandbagging and intentionally losing or the fastest runner is the only one who can intentionally slow down and lose the race the slower runner can't actually do that and so it's it's a short dialogue it's very very funny he has these contrarian takes these hot takes that I think are quite funny Protagoras who hovers over the Proceedings of the first part of this Socrates at one point says why do you say man is the measure of all things why not pig or horses if man is the measure we each make our own decisions why would anybody have a teacher and why would anybody pay for a teacher how ridiculous is that protag respond the dialogue Pythagoras which might be my favorite dialogue another individual who is deeply concerned with the idea of ethics and using the idea of teaching ethics or teaching works you would be Plutarch who in Plutarch's lives doesn't just give biographies he then gives these contrasts where he takes two characters and says here's someone here's someone else here's what we should learn from both of their lives when we contrast them together in deep deep contrast to Plato's dialogues would be something like the Analects of Confucius where we're really given a set of sayings we don't have this for Socrates we do have it for Confucius and it gives us kind of a different feel a different take in my mind and then finally if you're looking for like novels that delve into sort of some of these ideas from you platonic ideas or forms or just philosophy in general I think one of the best from the 20th century would be Iris Murdoch her she has a couple of books that are really dealing with that the sea the sea is one of the stronger ones so that was Plato's theaetetus again read Plato eventually read the theaetetus but read something else first Hippias Minor even the the last days of Socrates are sort of the apology Crito and fayeed Oh would I'd recommend but stay safe everybody have a great week I'll be back tomorrow see

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Length: 13min 34sec (814 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 06 2020