Catherine Rowett Knowledge and Truth in Plato

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 03/07/2018, SPi
Knowledge and Truth in Plato

Knowledge and
Truth in Plato
Stepping Past the Shadow
of Socrates
Catherine Rowett
1
3
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Preface
I. About the Reader’s Views on Plato

Almost everyone—among those who are likely to read this book, at least—has a view
on what Plato was trying to do, and what Platonism is. Many also think that Plato was
badly wrong about a great many things.
I will have achieved what I hope to achieve in this book if, after reading it, almost
everyone has changed their mind, either wholly or partly, about what Plato was
trying to do and what Platonism is, and I especially hope that, after reading it, those
who used to think that what Plato was doing was wrongheaded have begun to think
afresh. Perhaps there are some readers from whose eyes scales will fall. That would
be good, if so.
If not, then I hope that will be because all these truths were already out there, and
evident, and not everyone needed to rethink it. Perhaps some will need more time and
more discussion. The present volume examines a very small part of the whole story.
II. What I Am Trying to Do in This Book

In this volume I try to reconsider, using Plato as a guide, some major and controversial
issues in epistemology and philosophy of language. These have to do, first, with what I
shall call ‘conceptual competence’—particularly with the issue of what kind of know-
ledge is involved in grasping a concept, such as when we know what a game is or what
justice is. Is this a kind of knowing how? Is it knowledge of some fact or proposition, or
of a definition, or necessary and sufficient conditions for applying a term, or a rule of
conduct for applying a term? Is it like knowing an object? I shall argue that it is none of
the above, but that it is something else, more primitive and fundamental, that under-
pins the ability to do those things—and that those abilities, some or all of them in each
case, are characteristic of someone who knows, but not necessary or sufficient for some-
one to be a knower.
Second, I shall be concerned with the notion of ‘truth’. I shall argue that the range of
things that can be true is more extensive than has typically been allowed in recent ana-
lytic philosophy, and that there is a connection between truth and a certain sort of
‘being’ that Plato attributes to the Forms. We shall consider what kind of being this is,
and why it is still interesting. I aim to show that it occupies an irreducible place in
Plato’s understanding of conceptual knowledge and meaning, and that it is worth
recovering for our own use.
These are contributions to questions in contemporary philosophy, which also con-
tribute to contemporary debates about how to read Plato. Using Plato’s leads, I shall be
vi Preface
putting forward proposals that I consider to be serious contenders for solving or clari-
fying these questions about knowledge, conceptual competence, and truth; but the
proposals are also intended to be serious contenders for clarifying what Plato himself
was talking about, and I aim to improve our understanding of what he meant when he
referred to ‘knowledge’ (episteme), and when he talked about ‘truth’ (aletheia) and
‘being’ (ousia and to on).
Hence the main chapters of this book defend a novel reading of large parts of Plato’s
corpus. This will naturally be of interest to those who already believe that Plato’s views
are important. But I trust that it will be of interest also to some who may currently
believe that there is nothing of any interest in what Plato had to say about Forms, or
about truth, or about definitions and essences, or about science and what kind of thing
we can know. My reading is designed to undermine many of the objections to Platonism
that are typically bandied about, which are often directed against some caricature of
Plato’s epistemology and metaphysics. To show that such objections typically miss
Plato’s point, and thereby miss a range of promising answers to current topics of enquiry,
I have included substantial chapters that explore key texts from some of the most fam-
ous dialogues, reinterpreting them to show that Plato probably means something quite
different from what he has standardly been taken to mean. There is also more of this
work to come, on texts not included in this book, but here we make a start towards
developing these claims, defending them with close attention to some prominent texts.
My aim is to show that we should not try to reduce conceptual knowledge to some
other kind of knowledge, as though the list of basic kinds of knowledge were complete
at ‘know-how’, ‘acquaintance’, and ‘propositional’. Even less should we try to reduce one
or more of those three to one among them that is supposedly more fundamental. I shall
argue that there is a fundamental difference between knowledge of types and know-
ledge of tokens, and that all the kinds of knowledge that consist in seeing tokens as fall-
ing under types are parasitic on a more fundamental kind of knowledge—grasping the
type in question—which is not reducible to anything else, because all our knowledge of
facts, propositions, actions, and things presuppose a prior grasp of types. Whenever we
see some item as belonging to a class or deserving a certain description, we call upon a
repertoire of conceptual knowledge which—as I shall argue—cannot be reduced to any
finite set of propositions and is often not even expressible in propositional form; nor is it
reducible to any finite rule for how to continue a certain practice consistently (since the
practice may be creative, inconsistent, impromptu, and innovative).
Any agent capable of using language or classifying and reading the world draws upon
a repertoire of available descriptors (maybe linguistic, maybe practical/pragmatic)
whose meaning and relevance to the task at hand the agent grasps, sometimes in a
wholly inarticulate way. This repertoire enables conceptually equipped agents to see
things as instantiating types or kinds,1 and to extend the concepts indefinitely, to
1
Among conceptually equipped agents I include all animals that see the world in terms of kinds rele-
vant to their tasks and can engage with their environment on that basis.
Preface vii
embrace and redescribe new examples in an intelligent and creative way, rather than
mechanically. Extensions and innovations are clearly not pre-programmed, since they
can be controversial, a subject of debate and uncertainty, and innovations that were
once unacceptable can become accepted.
Obviously we must possess a certain idea before we can innovate with it. But what is
that knowledge, such that someone who possesses it can recognize familiar cases,
handle unforeseen possibilities unfazed, apply the descriptor intelligently beyond its
normal application and in metaphorical or strangely reconfigured circumstances, and
reject it in other cases that are too alien? How is it that on the basis of our idea of justice,
which we may never have seen properly instantiated anywhere, we can discern justice
and injustice in situations never before envisaged, and discuss cases that might be
unclear, ruling that they are or are not examples of justice, or that they are marginal or
irrelevant to judgements of that kind? For an adequate account of this kind of know-
ledge, Plato’s model seems to me to be far superior to any propositional or definitional
or rule-based models. Plato, I shall suggest, models this knowledge as a quasi-visual
grasp of ‘justice itself ’. A key theme of this book is what Plato has to say about the
method by which we learn (or re-acquire) those ideas, and become philosophically
aware of them: namely, as I shall argue, that we acquire this knowledge by a kind of
analogical or pictorial reasoning, based on a very small sample—even just one example
which could in fact be a bad or negative example (as e.g. we may come to see what
justice is from encountering a peculiarly telling case of injustice). He correctly identi-
fies, I suggest, a kind of picturing process that enables a conceptually competent
thinker to grasp an abstract idea of great complexity and subtlety, by abstracting (or
ascending) from small and unrepresentative samples. The process is not induction, or
empirical generalization, since it can be done from one encounter alone, or from
untypical ones, or even from the total absence of any instance. It is also possible to gen-
erate an understanding (as we shall see) by constructing an imaginary instance, unlike
any known in real life.
To get hold of the idea of justice, we do not need to have encountered any sound or
exemplary cases of justice; nor do we get the idea by habit or practice, or by learning
from role models; but it is to our existing idea of justice that we turn to see what would
be the just thing to do in situations not specified in advance. This grasp of the concept
(our idea of what justice is) provides a more accurate and authoritative basis for judge-
ment than common practices that are considered just. The latter will always fall short
for various reasons, and our ability to pass judgement on those practices reveals that
we have a more authoritative grasp of the notion in ourselves: so we can criticize our-
selves and others for not doing in practice what we know in theory; and we can criticize
ourselves and others for being unable to explain or define something that we know and
can correctly deploy in practice. These discrepancies (a) between our intellectual grasp
of things like justice, honesty, etc., and our attempts to be just or honest in real life, or
(b) between our ability to act justly/honestly and our ability to explain what justice or
honesty is in words—these show that we find ourselves able to correct both our actions
viii Preface
and our words by reference to something else—our knowledge of what justice and
honesty are—which, I argue, is epistemically more basic than the practices, and gener-
ally inadequately enacted in practice and inadequately expressed, or even inexpress-
ible, in words. On the basis of this fundamental knowledge of ‘what it is’ about the
relevant concepts, we can also recognize which instances are truly exemplary and
reject those that are not. Such corrective knowledge is the basis of all social, moral,
political, and artistic criticism and progress. Knowledge of facts is as nothing in com-
parison with this, when it comes to its importance for human life. It is this knowledge,
I suggest, that makes facts possible.
Thinking of this knowledge as quasi-pictorial helps us to understand how it can be
dense with meaning, yielding unlimited answers to an infinite range of unforeseen
questions. It is rather like consulting a map or drawing, in terms of the density of
its information, as contrasted with written directions that tell you just one or two
ways to go.
III. How to Read This Book

This book is addressed to two audiences. On the one hand, it is for those philosophers
who want to know what I am saying about the missing notion of conceptual know-
ledge, and about the role of ‘picturing’ as a means of capturing what kind of knowledge
that is. For them too, I want to explain in fairly straightforward terms how Plato
emerges as a ‘good guy’ in his creative work on these things. On the other hand, it is
also for those who want to see, in much more exegetical detail, exactly how that answer
can be seen to emerge, and how richly it emerges, from Plato’s texts. For these readers
there are substantial discussions of Plato’s texts, and some dialectical engagement with
various earlier treatments of those texts that dominate existing readings.
To meet the needs of both audiences, I have structured the book in a somewhat
unusual way. I hope that many readers will want to think deeply about both parts of my
project: that even those whose primary interest is in some contemporary debate about
conceptual knowledge will also want to understand Plato’s importance in that field
and the dazzling splendour of his treatment of it. But it should also be possible to read
this book (a) just for its new readings of certain well-trodden works of Plato (without
asking whether the problem that he is solving is one that modern epistemology and
philosophy of language need to address) or (b) just for its contribution to issues about
knowledge and truth (without much concern for whether Plato was really saying all
that). To enable both ways of reading the book, I have tried to signpost it so that readers
can find the parts that are most relevant to their own concerns. First, the two chapters
in Part I, one on knowledge and one on truth, explain my overall thesis, and situate it in
relation to past work on Plato, and current issues in the relevant philosophical
domains. This Part of the book offers some new ideas, but it is not designed to engage
thoroughly with the immense current literature in either of those fields. After that,
Parts II–IV explore Plato’s work in the Meno, Republic, and Theaetetus respectively.
Preface ix
I begin each part with an ‘Introduction and Summary’, which sets out my basic claims
with respect to the dialogue under discussion, and evaluates their significance for the
overall thesis of the book. These are partly for hasty readers with no time for wading
through the exegetical material, or for non-specialist readers who are not concerned
with the detailed exegesis. Such readers can settle for reading the first chapter in each
Part of the book. But those chapters are also designed as orientation for the specialist
reader, setting the agenda and explaining the significance of each move, before
embarking on the longer chapters in which the exegetical proofs are done. The exeget-
ical chapters which comprise the rest of each Part of the book attempt to show how one
can read the text with those results, and engage in varying levels of nitty-gritty detail
with both the Greek text and with a selection of the work of other scholars, classic or
recent, who have offered rival views.
Those seven exegetical chapters (Chapters 4–5, 7–8, and 10–12) are internally sign-
posted with headings, which summarize the progress of the argument. This means that
by reading just the headings, one gets a kind of précis or list of premises and conclu-
sions. The headings are also designed to enable someone who is not reading the book
from cover to cover, but looking for its argument on some particular passage or its
solution to some tricky dilemma, to locate the argument and easily identify what my
view on the issue is. The index locorum can also assist with this. Wherever possible, my
proposed answer is stated in the heading.
The book concludes with a chapter that is neither exegetical nor evaluative, but more
an outline promise of things to come, since there are many further texts that would
be relevant.
IV. Numbering System for Quoted Texts

I discuss certain passages of text in some detail in the main exegetical chapters of
the book, and occasionally in the ‘Introduction and Summary’ chapters for the main
parts of the book. As well as referencing each excerpt in the standard way, I have also
numbered these texts consecutively, in the order in which I present them within the
chapter, preceded by the chapter number. For instance, Text 4.3 is the third text quoted
in Chapter 4. I then cross-refer to those excerpts by their numbers. All translations
are my own.
Contents
Acknowledgements xix
Part I. Knowledge, Truth, and Belief

1. Knowledge, Conceptual Knowledge, and the Iconic Route
to Grasping an Idea 3
I. In Which We Consider Whether ‘Knowledge’ Is an Important Topic
in Plato’s Work 3
I.i That there is an irreducible form of knowledge that has to do with
grasping concepts and types or forms; I.ii That Lyons’s ‘structural
semantics’ approach to understanding Plato’s term episteme needs to be
superseded; I.iii Whether ‘knowledge’ is a useful translation for Plato’s
knowledge words; I.iv That knowledge is not a species of (propositional)
belief, and that Plato does not mean ‘belief ’ when he speaks of doxa
II. In Which We Classify Twentieth-Century Interpretations of Plato’s
Epistemology Into Roughly Three Distinct Views, and I Place My View
in This Taxonomy (or Outside It) 11
II.i That there are two classic ways of understanding the relation between
Plato’s Middle and Later dialogues, one unitarian and one developmental,
and a third way that is also unitarian; II.ii Some further options; II.iii That
my interpretation is a variant of the first type; II.iv That the contrast
between episteme and doxa is the contrast between the grasp of types
or concepts and the recognition of tokens or instances
III. In Which We Consider Whether it Is a Good Idea to Look for a Definition,
and, If So, Why 23
III.i That definition can serve three different roles in philosophical work, only
one of which is part of a philosophical method; III.ii That failing to find a
definition can be a fruitful part of a philosophical investigation, when the
author’s aim is to problematize faulty assumptions or diagnose confusion;
III.iii That the definition does not need to be in terms understood by the
interlocutor, nor does Socrates (or Plato) think that it does
IV. In Which We Investigate How Knowing Relates to Factual Information
and Propositional Utterances or Beliefs 27
IV.i That knowledge should not be equated with the ability to do something,
or to express a belief in words, although those abilities may be evidence of
knowing; IV.ii That some other kinds of knowing, besides knowing particular
facts about states of affairs, are more important for understanding what Plato is
talking about; IV.iii That the ability to read the world as made up of tokens that
instantiate types is like using a map, dense with pictorial information
V. In Which I Summarize the Plan for the Rest of This Book 33
xii Contents
2. Truth and Belief 34

I. In Which We Consider the Relation Between Knowledge and Truth, and
Between Knowledge and Belief 34
I.i That knowledge is about something, but not about a proposition, or about
the truth of a proposition; I.ii That it is a mistake to suppose (with Vendler
and others) that belief, but not knowledge, is a propositional attitude
II. In Which We Consider What Truth Is, and How It Can Be a
Property of Things 40
II.i That there are several ways of talking of ‘truth’ in Greek; II.ii That we
should understand the veridical sense of the verb ‘to be’ as a reference to the
truth in things, which is a kind of being something; II.iii That truth in
sentences and descriptions is derivative from the primary kind of truth in
things; II.iv That some truth can be found in what Heidegger and Detienne
say about aletheia; II.v That there is something similar in Aristotle; II.vi That
it is time to reclaim the spectator model of knowledge and truth
III. That Truth Can Be Observed by Viewing the Things That Reflect It 49
III.i That all kinds of deliberate representations and naturally occurring
instances can serve as icons, and that Plato’s methodology makes use of this
Part II. Plato’s Meno

3. Introduction and Summary for Part II: Plato’s Meno55
I. In Which We Note That Plato Is Arguing on the Same Side as Wittgenstein,
Against Socratic Essentialism 55
II. That the Geometry Episode Proves That One Can Identify a Precise but
Indefinable Length by Pointing, Not Saying 56
III. That Socrates Turns to the Hypothetical Method Not as a Second Best, but as
the Perfect Method for Dealing with Types That Have No Essential Definition 58
IV. That Knowing ‘What It Is’ About Some Type F Does Not Equate to Knowing
Which Tokens Fall Under the Type, or to a Description of the Shared
Properties of F Things, or to Any Classification of the F as a Token of a
More Generic Type 59
IV.i That the dichotomy between knowing an object and knowing a proposition
is a false one, and that Socrates means neither of those things when he speaks
of knowing virtue ‘what it is’; IV.ii That the example of ‘knowing Meno, who
he is’ is about a type, not a token, exactly like the case of virtue
V. That the Distinction Between Episteme and Doxa in Plato Is the Distinction
Between the Intellectual Grasp of the Type and the Experiential Recognition
of Particular Tokens, Whether With the Senses or Just in the Mind 65
4. Knowing What Virtue Is in Plato’s Meno69
I. In Which We Consider How We Should Read the Meno 69
I.i That we must distinguish between Plato and his characters, including the
Socrates character; I.ii A review of the key turning points in the dialogue,
which show that Socrates caused the confusion by insisting on the priority
of definition; I.iii That Plato’s chosen illustration, the search for the
Contents xiii
indefinable side of the double square, is intended to prove that what

someone knows may not be definable (by anyone, in principle, not just in
practice); I.iv That Socrates still wants to know ‘what virtue is’ before asking
other questions, but knowing ‘what it is’ no longer means giving a definition
II. In Which We Note That the Hypothetical Method (If Well Done) Is Ideal
for Poion Esti Questions About Vague Concepts With No Neat Definitions 76
II.i The failure of the hypothetical method: that Socrates is to blame;
II.ii A better attempt at explaining how we become competent with the
virtue concept without any need to define it
III. In Which We Conclude That Not Being Able to Say ‘What It Is’ Concerning
Some Concept Is Perfectly Compatible With Knowing ‘What It Is’ 82
5. Knowledge and Correct Impressions in Plato’s Meno84
I. Orientation: Issues About the Relation Between Doxa and Episteme
Arising From Chapter 4 84
II. Concerning Passage A: The Opening Pages of the Meno (70a–71e) 85
II.i That there is no one left in Athens who can answer Meno’s question,
‘because Gorgias has gone to Larissa’; II.ii That Socrates cannot answer
Meno’s question ‘because he does not know the answer’
III. Passage C: How Knowledge Differs From a Merely Correct Impression 87
III.i Passage C, stage 1: it is possible to answer a question from a position
that is not knowledge; III.ii Passage C, stage 2: the road to Larissa;
III.iii Passage C, stage 3: knowledge about and knowledge of;
III.iv Passage C, stage 4: the advantage of knowledge over true seeming;
III.v Passage C, stage 5: the statues of Daedalus, and explanatory
reasoning; III.vi Passage C, stage 6: a difficulty—do seemings become knowings?
IV. Passage B: Lessons From the Slave-Boy Passage 99
IV.i That ‘the boy did not already know’, meaning ‘the boy did not have
the knowledge already available’; and that Socrates does not teach him
anything that he did not know; IV.ii Passage B continues: the boy did
have knowledge; IV.iii Locating the back reference in Passage C
V. Once Again, Can True Doxa Turn Into Knowledge? 103
VI. Conclusion: That Neither Doxa Nor Episteme Is a Propositional Attitude 106
Part III. Plato’s Republic

6. Introduction and Summary for Part III: Plato’s Republic111
I. In Which We Consider the Plan of the Republic, and Why the Quest
for a Definition Is Abandoned 111
II. That We Can Avoid Ascribing Fallacies to Plato Once We Understand
Plato’s Method 112
7. Discovering What Justice Is in Plato’s Republic115
I. In Which We Examine the Argument of the Republic and Discover That
Plato Is Not Trying to Define Justice but Is Using a Method That Bypasses
the Need for Definition 115
xiv Contents
II. In Which We Examine the Text More Closely, to Reconstruct the Hunt
for the City’s Justice in Republic 4, and We Discover No Definition 118
II.i That the hunting in Passage A is a hunt for the city’s justice, not for
justice as such; II.ii That the method and the finding are comparable to
finding the line on the diagram in the Meno, and to the things admired by
the lovers of sights and sounds; II.iii That this ought to be a bad answer to
the ‘what is justice?’ question, by Socrates’ own previous standards;
II.iv Ontological interlude: Forms and tropes
III. In Which We Consider How Socrates Is Able to Move Forward From
Identifying the Justice of a Particular City, to Grasping What Justice Is 123
III.i That Socrates uses the analogy of rubbing sticks together to explain
his method; III.ii That there are other passages that explain the method;
III.iii That the ambitions of the method are not to define justice
IV. In Which We Consider David Sachs’s Objection, That There Is a Fallacy of
Equating ‘Platonic Justice’ With ‘Vulgar Justice’ 128
IV.i That the shift to the inner disposition is already explained in Adeimantus’s
challenge in Book 2; IV.ii Three ways to read the passage about temple-raiding in
Republic 4, of which the third is neither fallacious nor reductionist
V. In Which We Consider the Accusation From Bernard Williams That the
Analogy Between Soul and State Will Not Support Socrates’ Desired
Conclusions 134
V.i That Williams is assuming (a) that the soul/state comparison is an
analogy and (b) that Plato is pursuing an essentialist agenda; V.ii That
Williams constructs a story of crisis, and attempted, but ineffective, solution,
which is of his own making; V.iii That a better interpretation is possible,
if we avoid attributing any essentialist or reductionist moves to Plato
VI. Conclusion 140
8. Platonic Method: The Philosopher’s Route to Knowledge
in Plato’s Republic142
I. In Which We Juxtapose Socrates’ Comments About Short Versus Long
Routes and About Outlines Versus Finished Drawings, to See Why
Socrates Is Employing a Method That Is Not the Best 142
I.i That Socrates identifies, and follows, a shortcut method of enquiry
that is not good enough for the Guardians, but is enough for now;
I.ii That Socrates never embarks upon the longer way; I.iii That Socrates
takes a route that is third best, in the Sun analogy; I.iv That the Republic
aims at no more detail than is required for the target question, and
that this is what is meant by contrasting outlines with finished works
II. In Which We Consider the Implications of 505a–506d, Where Socrates
Rejects Two Candidate Definitions of the Good, Indicating a General
Problem for the Definitional Project 148
III. In Which We Consider the Role of Icons in the Divided Line 150
III.i That the Line is set up to explain why shadows are epistemically
valuable, and informative, for philosophical enquiry; III.ii That the same
Contents xv
relation, of icon to original, characterizes the higher levels of the Divided

Line, and this explains how the method in the Republic is supposed to work;
III.iii That we can solve some puzzles about the ratios on the Divided Line,
once we see that the degree of clarity is measured by how direct is the access
to truth provided by that kind of investigation; III.iv That there is a missing
section at the bottom of the Divided Line
IV. In Which We Consider What Is Meant by the Talk of ‘Hypotheses’ in the
Divided Line 156
IV.i That the hypotheses (or ‘posits’) are entities, not axioms; IV.ii What it
means to treat the posits as sources, at Level 3 of the Line; IV.iii What
happens at Level 4 of the Line, when we no longer appeal to posits as sources;
IV.iv That even at Level 4, the dialectician may use an iconic method;
IV.v That the content of knowledge at all levels of the Line is perceptual
or quasi-visual and conceptual, and never propositional
V. In Which We Consider Whether Socrates Still Thinks That a Person
Who Knows Must Be Able to Give a Logos of What She Knows 163
V.i That the effect of knowledge is to make a person capable of giving
an explanation, even if the knowledge does not consist of propositions
or definitions; V.ii A counter-argument and my response
VI. Conclusion: That the Ideal City Serves Not to Provide a Definition but as
an Icon of Justice, From Which We Can Ascend to a Grasp of Justice Itself 166
Part IV. Plato’s Theaetetus

9. Introduction and Summary for Part IV: Plato’s Theaetetus169
I. On the Post-Natal Role of Socrates as Midwife, and the Exposure of
Theaetetus’s First Brainchild 171
I.i That the midwife has a twofold role; I.ii That Theaetetus’s first
brainchild is consigned to the discard pile, once its auxiliary theories
have been found too extreme to survive; I.iii That Theaetetus’s second
proposal, that science is true discernment, is also supported with elaborate
survival aids and then rejected as non-viable by the midwife; I.iv That
the third brainchild also proves too sick to save
II. On the Search for a Science of Ousia 175
II.i That the Interlude redefines aisthesis as a technical term for sensory
perception, as distinct from doxa; II.ii That Socrates and Theaetetus are
mistakenly looking among the cognitive contents of doxa for what they
need, namely a grasp of ousia; II.iii That Theaetetus is too young and
inexperienced in dialectic to understand why his second thesis has failed;
II.iv That perception and doxa, whether true or false, presuppose another
kind of knowledge, namely knowing ‘what it is’ about the type
10. Geometry and the Scientific Project: Theaetetus 142a–184b 181
I. In Which We Discover the Significance of Theaetetus’s Aptitude for
Geometry and of His Premature Death 181
xvi Contents
I.i That the search for a definition of episteme must fail, and this is partly
because Theaetetus is too young
II. In Which We Consider Whether Listing Examples Could Be a Good
Answer, and Discover Why Socrates’ Analysis of Clay Is an Unhelpful Model 185
II.i That mentioning examples is part of the iconic method, and that Socrates’
objections to the examples, and his recommended kind of analysis, are not
the usual ones, but are nonetheless misguided; II.ii That Theaetetus’s three
definitions of episteme are all designed to follow the model of a simple
compositional analysis, which is a faulty model and leads to failure;
II.iii That there is nothing wrong with using the term that is to be defined,
and that Socrates is confused on that score
III. In Which We Briefly Consider Theaetetus’s Proposal That Science Is
‘Perception’: Whether It Is a Good Suggestion and Why It Fails to Thrive 192
III.i That Theaetetus conceives his proposed definitions by the iconic method,
generalizing from his experience of geometry as a science, and that his first
proposal has some merits, since knowledge of concepts is a bit like perception;
III.ii That Socrates respects the standard constraints on what can count as
science, in developing his support package for EA
IV. Conclusion: That Geometry Invites the Thought That We Perceive
the Intelligible Types in the Diagram, and That No Other Scientific
Knowledge Is Presupposed 195
11. The Division Between Sense Perception and Non-Sensory Doxa in the
Interlude: Theaetetus 184a–187b 197
I. In Which We Clarify the Meaning of Doxa and Doxazein in the Rest
of the Dialogue 197
I.i That ‘believe’ or ‘judge’ are not good translations for D, and why not;
I.ii That when Socrates lists ‘being’ as (hypothetically) one of the features
accessible to D but not SP, he does not mean propositional form
II. In Which We Take Issue With Some Classic Interpretations of the
Interlude and Their More Recent Descendants 201
II.i That there are four ways of reading the reference to ‘being’, and that
the most popular reading takes it as marking a feature of propositions;
II.ii That many interpretations cobble together Reading C and Reading P,
sometimes with other interpretations as well, in trying to make sense
of Plato’s text
III. In Which We Embark on a Reading of the Interlude and Note That Socrates
Distinguishes Two Faculties Equipped to Detect Non-Propositional
Features, One With, and One Without, the Use of Bodily Organs 208
III.i That Socrates explains his distinction between SP and D by giving
lists of paradigm cases; III.ii That the argument does not assume that all
sensibles are special sensibles, accessible to only one sense; III.iii Whether
we see with our eyes or with our souls, and why stipulating some technical
terminology helps the argument here (but has nothing to do with correcting
Contents xvii
an earlier mistake or inventing a unified consciousness); III.iv That the

thought experiment at 185b is not a mistake, but reinforces the key premise,
to ensure it is understood; III.v That the ‘being’ in List B is not the copula,
and that propositional form characterizes enquiry (both sensory and
dianoetic), but not its conclusions; III. vi That nothing much hangs on
the claim that some features in List A or B are ‘common’; III.vii That
when Socrates links being with truth, this is not because they are
propositional; III.viii That we should respect the fact that the text lists
‘being’ as one of several doxastic features
IV. In Which I Canvass a Solution to the Puzzle, by Suggesting That Socrates
and Theaetetus are Right That Science Must Access the Truth, But Are
Mistaken About What Truth Is, About Its Relation to Being, and
That Doxa Captures the Relevant Kind of Truth 220
IV.i That situating the Interlude alongside the Phaedo and the ‘digression’
in the Theaetetus is informative; IV.ii That the Interlude seems to confuse
the discovery of certain List B features with discovering the ‘ti esti’;
IV.iii That an alternative possibility, whereby the Interlude draws the
same distinction as the Phaedo, seems less convincing on balance;
IV.iv That doxa can indeed discern instances of being, in some sense
of ‘being’, but not in the sense relevant for episteme; IV.v That Plato
has not changed his model of episteme, which is still the science that
grasps ‘what it is’ about a type
V. Conclusion: That Doxa Will Not Be a Good Place to Look For Episteme,
Given What Episteme Is About 230
12. On the Failure of the Remaining Two Attempts to Analyse Episteme:
Theaetetus 187b–210a 231
I. In Which We Consider What ‘True’ Means, When Theaetetus
Says That ‘There Is Also False Doxa’, and Conclude That He Is
Noting the Difference Between Correct and Incorrect Answers to
‘What Is It?’ Questions 231
I.i That Theaetetus, being misled by the irrelevant contrast sketched in
the Interlude, tries to analyse science as a subset of doxa; I.ii That there
are two notions of truth at work in the dialogue; I.iii That when Theaetetus
contrasts true and false doxa he must mean ‘true’ in the folk sense
II. In Which We Consider the Falsity Problems That Socrates Raises, and
How They Contribute to the Discussion 235
II.i That ETD fails because it cannot distinguish knowledge of types from
discernment of tokens, which is parasitic on the former; II.ii That the ETD
brainchild cannot survive, because it undermines itself; for if it were correct,
neither truth nor falsity would be possible, even in discerning the identity
of singular tokens; II.iii That Plato is not confused and is not struggling;
II.iv That false doxa of the relevant kind is not due to ‘ignorance birds’,
but uses the same conceptual tools as true judgements on the same matters
xviii Contents
III. In Which We Examine Why Socrates Concludes the Examination of

ETD With the Jury Example 241
III.i That the jury example is vague, intuitive, and offers no theoretical
explanation of the reason why; III.ii That we should remember how, in
the Digression, Socrates spoke about the lack of time for the lawyers to do
their job properly in the law courts
IV. In Which We Consider the TDL Analysis, and Socrates’ Attempts to
Devise a Rescue Package for It 248
IV.i That the Dream theory tries to explain what puts an object out of
reach of science, on the mistaken assumption that science consists in the
analysis of composites into their components; IV.ii That Socrates provides
support by seeking potentially helpful meanings of logos, and that the
first two kinds of logos—though inadequate for the task—are not so
simple-minded as they seem; IV.iii That the third suggestion is also
somewhat trickier to understand than it seems, and that Plato is not
secretly recommending it; IV.iv That the survey of meanings of logos is
probably not noticeably incomplete; IV.v That regardless of whether the
discussion has been exhaustive, TDL still fails
V. Conclusion: That Plato Is Not in the Same Position as Socrates,
Since He Never Approved of the Naturalistic Project That Socrates
Pursues in This Dialogue 257
Part V. The Bigger Picture

13. Conclusions and Further Tasks 261
I. Where Are We Now? 261
I.i A retrospective on certain unexpected results of this enquiry;
I.ii That we need a special sense of ‘is’ for knowing ‘what it is’ in the
ti esti sense; I.iii That the key to reading Plato can sometimes lie in the
dramatic setting; I.iv That Plato is right about the logical distinction
between semantic tools and extensional objects; I.v That Plato is right
about the special kind of knowing involved in grasping or possessing concepts;
I.vi That Plato is right that searching for definitions is vacuous, and
that there are better ways to make philosophical progress, by using images
and icons; I.vii That Plato is not an opponent of images or illustrations;
I.viii That Plato is on sound ground speaking of the truth in representations
as derivative from a prior truth in the things
II. Where Do We Go From Here? 271
II.i About Plato’s Cratylus; II.ii About Plato’s Sophist; II.iii Conclusion:
that conceptual knowledge is irreducible and primitive
Bibliography 277
Index 287
Index Locorum 301
Acknowledgements
I received generous funding to support this research from the Leverhulme Trust and
the Arts and Humanities Research Council, as well as two semesters of research
leave from the University of East Anglia. The University of Aberdeen Philosophy
Department provided a visiting fellowship, excellent facilities, and collegial conversa-
tion in autumn 2008, and Merton College Oxford provided accommodation and colle-
gial facilities in autumn 2011. I would like to thank Gail Fine in particular for inviting
me to Merton, and for helpful conversations both then and at other stages of my
research. In 2009 Oxford Brookes University provided a ten-day visiting fellowship,
with accommodation and opportunities to present two seminar papers. On three
occasions I have enjoyed the hospitality of the Fondation Hardt in Geneva, with its
fine Classical library and other resources provided by the Geneva University libraries,
and the welcome opportunities to discuss ideas with other Classical scholars from
around Europe.
I have benefited from advice from three readers who reviewed sample chapters in
2010, and two readers who read the complete manuscript in 2012. I am especially
grateful to Sophie-Grace Chappell for comments on the manuscript at that stage.
I have tried, not always successfully, to pay proper heed to the excellent advice from all
these readers, and the manuscript has gone through several major revisions as a result.
I hope that it is now better, not worse.
I developed ideas from Chapters 1 and 2, and some work on the Sophist (not
included here in the end), in conversation with colleagues in Aberdeen (including
Patricia Clarke), in Cambridge (the D Society), and at Oxford Brookes University.
Chapters 3 and 4 contain material presented at Trinity College Dublin, the Nordic
Wittgenstein Society in Uppsala, and the Ancient Philosophy Workshop in Oxford.
Chapters 5 and 6 contain ideas discussed at the Southern Association for Ancient
Philosophy in Oxford, the Ancient Philosophy reading group in Cambridge, Oxford
Brookes University, the University of East Anglia, and the Open University. Chapters
7, 8, and 9 include material that I have presented in Toronto and in Bordeaux (the
Celtic Conference). At a reading of the Theaetetus in Dublin in 2013, I learned much
from discussion with Brendan O’Byrne, David Horan, and John Dillon, and from
Vasilis Politis, who had kindly invited me. I am also grateful to generations of under-
graduates at Swansea and the University of East Anglia (including my Special Subject
class of 2013) with whom I tried out several ideas.
“How can it be right to say that states will never end their troubles until philosophers
hold the sway in them, when we’ve agreed that the philosophers are useless to them?”
“Your question is one that needs to be answered by way of an icon,” I said.
“And you, of course, have never been known to talk through icons, I think!” said he.
“Bah! First you throw me an unfair topic, and then you mock the afflicted! But
here’s my icon . . . ”
Plato, Republic 487e (introducing the ship of state image)
PA RT I
Knowledge, Truth, and Belief
1
Knowledge, Conceptual
Knowledge, and the Iconic Route
to Grasping an Idea
I. In Which We Consider Whether ‘Knowledge’

Is an Important Topic in Plato’s Work
I.i That there is an irreducible form of knowledge that has to do with grasping
concepts and types or forms
Our task in this book is to address some questions concerning knowledge and truth.
Although the more familiar kinds of knowing that are usually discussed in modern
philosophy (such as ‘knowing that’) will occasionally feature in our enquiry, one particular
kind of ‘knowing’ will have a special place here: namely, having (grasping, knowing) a
concept or idea. For instance, if someone understands what makes a just thing count
as just, then (a) she has a concept of justice, (b) she has grasped what it is to be just, and
(c) she knows what justice is. In addition, (d) she may (though she need not) know
what the word ‘justice’ means, or she may (but need not) be able to use the term ‘just’
appropriately to describe things that she recognizes as just.
This kind of knowledge may come in degrees. For instance, it seems that one may
have a good or a hazy grasp of what it is to be just; and one may have an articulate or
inarticulate understanding of what justice is. But to have no idea at all what justice is,
or what the term ‘justice’ means, is to have a gap in one’s knowledge. Actually, those are
two different gaps; but anyway, there is a gap if one has no concept of the ‘just’ to apply
in the world.
For reasons that will become apparent, I shall often refer to such knowledge as
knowing ‘what it is’, which connects it with a certain notion of being that is expressed
by the term ‘is’ in ‘what it is’. Plato thinks of this kind of ‘knowing what it is’ as grasping
a certain kind of being, so that conceptual knowledge correlates with what we might
call conceptual being, as epistemic state to epistemic content. Given that the term being
has many other functions, it may seem that this is not a helpful way of understanding
the content of conceptual knowledge, but it leads us to identify a distinctive use of the
verb ‘be’ which does not reduce to any of the standard usages such as existence, predi-
cation, and so on. This is useful, because it is an important use of the verb ‘be’ and it
deserves attention.
4 Knowledge and Truth in Plato
Related to this kind of being is a corresponding idea of truth. We shall turn to

investigating the various kinds of truth, and their relation to being, in Chapter 2. There
we shall explore how ancient thinkers conceived of ‘truth’, how they linked it with
‘reality’ and ‘being’, and discover why they did not always, although they did sometimes,
regard truth as exclusively a property of propositional structures or representations.
Conceptual knowledge can be understood as grasping a kind of truth: when one
correctly grasps what justice is, one has in some sense grasped the truth about justice,
or what justice truly is. Such ‘truth’ tracks the notion of ‘being’ mentioned above, as the
content of a successful grasp of the relevant type, form, or concept. It is not to be under-
stood as the truth of some representation or proposition describing the idea, but it is
a truth in the idea itself, and is a mind-independent truth, out there to be grasped
whether anyone grasps it or not. By exploring this notion of truth we shall come to
recognize the advantages of thinking of truth as coming in degrees, where the standard
is set by reality—which has the highest degree of truth, in virtue of being what other
structures and signs merely portray, describe, or approximate.
I shall use Plato’s discussions as a route to raising and answering questions about this
kind of knowledge and this kind of truth. It seems to me that Plato has valuable things
to say on these matters. His treatment of them has been widely ignored, partly because
of a misreading (as I shall claim) of central aspects of his texts, including the question of
where in the text we find the views of the author. There are also certain preconceptions
in modern philosophy about what knowledge is, what it is of, and the form that conceptual
knowledge can take, which tend to exclude the options that Plato is recommending,
before we even begin, and this makes it hard for analytic philosophers to see that he
could be saying these things.
Furthermore, over the last fifty years we have seen a widespread desire to assimilate
different kinds of knowledge, or to reduce the less familiar kinds to some one funda-
mental kind of knowledge, either propositional knowledge or ‘knowledge how’. This,
I suggest, is not always helpful. Sometimes we need to look for differences, and take apart
things that have got unfairly lumped together or hammered into the wrong-shaped
hole. My proposal is that there is a kind of knowing that is more primitive than either
propositional knowledge or knowing how, which cannot be reduced to either of those;
and that Plato devoted much effort to exploring what form that knowing takes. His
work on this topic notes many reasons that count against trying to reduce conceptual
knowledge to one of the kinds of ‘knowing that’ or ‘knowing how’ which we tend to
treat as paradigmatic. Since knowing how and knowing that, as well as knowing who
or what, are all associated with recognizing a particular instance or token as falling under
a generic type, all these are actually parasitic upon the kind of knowing that Plato was
talking about. They presuppose and depend upon the generic conceptual knowledge.
Evidently, then, we cannot achieve clarity by trying to reduce the fundamental kind to
one of its derivative manifestations.
That this conceptual knowledge, or knowledge of types and forms, underpins all cases
of using it in propositions and practical engagement with the world is evident; what it is,
Knowledge, Conceptual Knowledge, and the Iconic Route 5
and what it is about, and what kind of truth it captures is not so evident. These seem
to be questions to which Plato was perpetually drawn. It seems likely that he never
answered them to his satisfaction, but that his explorations in some of his most famous
dialogues are among the best treatments of the issues known to this day. They raise
virtually all the puzzles that a good solution would need to address. Indeed, if I am
right, there are no recent treatments that do justice to the exploratory proposals that
Plato is investigating here, partly because his proposals have not often been recognized
as a contribution to this field, and when they have, they have sometimes been ham-
mered into alignment with the reductionist projects of the present day. Some of his
proposals, such as the theory of ‘Forms’, even though they are not presented in Plato’s
own voice, and are not presented uncritically as a problem-free account or a finished
answer, do at least take seriously the desiderata and criteria for success for explaining
this knowledge: namely that we need the content of conceptual knowledge to be some-
thing that is rich with quasi-pictorial density and not reducible to a formula, definition,
or rule of thumb.
I.ii That Lyons’s ‘structural semantics’ approach to understanding

Plato’s term episteme needs to be superseded
Plato has a number of words for ‘knowledge’, both nouns and verbs, and various adjectives
for the person who knows. The noun episteme is perhaps the most important for our
purposes, since this is the one that (as I shall argue) sometimes serves as a technical
term for conceptual knowledge. It can also mean ‘science’, which is how I translate it in
Part IV, but as we shall see, Plato also holds that science, properly so-called, is a grasp of
generic truths. There are also other words for knowledge in Greek, many of which are
built on the gnosis root. These are etymologically related (via Latin and French) to English
words like ‘know’ and ‘cognition’ and ‘recognize’. Another set of knowledge words has
a root formed of eid, or oid, as in eidenai or oida. These are related to our words for
vision, via Latin videre, and we could compare our use of ‘I see’ to mean ‘I understand’
or ‘I get it’. All these words, both from the episteme root and from the oida or gignoskein
roots, are used to refer to knowledge or science, and all are contrasted with lesser kinds
of cognition in the discussions that Socrates has in Plato’s dialogues. Socrates particularly
contrasts all these sorts of knowing with having mere doxa (sometimes translated as ‘belief ’
or ‘opinion’), including doxa that is true/correct. Occasionally he contrasts knowledge
with perception (aisthesis), or with ignorance or dreaming or other conditions in which
one lacks access to truth and reality, either partially or altogether.
In a study of Plato’s terminology for ‘knowledge’, in the early 1960s, John Lyons
argued that the terms formed a structured system, in which each of the three verbs
(gignoskein, eidenai, and epistasthai) was paired with a corresponding noun (gnosis,
episteme, and techne respectively) and that because the semantics of each term is con-
textually nuanced by the implicit contrast with the other terms in the suite, there are
no easy word-for-word translations into English (which doesn’t have quite the same
suite of terms with the same implicit contrasts).1 In 1981, Lyons retracted his 1963
conclusions, and asserted that after all it is possible to align the triad of terms in Greek
quite successfully with analytic philosophy’s ‘troika’ of knowledge types (knowledge
that, knowledge how, and acquaintance).2 Myles Burnyeat had spent much of his early
career urging the importance of Lyons’s 1963 work, and particularly the mismatch
between episteme (paired with eidenai) and epistasthai (paired with techne), and
deploying the findings from Lyons’s Structural Semantics in his own studies of the
Theaetetus and other works. Recently Burnyeat has reiterated this continuing belief
in the 1963 work, and questioned whether Lyons should have retracted.3 It is true
that many of Burnyeat’s favourite observations survive the retraction, and I would
agree with Burnyeat that it is very unwise to treat analytic philosophy’s epistemic troika
as if it were a complete and definitive taxonomy of knowledge that is uniform across
cultures.4 Arguably my thesis in this book is that the troika omits the one that was
Plato’s most central case.
However, I think that there was something wrong with Lyons’s 1963 approach, which
has also infected much of Burnyeat’s work. It privileged a certain kind of contextual
semantics, and understood the semantics of a term to be fixed in all uses, but context-
ual in this sense: that the term’s meaning was determined by its relation to other terms
in the writer’s vocabulary (whose meaning was also fixed by that implicit contrast and
comparison). So the way to discover what a term means in Plato’s vocabulary was, on
that approach, a matter of discovering a consistent rule that identified which word is
invariably implying a contrast with which, and assigning a single constant meaning to
every word in every occurrence. What Lyons concedes (correctly) in his 1981 rethink
was that these words may have focal meanings (so that stereotypically, a certain term
tends to be used for a certain kind of knowing, even though others can also be used,
slightly outside their normal range). This is an improvement, though his attempt to align
the focal usages of the three terms with some modern focal senses of ‘know’ may be
seriously unhelpful, as we have observed. Burnyeat, by contrast, is still rather inclined
to the one-word one-meaning methodology, and to the attempt to use the supposedly
fixed structure of relations between these knowledge-terms to prescribe a meaning,
rather than looking to the immediate context in the text to see whether it is being used
in the way prescribed by the Lyons theory.
1
John Lyons, Structural Semantics: An analysis of part of the vocabulary of Plato (Oxford: Blackwell,
1963).
2
John Lyons, ‘Structural Semantics in retrospect’ in Thomas Edward Hope (ed.), Language, Meaning
and Style: Essays in memory of Stephen Ullmann (Leeds: Leeds University Press, 1981), 73–90.
3
Myles Burnyeat, ‘Episteme’ in Benjamin Morison and Katerina Ierodiakonou (eds.), Episteme, etc:
Essays in honour of Jonathan Barnes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 3–29, 12. See further below,
note 50.
4
As e.g. in Ronald Polansky, Philosophy and Knowledge: a commentary on Plato’s Theaetetus (Lewisburg,
PA: Bucknell University Press, 1992), 14 who claims that Plato’s Theaetetus covers (and succeeds with) all
known brands of knowledge. (Incidentally it is also odd to claim that it succeeds, given that every part of it
fails.) See Part IV below.
My view is that the structural semantics approach was wrong, and the cross-cultural
equations are very unwise. I also find that the meanings of the knowledge words are
largely determined by immediate context, and very much less by the built-in semantic
connotations of the chosen word. There are many contexts in which Plato freely substi-
tutes one knowledge word for another with gay abandon through a passage of text. We
shall find some such passages in later chapters.5 We shall also find places where Socrates
or his interlocutor assigns technical senses to words that had more flexible meanings
elsewhere,6 and many examples where Socrates stretches his terms, or even abuses their
conventional grammar, to raise new difficulties or make clearer distinctions where
ordinary language had not made any.7 To discover what Socrates means by a term, or
what work he is having it do in some place, one must read it carefully, in that context.
The fact that it means something different, or invokes a different contrast, in another
passage should never be invoked to undermine the most coherent reading of the target
passage. We can only discover whether there is a consistent meaning for any of Plato’s
terms by reading the text.
So I shall not take Lyons’s conclusions as gospel, neither his 1963 ones nor his 1981
ones; nor do I follow Burnyeat’s dependence on Lyons. It seems to me that Plato’s
language, and the Greek language in general, is as flexible as our own, and there are no
fixed constraints on how far one may stray from the focal meaning of a word, or on what
connotations or implicatures one may voluntarily cancel in any given context.
That said, I shall suggest that, very often, Plato uses the term episteme in a moderately
technical sense—perhaps a sense that he has newly invented, and for which he has
newly adapted an existing term. He uses it, I shall argue, specifically to denote a kind
of knowledge that is not part of our troika at all. Yet even if this is a novel usage, he
evidently thinks that this is what the term should mean: that exactly this knowledge
(the knowledge of Forms, of the what-it-is about our concepts) is what one needs to
count as wise, as having scientific understanding, as having the thing that qualifies as
episteme. He is setting episteme up as a standard, and prescribing what it is to reach
that standard. Some passages imply that the bar is high, since a lot of people seem to
fail to meet it, by turning out not to know what they thought they knew. Yet that is
not quite true in the end. It is only if you adopt the criterion that Socrates uses in the
‘Socratic’ bits of the dialogues for whether someone counts as knowing that those
people seem not to know. We shall find reason, repeatedly, to think that Plato the
author is challenging that criterion, and hence challenging the result: it turns out
that we know many things, and we have ways to discover yet more, once we discard
Socrates’ misguided demand that one who knows must be able to give a definition.
But more of that shortly.
5
See for example Chapter 3, note 21.
6
E.g. the redefinition of aisthesis and the introduction of a technical sense for doxazein at Theaetetus
186e1, 187a8 (see Chapter 11).
7
E.g. the novel grammar assigned to the term doxazein in the Theaetetus (see Chapter 11).
I.iii Whether ‘knowledge’ is a useful translation for Plato’s knowledge words

If Plato is talking about our grasp of types and forms when he writes about ‘knowing’ in
his technical sense, we might wonder whether ‘knowledge’ is a sensible word to use
in English. This is not one of the three paradigmatic kinds of knowledge recognized by
analytic philosophers. If conceptual knowledge cannot be reduced to one of the troika,
should we stop calling it ‘knowledge’? Does it perhaps go by another name? Or does it
have no name in English?
I think that we should agree with Plato that it is a kind of knowledge, that we do
speak of ‘knowing’ what a game is, or what justice is (as well as ‘understanding’, ‘grasping’,
‘learning’, and other similar terms, all of them epistemological). I also think that for us
too it is irreducible to any other kind of knowing. Plato seems to have thought that this
was the only kind of knowledge that could qualify as episteme. If we want to hold that
propositional knowledge is also a kind of knowing, then we shall not follow Plato in
that respect. But there is a case to be made for thinking that propositional knowledge
cannot occur without this kind of episteme. So it is the more basic kind, arguably.
The idea that Plato might mean something that is not exactly what we mean by
‘knowledge’ is not new. Myles Burnyeat sometimes claims that he means ‘understanding’.8
But this does not help much. Is ‘understanding’ a technical term with a precise defin-
ition in our epistemological taxonomy? If so, we run once more into the difficulty that
epistemic terms in Greek may not map well onto any of our epistemic terms; but this
was a point made by Burnyeat himself, both for and against Lyons.9 It can be turned
equally against Burnyeat himself, and anyone else who wants to say that episteme in
Plato means ‘understanding’, if that is meant to identify some technical epistemological
category; whereas if ‘understanding’ is not a technical term, it cannot help us to pinpoint
Plato’s meaning.
For Burnyeat the ‘understanding’ in question seems to be understanding why some
fact is true. He seems to mean that one has episteme when one grasps not just the fact
but also the explanation or justification for it. Then one knows the fact, because it is
‘understood’. This seems to be a variant of propositional knowledge (we still know that p),
with a further requirement about the way in which the propositional truth is grasped
(with or without a grasp of the reason why). Some might say that this is already built into
the idea of propositional knowledge (since knowledge includes something more than
just believing the true proposition). Surely for many Anglophone analytic philosophers,
understanding why might be integral to any knowing that p (as contrasted with thinking
8
See Myles Burnyeat, ‘Socrates and the Jury: paradoxes in Plato’s distinction between knowledge and
true belief ’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume, 54 (1980), 173–91, 186–8;
Myles Burnyeat, ‘Aristotle on understanding knowledge’ in Enrico Berti (ed.), Aristotle on Science: the
posterior analytics (Proceedings of the Eighth Symposium Aristotelicum; Padua: Ed. Antenore, 1981),
97–139, 133–6. See also J.M.E. Moravcsik, ‘Understanding and Knowledge in Plato’s Philosophy’, Neue
Hefte für Philosophie, 15/16 (1979), 53–69; Jon Moline, Plato’s Theory of Understanding (Madison, WI:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1982).
9
Burnyeat, ‘Episteme’, 8–12. See this chapter, Section I.ii.
that p), whereupon adding understanding to the criteria does not seem to mark out
Plato’s idea as anything different from propositional knowledge, as currently under-
stood. Furthermore, if there is something further to know, besides the content of the
‘that . . . ’ clause—if we must also know or understand ‘why’, as Burnyeat implies—
should we take that additional knowledge ‘why’ to be knowledge of another fact—the
explanatory fact—or is it some other kind of knowledge from among the current troika
(some kind of know how or ‘knowledge-wh’, as the jargon has it)? If so, then we have not
escaped from matching Plato’s terms to contemporary analytic terms. Or is it some
additional kind of knowing that is not among those in the troika? In which case, we
want to know what it is and why it is sui generis and not reducible to one of those.
I dissent from the main thrust of Burnyeat’s proposal here, not so much because
I object to the term ‘understanding’ (since one could indeed use that term to mean
what I think Plato is talking about, though Burnyeat himself seems not to mean what
I mean).10 What I object to is (among other things) the inclusion of the factual knowledge
in the composite that Burnyeat has in mind, namely ‘knowing that p, plus understanding
why’. I disagree because I do not think that any kind of knowing facts or propositions is
ever included in episteme, as that term is used by Plato, whether or not you have some
further understanding of why they are true. Episteme just is not a knowledge of facts or
understanding of facts in the world. It is not knowledge that some particular state of
affairs obtains. Indeed, it does not relate to the particular at all.
However, I do take episteme to be a certain kind of understanding, namely conceptual
understanding—understanding a certain notion or idea, so as to be able to use it correctly
and explain it to someone else (as, for instance, in Wittgenstein’s famous example of
‘knowing what a game is’, and Socrates’ similar quest for knowing what a virtue is
or knowing what justice is).11 Clearly we can and do use the word ‘knowledge’ for this
(as Wittgenstein’s discussion, or rather the English translation of it, shows). We speak
of ‘knowing what a game is’, and of someone who doesn’t understand what games are as
‘not knowing’. It is a mistake to think that our term ‘knowledge’ means just knowledge
of facts, or ‘knowing that . . . ’, or that anything that deserves the name must be reducible
to something of that kind.12
Hence I remain sympathetic to some aspects of Burnyeat’s 2011 paper, in particular
his insistence that we should not come with some ready-made system of ‘kinds of
knowledge’ and see if Plato has got it right, but rather should invite analytic philosophers
10
The term ‘understanding’ is used as a translation for verstehen in Wittgenstein (e.g. Ludwig Wittgenstein,
Philosophische Untersuchungen, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1953), §146) (henceforth PI).
The example is understanding how to continue a mathematical series, and belongs to a discussion of
rule-following as a way of thinking about conceptual knowledge. This is a text about the kind of knowledge
I have in mind (but it is not the only kind that can be called ‘understanding’). Arguably Wittgenstein was
inclined to reduce it to ‘knowing how’, a knowledge manifested in behaviour with no remainder.
11
See Chapter 4, and Catherine Rowett, ‘Plato, Wittgenstein and the definition of games’ in Luigi
Perissinotto and Begonia Ramon Camara (eds.), Wittgenstein and Plato (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,
2013), 196–219.
12
See further this chapter, Section IV.
to be challenged by something that does not fit their categories. I also concur with his
sense that knowledge of the Forms is not correctly captured in terms of ‘knowledge by
acquaintance’, as traditionally conceived. I disagree with him mainly for the straitjacket
from semantics that he uses to constrain the philosophical sense. I prefer to explore
threads of topic-based enquiries across the Platonic texts and draw conclusions about
the semantics from the philosophical results. I also disagree with some of Burnyeat’s
conclusions about knowing ‘what it is’, because he seems to think that what is known
in, say, ‘knowing the good, what it is’ is the answer to an indirect question, conceived as
a proposition.13
I.iv That knowledge is not a species of (propositional) belief, and that

Plato does not mean ‘belief ’ when he speaks of doxa
It has been customary for at least fifty years to classify knowledge as a kind of belief.
Hence any part of Plato’s work that relates to belief can superficially appear to be relevant
to epistemology, because it may bear on the familiar questions that appear in contem-
porary epistemology about true belief, error, misdescription, and so on, which go with
‘true belief ’ theories of propositional knowledge.
However, there are two reasons for resisting this approach. First, we must ask whether
any of Plato’s work is actually concerned with belief. The answer is not as clear as we
might have imagined. I shall argue that what Plato calls doxa should not be assimilated
to propositional belief because it lacks the propositional form.14 Translating doxa as
‘belief ’ has led many to assume, mistakenly in my view, that Plato was thinking about
knowledge as a kind of true belief, even though, as I shall argue, the nearest thing to
our notion of propositional knowledge of facts will be found in perception and doxa
(which are concerned with recognizing particular features in the world as tokens of a
certain type).15
On my view, the knowledge that Plato calls episteme does not include propositional
beliefs or any other kind of beliefs as any component. Beliefs will not count as knowledge
at all, but should be contrasted with knowledge, as a different kind of epistemic state
altogether. Perhaps we should be pleased, and happily stop the twentieth-century project
of pushing Plato into the ‘justified-true-belief box’, since arguably that box is already
falling to pieces. It may be better not to insist that Plato’s reflections on true belief
(if such there be) were intended as serious efforts towards an account of knowledge.
Perhaps, rather, they might be well targeted to show up the difference between belief
and knowledge. Such a conclusion would be welcome to those impressed by recent
‘knowledge first’ contributions such as that of Timothy Williamson.16 Even supposing
(as I do not) that Plato’s discussions are indeed about what we mean by belief, still they
13
Burnyeat, ‘Episteme’, 7.
14
See especially Chapters 5, 11, and 12. On the relation between beliefs and credence (for which Plato’s
term is pistis), see Chapter 2, Section I.ii.
15
See Chapters 5 and 12.
16
Timothy Williamson, Knowledge and its Limits (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
need not be attempts at a successful compositional analysis of knowledge (as true belief
plus something). They may be showing that such an analysis would be unsuccessful.
This is the line taken by Lloyd Gerson in recent work.17
II. In Which We Classify Twentieth-Century

Interpretations of Plato’s Epistemology Into Roughly
Three Distinct Views, and I Place My View in This
Taxonomy (or Outside It)
II.i That there are two classic ways of understanding the relation
between Plato’s Middle and Later dialogues, one unitarian and one
developmental, and a third way that is also unitarian
In mainstream work on Plato since the early twentieth century,18 three ways of reading
Plato as an epistemologist can be seen emerging, all of which can be understood as
responses to developments in analytic philosophy, and to various kinds of pragmatism
and anti-realism that were fashionable at the time. If we suppose that truth is a prop-
erty of propositions, not things, and that knowledge is a propositional attitude, and
that propositions are perhaps true in virtue of their coherence rather than their relation
to a mind-independent world, and if we suppose that the world is inaccessible to thought
except through language, or is in some sense constructed in language, then knowledge
takes on a kind of linguistic character. Since Plato had traditionally been read as a realist,
and his account of knowledge in the so-called ‘Middle-Period’ dialogues seemed to focus
on knowledge of things, or perhaps a special range of things (i.e. Forms), not knowledge
of propositions couched in language, Plato suddenly looked deeply unfashionable.
Scholars then devised various ways to defend him, which I here call the Metaphysical,
Rylean, and Fine Readings.19
II.i.i The Metaphysical Reading

One way of saving Plato from being consigned to the heap marked ‘historic failures’
was to reject the above developments associated with twentieth-century analytic
philosophy, and to reassert, on Plato’s behalf, the need for realism, for the existence of a
mind-independent world that is the truth-maker, and the need for an account like
17
Especially Lloyd Gerson, Ancient Epistemology (Key Themes in Ancient Philosophy; Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2009). Cf. Lloyd Gerson, Knowing Persons: a study in Plato (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2003).
18
By ‘mainstream’ I mean not including the tradition of Leo Strauss or the Tübingen School. On the
difference between my approach and that of the Straussians, see Section II.ii.
19
Timothy Chappell, Reading Plato’s Theaetetus (International Plato Studies; Sankt Augustin: Academia
Verlag, 2004), 16–21 gives a survey of this story as a choice of two models, unitarian or revisionist. He rightly
observes that the revisionist readings were motivated by charity, especially to address their antipathy to the
Forms. Naturally (though he does not explicitly say so), the unitarian readings, including his own, are also
motivated by charity.
Plato’s, to explain how we grasp truths that are not mere human constructs. For such
readers, Plato becomes the hero in a project to reassert Platonism as a genuine philosoph-
ical position with explanatory power. Readers who take this view argue that Plato’s
texts should be read as sophisticated explorations either of the advantages of Platonism,
or of the problems generated by alternative views (such as pragmatism, and coherence
theories of truth). This tends to go with what we call a ‘unitarian’ reading of Plato—that
is, claiming that Plato adhered to the same model of knowledge throughout his career,
and always maintained that the Forms exist in reality, as the paradigmatic objects
of knowledge.
On such a view, there is no suggestion that Plato went on to reject that realist model
of knowledge in the Later dialogues (since that would be to suppose that he abandoned
a good theory in favour of a less good one). Rather, it is assumed that the Later dialogues
develop the same position on epistemology and metaphysics as the Middle-Period
dialogues, though offering support for it in new and subtle ways. F.M. Cornford’s Plato’s
Theory of Knowledge is the classic example of such a reading.20
This way of reading Plato’s Later dialogues went out of fashion for much of the second
half of the twentieth century, but there is evidence of a trend towards rehabilitating it,
going back at least to the 1970s, in, for instance, the work of Nicholas White, and more
recently, Lloyd Gerson and Timothy Chappell in the first decade of the twenty-first
century.21
When this reading of Plato’s later epistemology is applied to the Theaetetus, especially
to the first part of that dialogue, it is often called ‘Reading A’, following Myles Burnyeat.22
I shall call it the Metaphysical Reading, because its chief object is to secure a realist
metaphysics, with transcendent Forms as the objects of knowledge.
II.i.ii The Rylean Reading

The second way to save Plato from the heap of historic failures is to concede that Plato
did indeed, in his younger days, toy with a realist model of knowledge, typified by
acquaintance with Forms, and that he once held a two-world view, which separated
knowledge from belief, as two faculties having access to two different sets of objects, but
that he later abandoned all this. This reading shares its interpretation of the so-called
‘Middle-Period’ dialogues with proponents of the Metaphysical Reading, but it differs
on what happens after that. On this view, we deduce that, sometime after writing the
20
Francis MacDonald Cornford, Plato’s Theory of Knowledge (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1935). Also W.D. Ross, Plato’s Theory of Ideas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953); Harold Cherniss,
‘The relation of the Timaeus to Plato’s later dialogues’, American Journal of Philology, 78 (1957), 225–66.
21
Nicholas White, Plato on Knowledge and Reality (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1976); Gerson, Ancient
Epistemology; Gerson, Knowing Persons; Chappell, Reading Plato’s Theaetetus. See also Constance
Meinwald’s comments in Constance Meinwald, ‘Good-bye to the Third Man’ in Richard Kraut (ed.), The
Cambridge Companion to Plato (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 365–96, 390 regarding
the increasing dissatisfaction with the second model (described next).
22
Myles Burnyeat, The Theaetetus of Plato (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1990) presents two ways of reading
the Theaetetus as options for the reader to choose between, with his own commentary designed as a maieutic
tool asserting neither view.
Republic, Plato came to see faults in his earlier theories and revised them radically: the
revisions are already evident in the total absence of Forms from the Theaetetus, but further
improvements are identified even after the Theaetetus, particularly in the Sophist.
This developmental way of reading Plato was (perhaps not accidentally) prompted,
or at least encouraged, by Gilbert Ryle’s influential work which dreamed up a story
about Plato’s ‘progress’, according to which Plato came to realize that all his famous
‘theories’ from the Middle Period were muddled. Instead, he became a sound Rylean
in the Later Period.23 Readers who took this developmental line could adhere to the
dogmas of early twentieth-century analytic philosophy and still hold Plato up as a
great thinker, because they found that Plato himself had been wise enough (in his
maturity) to abandon the realist structures that he had foolishly proposed in his youth,
and adopt the dogmas of contemporary analytic philosophy instead.
It is often said that Ryle’s work on Plato was not very influential.24 It is true that some
of its detailed speculations were treated with suspicion, but his way of explaining
Plato’s development has become deeply entrenched in all subsequent work. What may
be closer to the truth is that Ryle’s approach was already in circulation by way of his oral
teaching, long before the publication of the 1966 book, so the effect of his published
book was less than the very extensive effect of his approach. Developmental readings
of this Rylean kind were pretty ubiquitous throughout the middle and latter part of
the twentieth century (again being somewhat challenged by more recent work from
various quarters).
On this developmental story, Plato’s thinking in the Later dialogues, such as the
Theaetetus and Sophist, is supposed to be fully compatible with the idea that knowledge
takes propositions as its content, that truth is a property of propositions, that the world is
structured by language, and that there is no need for disembodied souls or non-linguistic
access to reality. Readers in this tradition find in the Theaetetus the idea that there can be
knowledge of sensible particulars, not just Forms; the idea that truth involves complex-
ity, in particular the predication of one thing of another, and always has propositional
form; that knowledge, if it is of the truth, will also have propositional form; that one
might try to define knowledge as a kind of true belief, rather than radically alien from
belief (as in Middle-Period Plato); that logical atomism is an attractive but ultimately
self-defeating account of how knowledge and meaning are grounded; and that there is no
need for pre-existent souls, or out-of-body experience, since the mind can be stocked
with materials during its everyday embodied experience among particulars.
This second way of defending Plato seems to have been the dominant tradition since
at least the 1970s,25 and can be found in the work of Myles Burnyeat,26 David Bostock,
23
Gilbert Ryle, Plato’s Progress (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966).
24
But see Myles Burnyeat, ‘Gilbert Ryle (1900–76)’ in Robert B. Todd (ed.), Dictionary of British
Classicists (3; Bristol: Thoemmes Continuum, 2004), 846–9.
25
It was clearly motivating some of Gwynneth Matthews, Plato’s Epistemology and Related Logical Problems
(London: Faber and Faber, 1972), 13–23, who struggles with it somewhat in passages where she recognizes that
Plato is not speaking of knowledge of singular propositions, but of kinds or the complex relations of kinds.
26
Burnyeat, Theaetetus and many preceding articles.
David Sedley (with qualifications),27 and perhaps G.E.L. Owen.28 When applied to the
Theaetetus, this way of understanding Plato’s later epistemology is called ‘Reading B’ by
Burnyeat.29 I call it the Rylean Reading because it sees Plato as progressing away from
answers that appeal to metaphysics towards answers provided by the philosophy of
language, and because it finds in later Plato an embryonic awareness of what Ryle took
to be truths discovered by early analytic philosophy in the wake of Frege, Russell, and
Wittgenstein.
II.i.iii The Fine Reading

A third way to defend Plato, in the light of these worries about his unfashionable real-
ism, is to suggest that he was never a Platonist in the classic sense at all: that he never
had an acquaintance model of knowledge, never posited special Forms that could be
known, did not have what has been called a two-world view, and that he always, even in
his Early and Middle dialogues, related the capacities that he would call knowledge
to the ability to produce the propositions that go with such competence: that is, that
knowledge always took a proposition or logos as content. This line is taken by (among
others) Gail Fine. She maintains that Plato always held that knowledge was a form of
true belief, and that, throughout the dialogues, what makes knowledge ‘true’ is a kind
of holistic coherence, not a realism of the sort that most readers have found in the
Middle dialogues.
This third view is unitarian: there is no need for a story of development or change.
But it secures the unity of Plato’s work by reading back what the Rylean readers saw
in the Later dialogues, and finding it already there in the Meno, Republic, and so on.30
I shall call this view the Fine Reading, because Fine has been its most prominent and
determined exponent.
27
David Sedley, The Midwife of Platonism: text and subtext in Plato’s Theaetetus (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 2004); David Bostock, Plato’s Theaetetus (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988). Sedley thinks that Plato
saw himself as continuing the same project throughout (Sedley, The Midwife of Platonism, 13–15).
However, he thinks that Plato endorsed the Socratic approach in his early work, and that in the Theaetetus
the text serves as midwife, to deliver a Platonic brainchild that Socrates himself could not conceive, which
allows the text to elicit from the reader an answer not explicitly offered by Socrates, which is Plato’s answer.
So although he finds continuity between the Socratic (pre-Forms) project and the Platonic one, Sedley is
closer to the Rylean reading on the issue of whether there is ‘progress’ towards an ‘improved’ understanding
of the propositional structure of thought and knowledge, and towards the ‘correct’ diagnosis of false belief
as propositional. Like Frede, Sedley considers that some puzzles are still inadequately addressed in the
Theaetetus, and that Plato finds a correct solution in the Sophist (Sedley, The Midwife of Platonism, 119).
28
G.E.L. Owen, ‘Plato on not-being’ in Gregory Vlastos (ed.), Plato I: metaphysics and epistemology
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1970), 223–67 does not much discuss the Theaetetus, but seems to think it
still fairly benighted, though perhaps only about the relation between reference and meaning in sentences
(see Owen, ‘Plato on not-being’, 245).
29
See note 22. Burnyeat’s two options are not entirely satisfactory: see, for instance, some criticisms in
Lesley Brown, ‘Understanding the Theaetetus’, Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, 11 (1994), 199–224,
209–13.
30
See particularly Fine’s articles collected in her volume of reprints, Gail Fine, Plato on Knowledge and
Forms (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003).
II.ii Some further options

The three stories just mentioned are the main options represented in the literature
addressing Plato’s later epistemology. Either Plato did, or he did not, hold various realist
doctrines in what we call his Middle Period, such as the idea that knowledge is funda-
mentally different from belief, that particulars cannot be known, that knowledge cannot
be acquired from empirical experience, that there is a metaphysical realm of stable
objects that can be known, that truth and knowability are properties of permanent
unchanging Forms that have their own characteristics to the nth degree, and so on.
If Plato did not hold those views at all, he was never a confused metaphysician and
there is no charge to answer; so there is no need to invoke any change of mind. That is
how the Fine Reading solves the problem. If Plato did hold those views in the Middle
Period then either he was or was not right to do so. Then either he did or did not give
them up in the Later Period, supposing that the Theaetetus, and especially the Sophist,
were written later. If he was wrong to hold those views, then he was right to give them
up, and should be congratulated. This is how the Rylean Reading solves the problem.
If Plato was right to hold the realist views, then it is not likely that he gave them up.
Rather it is preferable to read the supposedly Later dialogues on the basis that he main-
tained those views to the end. We must then choose between supposing that the Later
dialogues explicitly defend Platonism, or that they implicitly encourage Platonism as the
only position that can survive the difficulties raised in those dialogues. These variants
belong to the Metaphysical Reading. Metaphysical Readers can hold either that the Later
dialogues present problems on which any non-realist ontology and epistemology will
evidently founder, or that the Later dialogues continue to reveal, directly, that the
Platonist ontology and epistemology survive unscathed.
Besides these, there are two other positions that do not fit entirely comfortably
with the scheme just sketched. One is represented by Michael Frede, the other by
John McDowell. Michael Frede was concerned mainly with Plato’s Sophist, especially
its work on negation of the verb ‘be’. Although he did not develop its implications with
respect to knowledge,31 it appears that he was a developmentalist. He thinks that the
Sophist still implies that there is a kind of Being that belongs only to Forms, but that
Plato had by then rejected some extreme versions of self-predication that were confusing
him in the Middle Period. He also seems to think that, in the Theaetetus, Plato has real-
ized that belief must be propositional, and distinct from perception.32 In these respects
Frede comes close to the Rylean position that we find in Burnyeat and Bostock. However,
31
His work on the Sophist is mainly contained in an early work, Michael Frede, Prädikation und
Existenzaussage (Hypomnemata, 18; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1967), together with a
more accessible article from later in his life, Michael Frede, ‘Plato’s Sophist on false statements’ in
Richard Kraut (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Plato (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992),
397–424. Michael Frede, ‘Observations on perception in Plato’s later dialogues’, Essays in Ancient Philosophy
(Mineapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 3–8 includes a very sketchy discussion of perception
and belief in the Theaetetus.
32
Frede, ‘Observations on Perception’.
he still has Plato saying some unfashionable things about perception and metaphysics,
retaining Forms in the late period, and invoking a special ‘itself in itself ’ use of the verb
‘be’ for saying what the Form is in itself, and in other ways seeks to show how alien the
material is, even in the late dialogues, to our way of thinking and to the distinctions
between senses of ‘to be’ so beloved of analytic interpreters. This alienating ambition
aligns him with the Metaphysical party, who would maintain that we ought to learn
from Plato’s unfashionable and challenging ways of addressing his problems. Some
of Frede’s thoughts, and his alienating ambitions, are quite close to what I am arguing
for here.
John McDowell is also slightly hard to place in my scheme. This is partly because
his major work on the subject is a commentary on the Theaetetus which lacks any
introduction or extended essay on any of the issues, so his overall view is hard to extract
from his intermittent comments on problematic passages. His position is evidently
something like the Rylean one, in that he thinks that Plato makes progress, and that the
later works abandon certain ways of thinking that were characteristic of Middle dialogues.
Parts of his commentary imply that Plato was (by now) equating truth and being with
propositional structure, and he thinks that Theaetetus 184–6 delivers a sense-datum
theory for perception; also he thinks that the arguments and distinctions that Plato
musters in discussing whether knowledge might be defined as true judgement ought
to have committed Plato to a propositional or quasi-propositional structure for know-
ledge if Plato had been sufficiently clear about what he was doing.33 Yet at the same
time, he emphasizes at relevant points that Plato thinks of his topic as ‘knowledge of
things’,34 concluding that Plato was at least somewhat confused by this, and by failing
to realize that ‘to know something as the thing it is’ should be unpacked as an answer to
an indirect question, amounting to knowing what it is, and should therefore be couched
as knowledge that . . . ,35 McDowell reckons that Plato still needs to make further progress
(which he does in the Sophist), and that he is still some way from reaching clarity on
these issues in the Theaetetus.
So McDowell, like Frede, recognizes that Plato still does things that are alien to modern
sensibilities, even in his relatively mature works, but McDowell does not commend
these strange ways of thinking, but supposes that it is a stage on the way to less non-
sensical talk. By the end of the Sophist, Plato will be close to talking as we (post-Fregean
philosophers of language) would expect him to talk. Evidently then, McDowell, like Frede,
favours the Rylean Reading, but thinks that the progress to clarity is still incomplete
in the Theaetetus.
Aside from these mainstream interpretations, we should also mention Straussian
readings, which suggest that Plato’s dialogues have one message at the exoteric level,
33
John McDowell, Plato’s Theaetetus (Clarendon Plato; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), particularly
118 and 192.
34
McDowell, Theaetetus, 115, 192. He also notes the direct object construction for doxazein, on which
see Chapter 11, Section I.
35
See Chapter 11, note 8.
for a superficial reading of the text, and another hidden meaning for those in the
know. Unlike Sedley’s maieutic reading of the Theaetetus (which also uses a distinction
between surface meaning and philosophical message) and those Metaphysical readers
(e.g. Cornford) who think that Plato is nudging us to supply the Forms where they are
not mentioned, the Straussian tradition looks for political or social reasons, not liter-
ary or pedagogical ones, for why Plato must hide his meaning. It also looks for political
or social importance, not philosophical significance, in what is hidden. In what follows,
I shall often suggest that by reading some portion of text closely we can discover that
the discussion fails in what it overtly sets out to do, for reasons that the reader can see,
while the characters in the dialogue cannot see it, because those characters are missing
something important—something that Plato the author wants the reader to bring to
bear. In such cases there is a hidden message that is not stated in the text, but it is a
philosophical message, about how to escape an impasse that the characters have
encountered. When I suggest such an authorial tactic, the idea is more like Sedley’s
maieutic reading,36 and Cornford’s Metaphysical Reading of the Theaetetus,37 and quite
unlike the Straussian approach.
II.iii That my interpretation is a variant of the first type

My own position does not coincide exactly with any of the approaches just sketched.
It is true that I share with McDowell the sense that Socrates really is talking about
something like knowing things in the Theaetetus, not ‘knowing that’.38 Whereas McDowell
thought that Plato was confused on that score, I disagree. I think that we need to take the
conversation in the Theaetetus, about discerning things and features, more seriously.
I think that the Theaetetus is not trying to talk about truth and falsity in propositions:
that is something else, for another dialogue. I do not think that the Sophist is trying to
revise Plato’s own treatment of an ongoing puzzle first addressed in the Theaetetus.39
On the contrary, the topic addressed in the Theaetetus (episteme) has been replaced by
a new topic (true and false sentences). It is our mistake if we cannot see that these two
topics are different.40
Certainly, on my view, some aspects of Plato’s work turn out to be alien and hard to
get our head around, if we come with preconceptions from early twentieth-century
analytic philosophy (though it is conceivable that these aspects might seem less alien
to those familiar with Wittgenstein’s later work, and parts of Kripke). I think that we
need to keep and respect what is alien in Plato’s work.41 I am attempting to read Plato’s
36
Sedley, The Midwife of Platonism. 37 Cornford, Plato’s Theory of Knowledge.
38
Not that one knows things on my view, but the faculties all take direct-object constructions. See further
Chapters 4 and 12.
39
Here I disagree with Sedley, The Midwife of Platonism, 119.
40
I cannot treat the Sophist in this volume, but see Chapter 13 for some thoughts.
41
I shall diagnose some peculiarities that are similar to what Frede found, especially his suggestions about
a special use of the verb ‘be’. See also Charles H. Kahn, ‘Some philosophical uses of “to be” in Plato’,
Phronesis, 26 (1981), 105–34 (reprinted in Charles H. Kahn, Essays on Being, Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2009, 75–108); R.E. Allen, ‘Participation and predication in Plato’s Middle Dialogues’ in Gregory
work, including the Theaetetus, without rewriting them to make knowledge or truth
propositional. However, I am not particularly concerned to make any of these works
(whether Middle or Late) defend the realist ontology that the Metaphysical Reading
found there. Rather, I share with Gail Fine the thought that the Platonist tradition
might not have the last word on what is going on, even in the Middle dialogues. The
continuity between the Middle and Late dialogues need not be a Platonism of exactly
the kind that has traditionally been attached to Plato’s name.
Still, I do not share Fine’s view of what we ought to find in Plato’s Middle Period. She
has a Rylean account of what knowledge should be, and suggests that we were wrong to
suppose that Plato ever had anything else. I, by contrast, want to suggest that we should
not have Plato end up there, with a Rylean view, even in the late period, and therefore, a
fortiori, not in the Middle or Early works either. In particular, I shall suggest that Plato
does indeed make a strong distinction between knowledge and opinion in both the
Middle and the Later dialogues, and he does not think, even in the Later dialogues,
that knowledge can be reduced to, or defined in terms of, belief, or opinion, or ‘seem-
ing’, plus something. I shall suggest that the traditional reading is right to link doxa
(seeming, discerning, opinion) with perception, and to think that Plato gives them both
the same status—that both fall short of knowledge because they are not accessing the
kind of content that can be known. In these respects I concur with the Metaphysical
Reading and dissent from much that Fine has to say.
On the other hand—and here I part company from the Metaphysical Reading—I do
not think that the distinction between knowledge and opinion entails a hard and fast
distinction between the sensible world and the intelligible world, or between Forms
and their instances, or between universals and particulars, or between being and
becoming. Certainly all these distinctions figure crucially in Plato’s thought, and inter-
sect in his discussions of both metaphysics and epistemology. But what falls on one
side of one of these divisions need not always fall on that side of the division, nor need
it always fall on that same side of the other divisions (if we imagine, for instance, that
we have laid these dualities out in a chart with two columns).
Here are two ways of thinking that things might be more complex than the traditional
‘two-world’ view of Plato’s distinction between Forms and Particulars. First we might
say that there are features (or attributes) and there are what the features belong to. An
individual case of justice can be regarded as a feature, or as a thing that has that feature.
In both cases the item is a particular that instantiates the generic form ‘justice’, but the
particular feature (a case of justice) is neither material, nor an object, although it is not
a Form.42 It is (or might be) abstract, but not generic. It is often unclear, when Plato
Vlastos (ed.), Plato: A collection of critical essays, Volume 1 (New York: Anchor Books, 1971), 167–83; Francisco
J. Gonzalez, ‘Propositions or objects? A critique of Gail Fine on knowledge and belief in Republic V’, Phronesis,
41 (1996), 245–75 (all questioning attempts to assimilate Plato’s uses of ‘is’ to the ‘is’ of predication).
42
It is what is known as a ‘trope’. See Peter Simons, ‘Particulars in particular clothing: three trope theor-
ies of substance’ in Stephen Laurence and Cynthia MacDonald (eds.), Contemporary Readings in the
Foundations of Metaphysics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 364–84.
speaks of many just [things] or many beautiful [things], whether he is referring to

instances of justice (tropes) or objects that have justice as a property (concrete particu-
lars with properties). If ‘Justice’, the Form, is an abstract property shared by particular
things, it is not clear whether what shares in it are instances of the property (tropes),
or concrete particulars that have it as a property. If there is and could be only one
instance of a property, what is the distinction between the Form and the one instance
of that property? The logical distinction clearly remains, even though plurality is not
a characteristic of the set of instances of that property. And again, is it not the case
that a Form too can itself have features, which instantiate other Forms? Can it also
itself be (or manifest) a particular property-instance of another kind? For instance,
every Form instantiates the general types ‘Form’ and ‘intelligible object’. Are these also
Forms, or are there only Forms of features, not of types of objects, in which case Forms
will not themselves be particular instances of Form (nor will any things or objects), but
they will have, or manifest, property-instances that are the instances of other Forms
(such as unity, difference, and so on: the great kinds, if you like).
Second, we might say that there is a distinction between the intelligible or semantic
conceptual tools with which we interpret the world, and the non-semantic objects
or things that are described or thought about in those terms. To instantiate an idea or
concept is to be something of the kind in question, but it is minds, intelligent beings,
that think of them and describe them in those terms. So there are inanimate beings
that can be thought of, and there are the ideas that we use to think about them. But of
course animate beings can also be in the first category: indeed, they must be when we
think about them or classify them or describe them. Ideas are mental and descriptive,
but they can be descriptive of the minds that think them, and they can be descriptive of
other ideas. Semantics can refer to semantic items as well as to non-semantic ones. So
if we think of the intelligible (Forms, ideas) as semantic entities, and the application of
them being the work of a mind, and the instantiation of them being when something
qualifies to be seen or thought of in those terms, then the things that can qualify for
some term or description can include both semantic and non-semantic entities. There
is no impermeable division between the two worlds, except that material objects can-
not be ideas, or the bearers of meaning (though they can be used as symbols or signs to
stand for an idea that has meaning).
So whether we think of Forms as generic classes, with their instances being particular
members of the class, or as property types, with their instances being tropes or token
cases of the property, or as the archetypes of semantic or conceptual tools and descrip-
tors, with their instances being those objects that qualify for the description, there will
be no simple ontological structure in which everything that there is falls permanently
into one or other but not both of those worlds, even though the logical distinction
between the two is absolutely clear, no matter which understanding we take of what a
‘Form’ is.
For understanding what Plato is talking about, it may be better to consider not
what things or objects can be known (and what can’t)—as though the issue were
ontological—but rather what kind of question one can know the answer to. Sometimes
Plato talks of knowing being, or ‘what it is’, which is the answer to a question about the
being of something. Being and truth and knowledge are closely connected in Plato’s
thought, as we shall see. The issue then is what is meant by knowing ‘what it is’, and
about what kind of thing (or under what circumstances) one can ask and answer this
question. One reason for trying to talk about Forms, among things that we might
know, is not that they are some special kind of permanent or real object, but that they
are the very same features as we use among our tools for predication and description of
other things, but when they are looked at in themselves, as the features that they are, not
as the features of something else, then we can say something about them, and indeed
know them, and not just use them to describe the incidental features of other things, as
we do in predication. Similarly, we can ask of some concept or generic idea not ‘what
things fall under it’, but ‘what it is in itself ’, which means something like what makes
a thing count as one of those, or what are the necessary and sufficient conditions for
falling into this class.
The question about ‘what it is’ seeks not the extension of the class but the criteria for
membership. It tempts us to an essentialist view, the search for definitions that give the
one key criterion that makes all just things count as just, or whatever. But although that
search for a single criterion turns out to be simple-minded, and never yields results,43
that does not mean that we never do know ‘what it is’ about an idea such as justice, or
that we should not ask what kind of knowing that is.44
II.iv That the contrast between episteme and doxa is the contrast
between the grasp of types or concepts and the recognition
of tokens or instances
In this book, I shall test the hypothesis that Plato thinks of knowing as answering the
‘what it is’ question about things of this kind—that is, knowing a concept or type, not as
an instance of another kind (e.g. that virtue is a kind of knowledge) but as what it is in
itself (what virtue is, what justice is). By contrast, seeming or perceiving are the terms
for seeing or recognizing a particular under some description, such as when we observe
that Theaetetus is ugly or that virtue is teachable, or that Socrates is a man or that virtue
is a kind of knowledge. (I use ‘seeming’ here as a handy term for non-sensory appearances
or doxa, where something seems to be F, i.e. dokei.) These, when expressed in language,
typically involve a kind of predication, forming a proposition to the effect that x is an F
(virtue is knowledge, for instance), but epistemically they typically consist in x seem-
ing F to A, or A perceiving x as F—or, as Socrates will more often say, A perceiving an F,
43
I simplify. It cannot yield results for the values that Socrates investigates.
44
For relevant reflections on knowing ‘what justice is’, as manifested in practice and not a definition,
see A.W. Price, Virtue and Reason in Plato and Aristotle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 178 and
note 28.
or perceiving the Fness of x.45 They involve applying a semantic idea or Form (such as
virtue) to an extensional particular (a particular virtue), even if that particular might
itself also be (on other occasions) itself a type (e.g. courage) that could have instances
or tokens of its own.46
This distinction between knowing Fness for what it is and seeing Fness as an instance
or example of some other kind or property G cuts across the divide between Forms and
particulars as traditionally conceived, since forming propositions about Forms or types
would then be a case of predication—and therefore a case of seeming, not knowing. It
might then seem that discovering, about a mere particular, what that thing is in itself,
would amount to knowing. But in fact it will not make sense to ask the ‘what is it’ ques-
tion about a particular, since knowing ‘what it is in itself ’ means knowing what makes
something count as one of those, and that is something that could only apply to something
that is generic, conceptual, or semantic—to a type or role, not to its token or occupant.
This helps us to see why Plato would want to say that the particular (qua particular)
cannot be known and is subject to becoming but not being.47
All of this runs completely counter to the pressure from some branches of analytic
philosophy to think that Plato was on his way to realizing (after some earlier confusion)
that ‘being’ and truth have something to do with predication, with structures of the
‘x is F’ sort, and hence that knowledge too should be propositional in structure. On the
contrary, I shall argue, Plato always assigns judgements about particular facts and tokens
to seeming, and even when true such judgements are no more than true seeming.
They fail to meet his criteria for being knowledge or science (episteme), not because
they are not truth-apt, but because the recognition that some x is F is the wrong kind of
content for episteme. In this book we shall look closely at some passages in both the
Meno and the Theaetetus that have been read as hints that predications of the ‘x is F’
kind might be serious candidates for being knowledge. I hope to show that Plato thinks
precisely the opposite.
Suppose I am right about what Plato is talking about, and he is right about the peculiar
nature of this knowledge. Should we then confine the word ‘know’ to this restricted range
of knowledge, as Plato confines his knowledge-terms to knowing what it is about a type
or form? Clearly not. On the contrary, knowledge will continue to mean what it ordinarily
means. Our vocabulary does not precisely fit Plato’s, and arguably Plato has tried to
impose an artificial restriction on how his Greek words can be used. He seems, on strict
days, to reserve episteme words for just one part of the knowledge spectrum. But his
usage can serve as a wake-up call to us. What Plato calls episteme is also something that
we would call ‘knowledge’, but arguably it does not occupy a sufficiently central place in
45
See Chapter 11, notes 12 and 52.
46
Again, see Price, Virtue and Reason in Plato and Aristotle, 178, 180–7.
47
For some discussion of this, see Chapters 4 and 5. The idea that the particular does not have being
of its own, but only becoming, is found more in the Timaeus and Sophist than in the dialogues we shall
discuss here.
our epistemological reflections, though it does have an established place in work on

the philosophy of language.48
In addition, since Plato does not use any of his several terms for ‘knowing’ to refer
to practices that we call propositional knowledge—or, at least, even if he uses knowledge
words occasionally of such practices, in non-specialist contexts,49 he seems to avoid
doing so when he is doing careful epistemology, and tends, instead, to deny that such
propositional thoughts can be knowledge—this too can prompt to us to rethink, to
wonder why we have focused so centrally on knowledge of facts, or even what leads
us to suppose that it is a kind of knowledge at all, let alone the most important
kind. Plato, when he is doing epistemology, does not consider that it qualifies for any
dignified name.50
Nevertheless, we need not immediately exclude what Plato excludes just because he
excludes it and has reasons for doing so that are worthy of attention. Rather, perhaps,
we should extend our attention to include what he includes as another important kind
of knowing. We might agree that it would help to have two different words, one for
‘knowing what the F is’ about a concept or descriptor and another for knowing about
something in the realm of particulars that qualifies for that description. We need
something like the distinction that John McDowell makes (following but dissenting
somewhat from Wilfrid Sellars) between a space of reasons and a space of natural laws.
In our case it is something like a distinction between the space of concepts or semantic
ideas, and a space where there are non-semantic facts to which those semantic ideas
can be rightly or wrongly applied. And then we need a distinction between the kind
of knowledge that is an understanding of items in the first space, and the kind of
knowledge that is a grasp of facts in the second space (which is logically dependent
on the former kind).
By alerting us to what mainstream epistemology has largely missed, but philosophy
of language has embraced, Plato prompts us to think about the conditions for know-
ledge in both realms. He prompts us to ask whether our traditional project to define
‘knowledge’ fails not just because it ignores the polysemy of the term ‘know’, but also
because ‘knowing that’ presupposes, and is parasitic upon, another more fundamental
kind of knowledge, which is knowledge of items in the space of concepts (what we
might call the intelligible world), which we had stopped noticing when we stopped
understanding Plato. What we actually need is the distinction between the intelligible
48
The topic of what it is to be a competent user of a concept tends to fall under philosophy of language,
meaning, or logic for us, rather than epistemology: e.g. Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity (Oxford: Blackwell,
1980); Saul Kripke, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982). See further
below (note 59, and Chapter 4).
49
E.g. in Protagoras 355d, 358b he discusses whether I can ‘know that something is bad’ and still do it
(I thank Michael Morris for raising these examples in debate). There is controversy over whether Socrates
claims to know ‘that he knows nothing’, but arguably he does not (see discussion in Gail Fine, ‘Does
Socrates claim to know that he knows nothing?’, Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, 35 (2008), 49–88).
50
See Section I.ii.
world and the sensible world, and we need to recognize the need for knowledge of the
first if one is to have any articulate grasp of the second.
III. In Which We Consider Whether it Is a Good

Idea to Look for a Definition, and, If So, Why
III.i That definition can serve three different roles in philosophical work,
only one of which is part of a philosophical method
Searching for a sound definition of something is a common methodology shared by
Plato and contemporary philosophy. It looms large in all Plato’s works on knowledge.
What purpose does it serve?
There seem to be three reasons why we might seek a definition, as part of a philo-
sophical enquiry. First, we might define our terms at the beginning of the discussion,
as a way to stipulate technical meanings for terms that figure in the investigation, and
guard against misunderstanding, lest readers come with some other understanding of
what the terms mean. In such cases, it matters little whether the stipulated definitions
adhere to standard uses of the terms outside philosophy, or outside the particular
scholastic tradition in which one is working, providing that they are not so counter-
intuitive that they become hard to fathom. So one might decide to use the word ‘run’ as
shorthand for ‘walk, skip or run’ in some discussion. Defining it at the start would
cause it to function accordingly, so no one could complain, even though ‘run’ doesn’t
normally include all that.
Such stipulative definition does not in itself contribute to the investigation of a
question, however,51 so defining things in this way is not a philosophical methodology
as such. It merely helps to prevent misunderstanding later, though it will achieve that
end only if the terms of the definition are also known to the reader or listener, and
mean the same to the reader/listener as they do to the author or speaker. So terms must
be defined with terms that are more familiar, and not vague or open to dispute.
A second possible role for definition is as a conclusion of an enquiry, as a way to
deliver the results. That is, we might conceive of our philosophical search as a search
for a definition of something, so that finding a definition would answer our question.
‘What is virtue?’ or ‘What is knowledge?’ might themselves be philosophical questions,
in which case finding a good definition could amount to success. Superficially it might
seem that Socrates conceived of his task like this, and that in those discussions where
he requests a definition he would, had he found one, have treated it as the answer, not
part of the enquiry.
In neither of these cases is finding a definition part of the method of enquiry. In the first
case it is a preliminary, to clarify the terms of the debate. In the second it is the outcome
of an enquiry: the answer, not the method. However, in the second case the method
51
See Chapter 10, Section II.
might involve proposing possible definitions and testing them to see if they are the
right answer, by a sort of trial-and-error procedure. It is plausible to see some of what
Socrates does in the dialogues as processes of testing definitions to see whether they
successfully answer a ‘what is Fness?’ question. However, when I say that Socrates does
this in the dialogues, I do not mean that Plato favours this method.
A third way in which a definition may figure in a philosophical investigation is as
part of the work itself, even when the task is not conceived as a search for a definition or
as a ‘what is it?’ enquiry. That is, we sometimes use the process of devising a definition
as a technique to test whether the subject we are investigating is really a single clear
subject. If we cannot give a single, clear account of what we are talking about, this casts
doubt on whether we have a clear topic of investigation, although it will not necessarily
reveal what the fault is. If we can only reach a definition by using terms that are just as
unclear or vague as the original term, this also raises suspicions. So, for example, one
might search for a definition of knowledge, to test whether the ordinary term ‘know’
picks out a single kind of thing, or is ambiguous or vague in some way. If we cannot
find a good definition immune to counter-examples, we might infer that our notion
of ‘knowledge’, that we hoped to define in a way that suited all cases, was actually a
complex of things, or somehow muddled. Then the next move would be to make finer
distinctions, or perhaps to abandon or rethink the question. If we find that there are no
terms that can elucidate the one whose scope we were trying to clarify, that might show
that the original term is one of the most basic in our grasp of the structure of things,
and can only serve to elucidate others.
Definitions used in this third way are instrumental (as was the first kind of merely
stipulative definition). They are not the conclusion of the enquiry, but tools for testing
whether the enquiry is clear, whether its object has been clearly identified, and whether
it yields to further analysis. The aim is not to explain an unfamiliar term to the reader,
but to bring the author to a clearer understanding of her topic, by completing an analysis
of its relation to other items that are precisely fitted to the task of elucidating it. The
definition must be as accurate as possible. If the terms are not familiar to the reader, so
much the worse for the reader: they will not be able to follow the work. But that does
not vitiate the quality of the work.
Which of these three roles do definitions play in Plato’s work? It’s easy, but probably
wrong, to imagine that Socrates was seeking definitions as the answer to his question.
I think it is more fruitful to see his quest for definitions as part of the method, on the
third model.
III.ii That failing to find a definition can be a fruitful part of a philosophical

investigation, when the author’s aim is to problematize faulty assumptions
or diagnose confusion
The third kind of search for a definition figures in much philosophical work. There are
two ways in which it can bear fruit: (a) by being successful, which is rare, or (b) by being
unsuccessful, which is common.
Unsurprisingly, a topic that needs investigation is typically one that is by no means

clear or simple: it has usually been a source of great confusion over time, which may be
precisely because there is something odd in the usage of ordinary language, or in the
way that philosophers have thought about things. Looking for a definition may reveal
that what we had always thought was a single unconfused idea is really not so, which
might prompt us to elucidate it as a spectrum of related phenomena, perhaps; or to
discover that the variants are still related in interesting ways, despite not sharing a
single definition. Finding the salient connections might be interesting, after failing in
the initial search for a definition.
There is a certain classic move in analytic philosophy that is made at this point. It is
called ‘family resemblance’ and is always, or almost always, attributed (incorrectly,
I suggest) to Ludwig Wittgenstein. It goes like this: we find that there are no necessary
and sufficient conditions for something we were trying to elucidate, or none that we
can find; so we conclude that it has no single essence—there is not just one way that
things might qualify as members of that kind, but various ways of qualifying, an over-
lapping network of conditions, none of which is necessary, but some selection of which
might be sufficient. Wittgenstein’s example was the notion of a game: even if we cannot
find one feature that all games share, there seem to be various diagnostic characteristics,
of which games tend to have at least one.52 Some readers jump to the conclusion that
Wittgenstein meant that this was true of all concepts, so that one could never hope for
a unitary definition.53 Some then suggest (also erroneously) that Wittgenstein meant
that we should then offer a disjunctive definition instead, listing alternative qualifying
characteristics. These quasi-essentialist responses do not capture the spirit of the later
Wittgenstein at all well, although this is not the place to discuss that issue in detail. But
in any case, we do not need to go that way, since even if no such definition is possible,
the activity of mapping features that strike us as characteristic of the family can be a
useful way of proceeding, at least at the start of an enquiry. It can show up a complexity
not previously observed, or it may help us to see a focal point, or identify the paradigmatic
cases that set the standard. These paradigms tend to direct our philosophical analysis,
making us think of certain examples as more genuine than others, or closer to the real
thing. Wittgenstein reminds us that we are tempted to think that there is an essence or
single common factor, because we tend to focus on central cases that most obviously
display some characteristic feature, which then strikes us as essential or diagnostic,
even though it is actually neither necessary nor sufficient.
The practice of defining a concept as part of an enquiry (the third way) is neither a
preliminary stipulation of terms, nor the target of the enquiry, nor a tentative attempt
at an answer for testing, but it may itself be a philosophical method to discover the lie
of the land, so to speak: to map the complexity of the subject, diagnosing the source of
the earlier difficulties. It is, in effect, a method of problematizing things, or showing
Wittgenstein PI §66.
52
See further in Chapter 4, and Rowett, ‘Plato, Wittgenstein and the definition of games’.
53
why they once caused bewilderment. So starting one’s enquiry with a quest for a
definition need not mean that the desired end is finding one.
III.iii That the definition does not need to be in terms understood by the
interlocutor, nor does Socrates (or Plato) think that it does
Of the three uses of definitions just described, only the first is aiming to teach someone
the meaning of a word whose meaning is unfamiliar, so that is the only case where one
must define it in terms that are known to the interlocutor. Yet that kind of definition
merely sets up the terms of an enquiry, and makes no contribution to the method or
the result.
Hence Socrates is right to dismiss Meno’s request that a definition be couched in
terms understood by the interlocutor (Meno 75c5). When the aim is not to teach
someone the meaning, or stipulate terms, but rather to state (as Socrates puts it) the
truth, the criteria of success have nothing to do with whether the interlocutor subject-
ively understands and accepts it. The definition succeeds or fails by whether it correctly
decodes the objective relationship between the definiens and the definiendum. If Socrates
asks his interlocutor to accept or reject a proposed definition, that is only to confirm
the hypothesis that this definition succeeds: that a genuine fit has been found between
definiens and definiendum, to the satisfaction of all.
This point is not always understood. Some commentators suppose that Socrates,
and Plato, accept Meno’s demand at 75c. Dominic Scott thinks that it articulates a
‘dialectical requirement’ accepted by Socrates.54 Even more ambitiously, Gail Fine holds
that it is a requirement for knowledge, not just a dialectical convention.55 But it is clear
from what he says at 75c8 that Socrates considers the request quite bogus. Were they
not trying to engage in a friendly discussion, he would be very rude to Meno, but out of
politeness he makes a pointless concession to Meno’s misguided and sophistical parrying
tactic. Methodologically, Socrates is correct in saying that the onus on the interlocutor
is to show that the definiens is faulty, not just hard to understand. Finding fault with it
for an irrelevant failing is (as Socrates suggests) an eristic tactic, a case of ignoratio elenchi.
But Meno’s incompetent or aggressive tactic is effectively defused by Socrates’ willingness
to comply, even though complying is not required. This restores collaborative dialectic,
but is not dialectically necessary.56
From this and many other such passages, it is surely clear that Socrates is not using
definitions in the first way, to stipulate or teach the meaning of a word, but that his
purpose is philosophical, probably aiming to answer questions of conceptual analysis
by presenting a successful definition. Plato, meanwhile, is using Socrates to do something
different: what he does is (a) problematize the concept under discussion, by having
Socrates fail to find a definition, and (b) diagnose Socrates’ difficulties and confusions,
54
Dominic Scott, Plato’s Meno (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 35–6.
55
Gail Fine, ‘Knowledge and logos in the Theaetetus’, Philosophical Review, 88 (1979), 366–97 (reprinted
in Gail Fine, Plato on Knowledge and the Forms (2003) 225–51), 226.
56
See also Chapter 10, Section II.
display the sterility of the definitional project and its lack of any useful way to solve
its problems, and (c) prompt the reader, and, within the dialogue, prompt the Socrates
character to correct the failure in some cases by adopting a new methodology to over-
come the problem. By working with icons and paradigm cases instead of definitions,
this new method can help the reader/interlocutor to grasp the true nature of the con-
cept under discussion, and to understand how one can know and use the concept, and
count as wise about it, without being able to give a definition.
IV. In Which We Investigate How Knowing Relates

to Factual Information and Propositional Utterances
or Beliefs
IV.i That knowledge should not be equated with the ability to do
something, or to express a belief in words, although those abilities
may be evidence of knowing
Having just seen that a quest for definition can help to problematize faulty solutions to
a question or diagnose the reasons for common confusions, let us try that method now.
Let our question be ‘What is knowledge?’: can it be defined or is it not a simple unitary
concept? If knowledge is not just one thing, what paradigmatic examples lie at the focus
of the concept?
We might notice that knowledge is associated with being competent at some kind
of practice, whether that involves doing something (e.g. riding a bicycle) or speaking
truthfully (answer questions correctly) or discriminating (e.g. in an identity parade).
Should we then focus (a) on the outputs (what the knower can achieve), or (b) on the
causal explanation (why or how they can do those things)? If we focus only on (a), the
manifest outcomes, this seems to lead to a kind of behaviourism. It identifies know-
ledge solely and completely with the outward behaviour that is enabled. It is unable
to distinguish instinctive responses from abilities informed by the acquisition of
information, experience, or calculation. The second thought, (b) that there is cognitive
content that is causally responsible for the manifest behaviour, seems to lead to a more
internal account of knowledge, as the condition of having stored information or a
technique that could be consulted or brought into use in performing various actions,
which is still there even when not manifest in action. My view is that (b) is the only
viable option, and that theories that try to reduce knowledge (whether of facts or of
concepts) to the behaviour, actions, and expressions of the knower, and deny that there
is anything to find inside the mind underlying the behaviour, are missing the knowledge
and citing only the manifestations of it.57 I think there will be a similar result for ‘knowing
how’, but that is not my immediate interest.
57
Wittgenstein is sometimes tempted to behaviourism, and has sometimes been accused of it (with
some justification), but there are passages where he is alert to it and resists: see PI 150 (on ‘can’ and ‘under-
stands’) and PI 152–4 (on distinguishing manifestations from the inner content they are evidencing).
For sure, we often attribute knowledge to people because they can evidently do things
reliably. We don’t always check whether they really know what they seem to know, but
this does not mean that there are no internal or causal requirements. If someone can
do what can only be done by someone who knows, then of course we assume that she
knows, and we don’t check that her ability is founded on knowledge.58 In fact, saying
that she ‘knows’ is precisely ascribing such cognitive contents to her, because what she
can do is the evidence for that. Sometimes we do explicitly check the causal story, to
exclude the possibility that someone’s success is due to guesswork, intuitive reactions,
sheer luck, or is unreliable. So sometimes we do and sometimes we don’t check whether
the person knows, but this need not signify a difference in the kind of knowledge, or
our criteria for what can be knowledge, or where the knowledge is found, but is more
to do with pragmatic and contextual issues, concerning whether the circumstances
leave room for luck or guesswork. So cases where we check that the person really
knows, and the cases where we don’t, are not different kinds of knowing, and do not
lead to different definitions of what knowing is. They are just different standards of
evidence, applicable in different circumstances.
Let us suppose, then, that knowing typically involves being able to do something on
the basis of an internalized source of information acquired in an appropriate way
(leaving open the possibility that the appropriate ways may be different for different
kinds of information). What kind of ability, and what range of information, would
count as knowing? Well, one thing that people can do is make true statements about
what states of affairs currently obtain, formerly obtained, or will obtain in the world.
One can describe one’s surroundings, for instance. Right now I can report that the trees
outside my window, though not in leaf, are beginning to show some green. I can also
tell you who owns each of the five cars parked in the car park. The information I need
for the first claim is available to anyone placed where I am, with eyes to see and an
understanding of trees. By contrast, for the second claim I need information about
who lives here and which car belongs to which household. I could support my claim to
know, as opposed to guessing correctly, by explaining the sources of my information:
observing my neighbours’ behaviour, conversations, a grasp of whether cars are privately
owned, shared, or rented in this kind of housing scheme.
Analytic philosophers tend to take this kind of content (particular factual information)
as the typical content of the focal and most important type of ‘knowing’. They would
describe it by saying that I know that the trees are coming into leaf, and that the Volvo
belongs to Jean. That is also how I express it, when I demonstrate that I do know by
answering some question. The expression takes the form of a specific proposition
expressed in words (naturally). But notice that my inner source of information—what
I learned, and have to consult or deploy to produce these utterances—is not likely to
come in the form of specific propositions, either those ones or any others. In the case
58
Price, Virtue and Reason in Plato and Aristotle, 178 offers some reflections on this kind of evidence
of knowing.
of the trees, for instance, I have acquired a visual impression from looking at the scene
before me, and noticing greenish hues surrounding the still visible bare branches.
Selecting from what I see, and finding words to fit, I can then formulate various
statements: that the trees are just coming into leaf, that spring is on its way, that the
beech trees are less advanced than the plane trees, and so on. To say that I saw ‘that
the trees were coming into leaf ’ would be true, but there is a vast range of other
descriptions, in all sorts of terms, of what the situation was that would also be true,
and which would also be based on the visual information that I have. In the case of
the cars, I confidently assert that Jean owns this Volvo on the basis of plentiful observations
and experiences which simultaneously provide the basis for many other things that
I turn out to know—that Jean went to Sainsbury’s in her Volvo yesterday, that she cleaned
it last week, and that she fetches the children every day in it, for example. I do not
need ever to have formulated these thoughts as known propositions, but they can be
deduced from what I do know (which is not a proposition). No finite set of propositions
exhausts the content of what I know from observing the behaviour of my neighbours
over time.
It would be nonsense, therefore, to claim that the knowledge, from which I draw
the conclusions expressed in these sentences, was itself in the form of sentences or
propositions. I observed trees and cars, events and patterns of behaviour, not sentences.
My answers to specific questions are in sentences, but the knowledge is not. So the
sentences and the propositions that they express are not themselves the knowledge,
but are a reformulated expression of (some of) what I know, or an application of the
knowledge to the task of answering a particular question. So even with respect to
the kind of knowledge which analytic philosophy treats as paradigmatic, I would deny
that the knowledge itself is propositional. Certainly one way in which it is manifested is
in the utterance of propositional claims, usually (but not always) true.
Once we recognize the difference between the knowledge and the utterances, it
becomes clear why uttering a false proposition can also be an expression of knowledge.
Propositional claims and propositional beliefs based on knowledge are not always true.
Someone may end up believing a proposition or uttering a sentence that is intended to
be true, but happens unpredictably to be false; equally she may believe or utter sentences
that happen unpredictably to be true, but are incorrectly explained for contingent
reasons, in both cases on the basis of knowledge. Examples of such accidental truths
and falsities (including Gettier cases) are often deployed as challenges to the JTB analysis
of knowledge. But since the knowledge is not itself the propositions, true or otherwise,
that are believed or uttered, but rather the stock of well-founded knowledge of which
they are incomplete and contextually unreliable expressions, this is exactly what we
should expect. But then, evidently, knowledge is not a set of justified true beliefs or
propositions. It just happens sometimes to provide the justification for some belief
or assertion, and those beliefs and assertions are often true as a result.
The same goes for the ability to produce explanations, in justification of one’s claim
to know. These too typically appear as propositions, about the reason for assenting to
some claim, and are uttered in response to something like a request for evidence. But
the fact that when we express these reasons the expressions come out as statements or
propositions does not prove, or even suggest, that the underlying knowledge was
itself composed of propositions. After all, it would be very difficult for the expression
of it in language to appear in any other form than a proposition. On the other hand,
linguistic communication is not the only way to communicate knowledge or reasons
or justifications: one can also prove things by showing the person some diagrams,
pictures, things, or by demonstrating some actions or procedures that work: all of these
can make clear to another person what it is that one knows, and the basis or justification
for it, and the other person too can come to know what you know in that way, without
any linguistic expression or proposition intervening in the communication at any stage.
Noticing that this is so can help to shift us away from naively assuming that because we
sometimes utter sentences, the knowledge conveyed or expressed in the sentences
must have the same form as the sentences in our language.
IV.ii That some other kinds of knowing, besides knowing particular facts
about states of affairs, are more important for understanding what Plato is
talking about
Besides the knowledge that relates to particular facts or states of affairs, there are other
kinds. My interest is in three that figure less prominently in recent epistemology, but
which are (I think) important for Plato, and indeed may be serving as the paradigm
for him.
First is the one that is the main target of this book: the grasp of a concept. This is
made manifest in various kinds of competence, including understanding what people
mean when they use that concept, using it correctly, picking out examples, and making
suitable utterances that employ it.59 In English, we speak of ‘knowing what a horse is’ or
‘knowing what horses are’ (as in Plato’s example at Phaedrus 260b–c).60
Second is recognizing something as one of a kind. For instance, knowing, about
this animal, that it is a horse, or knowing, about this person, that it is Meno.61 This is
manifest in competences like picking out the thief from an identity parade, referring to
the right extensional item, or matching the object to a given name or general term. This
knowledge involves correctly classifying an individual as what it is—knowing that this
is a horse—by contrast with knowing what horses are, which was the previous kind. In
Chapter 3, we shall examine Plato’s distinction between the poion esti question (what it
is like) which asks us to apply a descriptor to a particular case, and the ti esti (what it is)
question which asks us to explain the concept itself. The poion esti questions sometimes
expect a propositional answer in subject-predicate form using the copula (‘Bucephalus
59
See above, note 48. Some aspects of this kind of knowing and how it is acquired are considered in
Charles Travis, ‘On knowing what: where do correct ideas come from?’ in Herman Parret (ed.), On
Believing: epistemological and semiotic approaches (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1983), 333–56. See Chapter 4 for
further discussion of this kind of knowledge.
60
See Chapter 4. 61 See further in Chapter 4.
is a horse’), or they may just require one to point out or label a token case, by choosing
a horse, say. The ti esti question expects an answer that defines or explains what a horse
is or what makes something count as a horse rather than a donkey. For Plato, only the
cognitive content that underpins the ability to address ‘ti esti’-type questions counts
as episteme, or so I suggest. Answering the other questions will also call upon that
knowledge, because identifying a horse also depends on understanding what a horse
is. One needs first to know ‘what it is’ about ‘horse’ to answer a poion question about an
instance of the kind and say it is a horse. But correctly recognizing a particular horse as
a horse is not itself a case of episteme, but of perception or doxa.
Third on our list is knowing the proper name for something, whether a particular
item or a kind or type. This should be distinguished from knowing what kind of thing
it is, or who it is, since one may know it in those ways without knowing the name,
or without knowing the general term that describes it. One may know that this is
Alexander’s horse, without knowing that he calls it Bucephalus. One may select a horse,
knowing that it is a horse, and knowing what horses are, without knowing that such
animals are called ‘horses’. One may join in a game without knowing its name, or even
whether it has a name. One may understand that it is a game, and what games are,
without yet having learned the word ‘game’, as anyone who has played peek-a-boo with
a baby will know. Learning the word, in this case ‘game’, is learning a label for a practice
that is already familiar. Knowledge of the name is typically manifested in competences
such as applying the name correctly, or understanding what people mean when they
use it. For explaining a grammatical point to a student, it helps if she knows the word
‘preposition’. But even if she does not know the term, her knowledge of language is
such that she can in practice use prepositions and distinguish them from other kinds of
words. One can explain the point, though less quickly, without teaching her the name
for that kind of word at all.
These three kinds of knowing can look rather similar, if we focus on rule-following
as the behavioural manifestation of conceptual knowledge.62 For then the same ability
may be evidence of more than one of these: for instance, being able to fetch horses
when someone asks for horses is evidence that you know what a horse is, which things
are horses, and which things are called ‘horses’. Failing to fetch horses might be due to
lacking one, two, or all three of these kinds of knowledge. But, I submit, none of these—
knowing what an x is, knowing that this is an x, knowing that these are called ‘x’—none
of these kinds of knowledge should be identified, without remainder, with the abilities
that manifest or demonstrate that their owner possesses all or some of these kinds of
knowledge. The knowledge is not itself the practice of following the rule, but rather
the grasp of what it would be to go on in the same way so as to be disposed to continue
appropriately in all kinds of situations, in response to any question. It may indeed
be that two or more different kinds of knowledge are required for performing many of
the tasks that count as evidence of knowing.
See Burnyeat, Theaetetus, 75, discussing Theaetetus 188b–c.

62
In discussing Plato, I suggest, we should focus much more on these kinds of cognitive
grasp, of concepts, things, and names, and much less on the production of ‘that’ clauses
or explanatory and justificatory claims. For the latter, it seems to me, are expressions of
knowledge, as are many other kinds of behaviour and activity. We should not confuse
the ways in which we express or prove our expertise with the content that is known.
IV.iii That the ability to read the world as made up of tokens that instantiate
types is like using a map, dense with pictorial information
How many items do you have in mind when you see this animal as a horse, or this
building as a church? We should not imagine that there is a complex procedure, whereby
you first see something (a token of no particular kind) and then apply the concept
‘horse’ or ‘church’ to it. Rather, you will always see it as something. It is no simpler or
more complex to see it as a building than as a church. You are aware of something under
a certain description, and the description is supplied (sometimes in linguistic form,
sometimes not) from your repertoire of concepts (e.g. building, church, landmark,
thing, artefact). Some conceptual work is built into the very experience that brings it
to your attention. We hardly ever (maybe never?) encounter something that can’t be
categorized in any of our existing terms.63
This repertoire of descriptors is a body of knowledge (the kind of knowledge that
Plato is most interested in). Grasping a type or form is a kind of knowing (the kind that
Plato is concerned with). It is a body of knowledge distinct from our repertoire of
known facts about things, learned from experience or testimony. Plato is not much
interested in those. I find it helpful to compare our capacity to read the world with our
capacity to read a map. A map contains an unlimited range of information, in the form
of a diagram and without words or propositions. We can use it to answer any suitable
question, even one that the map-maker did not anticipate. Is the post-office before
or after the last turning before the pub, if you’re travelling north? The answer to this
question is evident not as a proposition, but is encapsulated in a drawing in which features
like distance and orientation are represented conventionally (adopting or inventing
some mapping convention). Although it is not a linguistic representation, the user can
turn it into a linguistic representation by expressing the information as a proposition—
or a great many propositions. ‘The post-office is a good halfway down, past the first
turning, just opposite the large house called the Old Rectory, where the road begins to
turn left.’ However, no matter how many sentences you utter, they will never contain as
much information as the map (unless we are talking of a very small sketch map devised
for a single purpose).
My point is that our epistemology needs to provide for the kinds of knowledge that
have unlimited density of information in this pictorial way. If there is no provision for
that, the theory is wholly inadequate. Examples of such density of knowledge would be
63
Even describing it as ‘that thing’ involves some kind of discrimination of a category of things (as
opposed to, say, people, shadows, phantoms, one’s own body etc.).
(a) the expertise about the world that sentient beings obtain from living in the world,
that enables humans and animals to act coherently, speak sense (if they can speak),
and answer appropriately to unlimited questions or problems without prior notice;
(b) the expertise of a craftsman who can consider how best to proceed with an unforeseen
problem, due to knowing his tools and the materials available; and (c) conceptual
knowledge—dense, quasi-pictorial, quasi-expertise, which, like the craftsman’s expertise,
can be deployed across unforeseen circumstances and extended to examples not previ-
ously encountered. If the epistemologist confines her attention to a certain limited
range of expressions, namely those uttered or written in propositional form, she will
fail to capture the relation between knowledge as the equipment that enables one to
read the world, no matter what the world throws up, and the resulting utterances,
which someone with that kind of knowledge might be disposed to make. The utter-
ances may be propositional claims about the world, but the knowledge is not acquired
or stored as a set of propositions.
Comparing the way we read the world, when we are conceptually equipped, with the
way we read a map, when we understand the mapping conventions, helps us to see that
someone who lacks the concept of a ‘church’ will see the same building but in a differ-
ent way, just as someone reading the map without the key sees the symbol, but not as
what it stands for. Without the key we cannot answer the questions in quite the right
terms, though once the symbols and their meanings are explained, we can produce the
same propositions that a competent map-reader produces, and give reasons.64
V. In Which I Summarize the Plan for the Rest

of This Book
My aim in this book is to develop and test the hypothesis that Plato was persistently
fascinated by the conceptual resources that we deploy, and by their apparent objectiv-
ity and normativity, and by puzzles about what it is to lack or be mistaken about an idea
for which there is a normative role, such as justice. I shall examine this theme in three
works of Plato, the Meno in Part II, the Republic in Part III, and the Theaetetus in
Part IV. Before turning to those dialogues, I start with an exploration (in Chapter 2) of
the relation between knowledge and truth, and the relation between knowledge and
belief. This will lay a foundation for investigating what Plato has to say and avoiding
various traps into which we might otherwise fall.
64
There is a continuity between reading maps and reading geometrical diagrams and other visual tools
of proof and deduction in mathematics (about which we shall have much to say in later chapters). See
Reviel Netz, The Shaping of Deduction in Greek Mathematics (Ideas in Context; Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1999), 59.
2
Truth and Belief
I. In Which We Consider the Relation Between

Knowledge and Truth, and Between Knowledge
and Belief
Knowledge and truth are related. To claim to know is to claim to know the truth.
If I discover that something I thought I knew is actually false, I conclude that I never
did know it. For it cannot be known if it is not true.
This much we can get without any sophisticated enquiry into what we mean by
‘truth’. It follows that when we do make a sophisticated enquiry into what truth is, our
conclusions must be constrained by the requirement that knowledge is of the truth.
This requirement is probably one factor that motivates the idea that proper knowledge
is propositional knowledge (knowing that p). One might reach this conclusion by
observing that what we know must be the kind of thing that can be true or false (its
content must be truth-apt), and if propositions are the only kind of thing that can be
true or false, then knowledge (and any other cognitive states with truth values, such as
belief) must take propositions for content.1 This sequence of thought is equally avail-
able whether truth is conceived as correspondence with a mind-independent world or
as coherence among a body of propositions.2 Realists and non-realists alike tend to
think that truth belongs to propositions.
To free us from this sequence of thought, I shall suggest not only that there are other
kinds of knowledge, taking other kinds of content besides propositions (as explained
in Chapter 1), but also correspondingly that there other kinds of truth belonging to
other kinds of things besides propositions. It might initially seem that two possibilities
are open. One might think (a) that, strictly speaking, only propositions are truth-apt,
so any other kind of known object, besides propositions, should not be described as
‘true’, and any temptation to describe other things as true would be due to forced
assimilation to the core type of knowing, in an attempt to adhere to the imagined constraint
1
I use ‘content’ to refer to conceptually rich mental content, unlike Donald Davidson, ‘On the very idea
of a conceptual scheme’, Inquiries Into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 183–98
who uses ‘content’ for the non-representational ‘given’, as opposed to a conceptual scheme. See discussion
in John McDowell, Mind and World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), xvi, 3.
2
E.g. Donald Davidson, ‘A coherence theory of truth’ in Ernest LePore (ed.), Truth and Interpretation:
perspectives on the philosophy of Donald Davidson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 307–19.
truth and belief 35
that all knowledge must be ‘of the truth’ (so all knowable items must be truths). Perhaps
after all there are other kinds of knowledge that are not ‘of the truth’ and that imagined
constraint was wrong. Alternatively, one might think (b) that truth is a broader notion,
as is knowledge, and the mistake was to assimilate all cases of truth to the paradigm of
propositional truth. Perhaps after all there are other acceptable senses of ‘truth’, and the
word ‘true’ can apply to many things, including all kinds of representational structures,
and perhaps even non-representational items.3
Option (a) rejects a mistaken constraint on the concept of knowledge while option
(b) rejects a mistaken constraint on the concept of truth. Probably both are mistakes,
and should be jettisoned: this chapter will explore those thoughts. But first we should
consider whether we correctly understand how knowledge relates to propositional
content and truth in the paradigm case of knowing that p.
I.i That knowledge is about something, but not about a proposition,

or about the truth of a proposition
Both knowing and being true are intentional features. That is, they have ‘aboutness’;
they refer to something else. To know is to know about something; and to be true is
to be true about something (at least in the uncontroversial case of propositions
being true). For instance, the proposition ‘my friend is coming to stay’, if true, is
true about my friend, and her plans. If I know that, I know something about my
friend and her plans.
So the proposition is not what the knowledge is about. Both the knowledge and
the proposition are about what the proposition is about, in this case the things and
events that the proposition truly describes, e.g. my friend and her plans. Knowing
needs to reach out to the world that it is about, not just to some propositions that
describe that world.
Of course there are cases of knowing about a proposition: for instance, if Jenny
knows that ‘trees are green’ is a simple proposition, then what she knows about is the
proposition ‘trees are green’. But usually what we know about are things. For example,
if Mark knows that the party is at 7 p.m. , then what Mark knows about is a party, and
its starting time, which is an event in the future. Most of our knowledge is not about
propositions, like Jenny’s example, but about ordinary things and events, like Mark’s
example. Because he knows about the starting time of the party, Mark can derive vari-
ous true propositions from what he knows—propositions such as ‘The party starts at
7 p.m.’, ‘it will not have started by 6 p.m.’, and so on. To know the starting time is to
know that a whole range of such propositions are true, and to capture all that Mark
knows, by knowing that one fact, one would need an extensive if not infinite list of such
propositions. Yet for simplicity’s sake, let us say that the content of his knowledge is
that ‘the party starts at 7 p.m.’. Nevertheless, that proposition is not what he knows
3
See Section II.
about (as ‘trees are green’ was what Jenny knew about). ‘The party starts at 7 p.m.’ describes
a situation or state of affairs, but what Mark knows about is the state of affairs that
it describes.
Sometimes we say that what you know is the truth of some claim, or that some
claim is true. Although ‘truth’ here appears to be the thing that you know about, on
closer inspection it turns out that knowing the truth of the proposition consists in
knowing—about the situation that the proposition is about—that it does indeed obtain.
So knowledge is still about the state of affairs, not about a proposition. It would be quite
misleading to claim that what Mark knows is that the claim ‘the party starts at 7 p.m.’ is
true. Mark needed to know about a party and its starting time, not whether some
statement is true.
I.ii That it is a mistake to suppose (with Vendler and others) that belief,
but not knowledge, is a propositional attitude
The correct thought that knowledge—even propositional knowledge—is not about or
of propositions, but is about, or of, the real things and states of affairs that propositions
describe, has led some scholars to distinguish between knowledge and belief in this
respect: to deny that knowledge is a ‘propositional attitude’ while retaining the idea
that belief is a propositional attitude. This project seems to originate with Zeno Vendler
in the 1960s, though there may be earlier examples that I have missed.4 For conveni-
ence, I shall call it ‘the Vendler view’. Since my focus in this book is not on belief, but on
knowledge, it would be inappropriate to devote much space to discussing the correct
analysis of propositional beliefs, or whether there are non-propositional beliefs, or
whether ‘propositional attitude’ is a useful description, but a brief glance at the reasons
why the Vendler view has been attractive, and what is wrong with it, is worthwhile. It is
common to read Plato’s work on doxa to be about what we call ‘belief ’, and to take some
of his definitions in the Theaetetus as attempts to define knowledge as a species of
true belief. We should therefore set aside two possible responses to that thought that
are based on the Vendler view: first the thought that the project would be misguided
if so, since belief and knowledge are quite different kinds of thing; and second the
thought that Plato might be rejecting ‘true belief ’ definitions for reasons like the Vendler
reasons. Since the Vendler view is confused, it will not help Plato here, I suggest. As we
shall see, there are other reasons why Plato is right to reject the attempt to analyse
(what he calls) knowledge as a species of doxa, but since what he calls knowledge is not
propositional knowledge of facts, and what he calls doxa—though closer to being
propositional beliefs about facts and states of affairs—is not what we mean by belief
and is not a propositional attitude, we cannot help him by invoking Vendler’s view.
4
Zeno Vendler, Linguistics in Philosophy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967), Kenneth M.
Sayre, Belief and Knowledge: mapping the cognitive landscape (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997)
and a surprisingly generous discussion of Vendler’s idea in Williamson, Knowledge and its Limits, 43. Even
more recently, Trenton Merricks, ‘Propositional attitudes?’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 109 (2009),
207–32 seems to be repeating much the same view as Sayre.
truth and belief 37
The basic claim defended by Zeno Vendler, Kenneth Sayre, Trenton Merricks, and
so on is that belief takes a proposition as its object, whereas knowledge, and some other
attitudes, such as hope, fear, and desire, take states of affairs as their objects. For, they
say, we do not hope for a proposition, or even for a proposition to be true. We hope for
a sunny afternoon.5 By contrast (the Vendler view maintains), when we believe some-
thing, what we believe is a proposition (‘that it will be sunny’, vel. sim.). So, they suggest,
we should say that beliefs have propositions as their objects, but that knowledge, hopes,
etc. have the very states of affairs themselves (not descriptions of states of affairs) as
their objects.6
The plausibility of the Vendler view is illusory. For it is no more true that we have
a belief about a proposition than it is that we have a hope for a proposition. When we
believe that it will be sunny, we have a belief about how things are and will be, not about
the proposition ‘that it will be sunny’. This is no different from the fact that we hope for
sunshine, not for a proposition, and we know about sunshine, not about a proposition.
Belief is no more and no less propositional than other cognitive relations to the world,
for in each case we are thinking about how things are, not about how they are described
(except in the unusual cases, like Jenny’s example above, where what we know, believe,
or hope is something about a statement or proposition).
I detect three muddles that lead to the recurrent popularity of the Vendler view:
(i) the ambiguity of the word ‘belief ’; (ii) a worry about false beliefs, and (iii) confusion
generated by the way we use propositional clauses to describe how things seem. Let us
examine and shed these confusions one by one.
(i) The relevant ambiguity in the word ‘belief ’ is this: the word ‘belief ’ sometimes
refers to the attitude of believing something (e.g. in assenting to your claim that the
party is at 7 p.m., I adopt an attitude of belief). We can call this an attitude of ‘cre-
dence’ or ‘assent’. Alternatively, ‘belief ’ may refer to the content of the belief, namely
what I assented to, in this case the claim that the party is at 7 p.m. By assenting to that,
I made it one of my beliefs. We can call this a ‘view’. These two senses of ‘belief ’ have
a different grammar in English: in the first case ‘belief ’ is a mass term, while in the
second it is a count noun: we can have a plurality of those beliefs.7 They are also dis-
tinct in whether they can be true or false. Belief in the sense of credence is an attitude,
and is therefore not representational and is not a candidate for being true or false. It
can be right or wrong, depending on whether it is assent to something that deserves
5
Sayre, Belief and Knowledge, 9–10.
6
The reference to ‘objects’ here is also a source of confusion, but one that need not be addressed on
this occasion.
7
Paul Ricoeur, ‘La problématique de la croyance: opinion, assentiment, foi’ in Herman Parret (ed.), On
Believing (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1983), 292–301, 293 draws this distinction in differentiating phantasia from
sunkatathesis in the Stoics, and argues that Descartes has this distinction (unlike Modern French):
Descartes reserves ‘croyance’ for the content or phantasia, i.e. what is believed, and never uses it for assent
or judgement. Like French, English now uses ‘belief ’ for assent, as well as for the opinion to which one
assents. John Henry Newman, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (New York: Longmans, Green and
Co., 1870/1947) offers a useful analysis of the notion of assent that is required here.
assent, but not true or false. But views are representations of how things are, and can
be true or false but not right or wrong. This is a second diagnostic difference in the
grammar of the two kinds of ‘belief ’.
Our beliefs, our views, are the claims to which we have assented. These are not
claims about propositions, but about the world, and they consist of propositions, or
other representational structures, which can be true or false, because they claim to
describe how things are. They are about the world, even when they are false in how they
describe it.8
(ii) The second muddle that generates the Vendler view has to do with falsity. It
goes like this: since knowing can’t be wrong, what the knower knows must be the
actual state of affairs, not just a description of it that could be true or false; but beliefs
involve assenting to some mere description of a possible situation—a proposition,
say—since in false belief things are not as we think they are so it is not a direct relation
to the world, as we took knowledge to be. To allow for false beliefs, we need to be
thinking of a representation that can be erroneous, not the world itself.
This is fine insofar as the credence type of belief is an attitude of assent towards a
belief of the other kind, which is a representation. This does indeed make space for
falsity, but equally it is required for truth; so a true belief, no less than a false one, will
involve assenting to something that has representational content and intentionality.
Plainly, however, the same must apply to knowledge too. For, first, if knowledge also
involves assent, then it must be assent to a proposed representation. Knowledge—if it
is a kind of assent at all—is epistemic assent: it is assessing and accepting a certain
description of the state of affairs, not assessing and accepting the state of affairs.9
Knowledge, like belief/credence, would be an attitude of taking something as true,
and what it takes as true would have to be a candidate for truth, just as it is for belief/
credence. That is, it would need to be some kind of representation that could in principle
(at least on another occasion) be false. Only that way can it be potentially true.
The only other option is to deny that knowledge is an attitude to anything, and that
what it grasps is a candidate for truth, since its unmediated object of knowledge
is the world as such, not some true description of it.10 That view runs into severe
problems, as Plato shows in the Theaetetus,11 but even were it a plausible account of
knowledge, belief would have to work in the same way, because both knowledge-
claims and belief-claims are always about the world. Believing something is assenting
to a way of thinking about the world, and the beliefs that we adopt are beliefs about
8
Here I have taken apart a case of having a belief as it comprised two components that could be separated.
This is to avoid confusion in the two kinds of belief. In analysing belief it may actually be better to follow
Murray Kiteley, ‘The grammars of “believe” ’, The Journal of Philosophy, 61/8 (1964), 244–59 and Curt John
Ducasse, Nature, Mind and Death (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1951) in treating the proposition as a kind of
adverbial clause or internal accusative. I thank Robin Cameron for pointing me to these things.
9
There is something that can be called assenting to a state of affairs, but it is evaluative and normative,
not epistemic, assent.
10
For a view like this, see Williamson, Knowledge and its Limits.
11
See Catherine Rowett, ‘On making mistakes in Plato: Theaetetus 187c–200d’, Topoi, 31/2 (2012), 151–66.
truth and belief 39
the world. Someone who knows conceives of the world under certain descriptions, and
so does someone who believes that it is like that. The truth or otherwise of each person’s
grasp of things is in the match between their descriptions and what they are about,12
which explains why it still makes sense to speak of knowledge and discovery being ‘true’.13
Unlike knowledge, beliefs can be faulty descriptions, but that does not mean that
they are beliefs about propositions. Their falsity lies in the mismatch between the descrip-
tion and what it is about, so it is about a world that has a way of being independently of
the belief we hold, and about which we can be wrong. However wrong it is, it must have
a way of latching onto the world that it is attempting to describe. Puzzles about how
this works go back a long way, to Plato, for instance, especially in the Theaetetus and the
Sophist. However, the solution is not to cut the propositional content of beliefs free
from any friction with the world. Falsity is a failure to achieve a target that was truth,
and just as for knowledge in which the descriptive content needs a way to refer, so also
does belief. To know is not to utter a claim that happens to be true about something.
It must be not only true but also true about the thing that you intended it to be about. It
must refer to the relevant item in the world.14
(iii) The third puzzle is about the propositional clauses in reports of beliefs. We
should not be confused by the fact that first and third-person reports of beliefs express
those beliefs using ‘that . . . ’ clauses. For, after all, when we speak in language, we use
propositional form. It does not follow that what we describe in those terms took that
form in our minds, before we described it. Certainly it does not mean that when we
hold a belief, we are thinking about a proposition, or that our belief is about that. On
the Vendler view, the content of knowledge is the world, and the content of a belief
is a proposition, even though both are expressed in exactly the same form ‘he knows
that p, she believes that p’.15 This is to concede that in the case of knowing, what the
knowledge is about is not a proposition, and the that p clause describes the world as
perceived. This is exactly how we should take it, for belief too. Neither is about a prop-
osition, and the proposition in the description is part of how we describe the belief or
knowledge, but does not form any part of the agent’s own subjective content.16
Evidently, then, none of these three puzzles about belief, about falsity, or about the
apparently propositional character of reports of beliefs should lead us to suppose that
12
This explains why knowledge admits mistakes of substitution in intentional contexts, because know-
ledge involves intentional content and is not entirely transparent. Could it be transparent in some cases,
e.g. subjective knowledge of one’s private experiences? But then surely we should doubt whether this counts
as ‘knowing’ in the same sense.
13
If it is knowledge, it is ipso facto true, but in checking whether it is knowledge, one checks for truth
as one of the criteria. The claims are and must be such as to be assessed for truth. Pace Sayre, Belief and
Knowledge, 16.
14
Cf. Plato Phaedrus 260b–c; Sophist 262e.
15
See e.g. Sayre, Belief and Knowledge. The words ‘that it will be sunny’ stand for two quite different
things in the two cases.
16
On the idea that the propositional clause serves as a kind of adverbial description of how one sees the
world, see the references in note 8.
beliefs take propositions as content, or that knowledge does not. Rather, I think, we
should allow that both belief and knowledge are representational states—but that says
nothing about how they relate to the propositions that people sometimes utter when
they express or deploy their knowledge.
In conclusion, then, we should not confine truth and falsity to propositions, but
should allow that all kinds of representations can be assessed for truth, just insofar
as they have intentionality, and that includes pictures and maps as well as linguistic
descriptions. And we should not make a strong distinction between belief and knowledge
in terms of what kind of representational content they may take, or how they can be true,
or in whether they involve assent to some way of picturing the world. And perhaps,
once we have expanded our limitations on knowledge in this way, and on the scope of
belief, we can accommodate the kinds of knowledge and belief or doxa that Plato
was interested in, including how well we grasp concepts or forms, which is a bit like
mapping something that is independent of us, in a world of conceptual truths rather
than particular facts, and how we perceive the instances of those forms in the world,
which is a matter of classifying experience in terms of those concepts, but with no
requirement that what one sees and thinks is structured in propositional form or a
complex of more than one idea. And we can now see why we need to extend the scope
of truth to include both these ways of representing intelligible and perceptible items, as
soon as they are assessed for accuracy and fit with reality. This is our next topic.
II. In Which We Consider What Truth Is, and

How It Can Be a Property of Things
II.i That there are several ways of talking of ‘truth’ in Greek
Among the various words for ‘true’ used by the Greeks, the old poetic word, etumos,
drops out of use as a philosophical term with the demise of philosophical poetry.17
Xenophanes (fragment 35) used it in an epistemological context, but Parmenides
employs the classical word alêthês, and the abstract noun alêtheia, which were destined
to become the norm.18 ‘Aletheia’ (‘Truth’) was the title of Protagoras’s most famous
book,19 and of a work by Antiphon the Sophist.20 It remained the word of choice for all
philosophers writing in Greek. In Latin philosophy it becomes veritas, and hence, via
medieval thought, it has an unbroken trajectory into modern philosophy, veritas being
historically translated by the English word ‘truth’.
17
Etumos does not occur in Classical prose. It is the root for etumologia (etymology), meaning the science
of the true (i.e. genuine, uncorrupted) meanings of words, but that term does not exist in the Classical period,
though the practice does (e.g. in Plato’s Cratylus). On the relation between etumos and alêtheia see Tilman
Krischer, ‘῎Ετυμος und ἀληθής’, Philologus, 109 (1965), 161–74.
18
B1.29; B2.4; B8.51. See also B1.30; B8.51–2 about the lack of true trust in mortal opinion.
19
Plato Theaetetus 161c. See Ernst Heitsch, ‘Ein Buchtitel des Protagoras’, Hermes, 97 (1969), 292–6
(reprinted in C.J. Classen (ed.), Sophistik (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1976), 298–305).
20
Origen Contra Celsum 4.25; Hermogenes De Ideis B.399–401 (DK87A2).
truth and belief 41
Yet, even though aletheia is so important in philosophy, and although its linguistic
and semantic history makes it the ancestor of our notion of truth, its ancient uses do
not exactly match our idea of truth. Furthermore, the ancients had other resources too,
for talking about truth—particularly the verb einai, ‘to be’.
II.ii That we should understand the veridical sense of the verb ‘to be’ as
a reference to the truth in things, which is a kind of being something
Gregory Vlastos was influential in drawing attention to a particular way of using the
verb ‘be’ that occurs in philosophical texts, meaning something that we would probably
call truth. He and others use the term ‘veridical’ for this use of the verb einai,21 and it is
considered vital for understanding certain famous arguments about how truth and reality
relate, in Parmenides and Plato, at least on some (often controversial) interpretations
of those arguments. Vlastos explained this usage as referring to things that are true.
He offered examples like true gold and true friends. These examples have appeared in
almost every account of the matter.22 Vlastos appeals to this use of ‘is’ to explain what
Plato meant by the superior reality and truth in Forms, as against sensible particulars,
and suggests that the idea of things having truth is a ‘derivative’ usage, while the more
basic idea is truth of propositions.23
Perhaps Vlastos thought that he was doing a service to the ancients by implying
(if this is indeed what he meant to imply24) that when they used ‘is’ to mean ‘is true’, and
used it about things, they were nevertheless aware that, properly speaking, truth is a
property of propositions, or at least of intentional representations, not things. My view
is the opposite: I do not think that truth in things is something to be embarrassed
about, as though it were stupid or strange; nor should it be explained in terms of truth
in propositions as though that were a more natural idea or more defensible. I suspect
that the naturalness and defensibility go the other way. The expression ‘truly is’, used of
a thing, should not seem hard to explain, or less natural, but more natural and more
obvious than using it of a proposition, and the veridical use of ‘is’ should not seem like
a complicated or difficult notion of being, or as a difficult notion of truth understandable
only once we have reformulated it as a sort of proposition. Such reformulation obscures
a perfectly straightforward notion. When we say that the weather is truly horrid, or
21
Gregory Vlastos, ‘Degrees of reality in Plato’ in Renford Bambrough (ed.), New Essays on Plato and
Aristotle (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965), 1–20 (page numbers are given according to the
reprint in Gregory Vlastos, Platonic Studies (2nd edn; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981),
58–75), and see also Charles H. Kahn, The Verb ‘Be’ in Ancient Greek (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1973).
22
Vlastos, ‘Degrees of reality in Plato’, 59; cf. Martin Heidegger, ‘On the essence of truth’ in William McNeill
(ed.), Pathmarks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 136–54, 137 who uses the same examples.
23
Vlastos, ‘Degrees of reality in Plato’, 59, and his note 4 (though the claim here is about the term
alethes). See also Richard McKirahan, Philosophy Before Socrates (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1994), 161 on
Parmenides.
24
Vlastos certainly thinks this about aletheia, but since he does not keep the two expressions apart, it
appears that he also means that being in its veridical sense belongs primarily to propositions, and derivatively
to things.
that true religion is a way of life, or that true wealth is found only among the wise, we
mean what we say. It is incorrect and confusing to say that we mean that our description
is true about the subject: when I say ‘True wealth is found only among the wise’ I do not
mean ‘It is true that wealth is found only among the wise’. The expression ‘true wealth’
and the expression ‘that is not true wealth’ do not mean the same as ‘wealth’ or ‘that is
not wealth’.
In these classic cases, we should allow that the truth belongs to the thing itself (the
wealth, the horridness etc.) and is not something that belongs to a description we apply
to it. Something is true wealth in virtue of actually being a genuine kind of wealth, as
opposed to many things that are in fact not wealth, though they are sometimes mis-
taken for the real thing. The weather is truly horrid in virtue of actually being horrid,
in a way that sets the standard to which lesser degrees of horrid merely approximate.
This has nothing to do with any propositions or descriptions. The truth of these items
does not depend upon being described by anyone. The expression is not an elliptical
proposition or description with an elided truth claim; so if Greek uses the verb ‘be’ for
this usage, it is not to be unpacked as ‘is true that’ followed by a proposition. It is a
property of the non-intentional exhibit, not of an intentional description.
II.iii That truth in sentences and descriptions is derivative

from the primary kind of truth in things
Once we understand being and truth like that (which is, I suggest, not difficult), then it
turns out that the second kind of truth, when a sentence or proposition is true, is not
the primary or original sense of ‘true’ but a derivative or borrowed notion. Truth is first
a property of things, and comes in degrees. It is then subsequently applied to a sentence
or name, in cases where some verbal description derives a kind of truth from its success
at revealing what something is truly like, or how things really are.
On this model, which I recommend, sentences can sometimes convey the truth of
things, to some degree, and the more effectively they do, the truer the sentence. Equally,
the name that closely fits something would be a true name for the thing, and the more
accurately it names the reality or truth of its bearer, the truer the name. If we see truth
in this way, then the origin and source of the truth in propositions and names is the
truth of the world, which those sentences and names are trying to communicate.
The truth in the world, however, is a mind-independent object or state of affairs,
logically prior to any observer, any naming, any describing.
Once we understand (or get back to understanding) truth in this way, we can begin
to appreciate the connections between what a thing really is, what it truly is, and getting
to know what it really is. Where one thing fails to be a good example of wealth, some-
thing else may be a better one, a truer kind, the real thing. It follows that there can be
truths ‘out there’ in the mind-independent world, that have not yet been discovered, or
truths of which we have only a limited grasp. There can be true descriptions that no one
has ever thought of or expressed (but which could in principle be uttered and would
correctly describe what is real), and more than that, there can be truths that have not
truth and belief 43
been expressed and cannot be expressed in any description. There is no necessity that the
truths of the world can be properly expressed in language or any other representational
medium. There may be some things that cannot be described. Such a truth is the one
that Aristotle thinks is superior and ‘more knowable’ in nature,25 even when we have
no access to it.
II.iv That some truth can be found in what Heidegger and Detienne
say about aletheia
Much has been written on the mismatch between the notion of aletheia in Greek and
the notion of propositional ‘truth’ so beloved of modern philosophy. It is a prominent
theme in the work of Martin Heidegger, who argued that the etymological roots of the
term aletheia lie in an idea of the ‘unconcealed’.26 This idea is already prominent in
Being and Time (first edition 1927), where Heidegger cites this proposed etymology to
support his claim that truth should still be a proper subject for ontology, so long as we
understand it in its ancient sense, as revealing the real being of things.27 The theme
reappears in many other works, especially in his essays on the Greeks, such as Early
Greek Thinking,28 and the paper on ‘The Essence of Truth’ from 1930.29
Heidegger is targeting three erroneous thoughts: (a) the idea that truth is a property
of propositions—which he ridicules at some length in ‘Vom Wesen der Warheit’;30 (b) the
idea of correspondence between the proposition and the states of affairs or facts in
the world to which it corresponds;31 and (c) the coherence theory of truth, which he
takes to be prompted by Kant’s so-called ‘Copernican Revolution’, leading to the
widespread belief that naive realism is no longer possible. Heidegger thinks that only
Neo-Kantians, and not Kant himself, have drawn this implication, making the coherence
theory of truth a response to an imaginary problem.32
According to Heidegger, truth can be ascribed to propositions in a certain sense,
because propositions are a means to uncover the thing in itself: ‘To say that an assertion
“is true” signifies that it uncovers the entity as it is in itself . . . points out, lets the entity
“be seen”. ’33 Propositions can be truthful insofar as they make a thing unhidden, but the
truth is the unhiddenness of the thing, not the correspondence between representation
and reality.
25
Physics 184a16–17, for example. See also Section II.v in this chapter.
26
On this whole theme see the excellent collection of essays in Mark A. Wrathall, Heidegger and
unconcealment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
27
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (London: SCM
Press, 1962).
28
Martin Heidegger, Early Greek Thinking, trans. Frank Capuzzi and David Farrell Krell (New York;
London: Harper and Row, 1975).
29
Heidegger, ‘On the essence of truth’. See also ‘Vom Wesen der Warheit: zu Platons Höhlengleichnis und
Theätet’, Heidegger Gesamtausgabe, vol. 34, Frankfurt 1988, translated as Martin Heidegger, The Essence of
Truth: on Plato’s cave allegory and Theaetetus, trans. Ted Sadler (London; New York: Continuum, 2002).
30
Heidegger, The Essence of Truth. 31 Heidegger, The Essence of Truth, 1.
32
Heidegger, Being and Time, 258. 33 Heidegger, Being and Time, 261.
A strikingly similar project, to trace the origins of the notion of aletheia in

re-Classical culture, to disclose its etymological background and map its semantic field,
p
was undertaken by Marcel Detienne in Les Maîtres de Vérité dans la Grèce Archaïque
(1967).34 It seems hard to imagine that Heidegger was not Detienne’s target, though
he is not explicitly mentioned. Similarly, Pierre Vidal-Naquet must surely be alluding
to Heidegger’s reliance on etymology when he writes (in the preface to Detienne’s
book) that ‘Il ne s’agit pas d’une histoire du mot. Celle-ci a certes son intérêt, mais
Marcel Detienne est précisement un philologue trop averti pour croire beaucoup aux
vertus de la “preuve par l’etymologie” ’.35 Heidegger had inferred that aletheia means
‘unconcealed’ from the connotations with lethe that he saw there. He understood
aletheia as what does not lanthanein (escape notice or lie concealed). Detienne, by
contrast, in his investigation of aletheia, explores the evidence for archaic uses of
aletheia, to trace how it contrasts with adjacent and antithetical motifs, in poetry and
other s urviving material.
The lethe motif is just one of Detienne’s motifs from archaic literature, and here
Detienne disagrees with Heidegger on what the motif is about: Heidegger took it as
concealment, but Detienne detects instead a theme of forgetting. In archaic poetry, he
suggests, mortals and heroes are afraid of being forgotten, if poets do not sing of their
heroic deeds. Only poets can ensure that your story is told, that you do not suffer from
the neglect and loss of reputation that belongs to those whose deeds were shameful or
unworthy. You want to be remembered gloriously. Hence the poets are the ‘masters of
truth’ (that is, masters of the unforgotten) in the archaic period.
For the archaic mind, truth was not about the accurate tale, or telling it how it is,
Detienne suggests. It was about remembering and retelling the past, never mind how
accurately. Since there is no other record, the poet’s word carries authority: the story as
he tells it defines the past that is remembered, no matter what other things happened
and are now forgotten and untold.36 Poets effectively create the truth.
Like Heidegger, though for very different reasons, Detienne denies that truth is
found in the match between the description and what is described (correspondence),
or in the agreement between one’s own judgement and that of others (coherence).37
Like Heidegger, he denies that we can understand the ancient idea of truth if we bring
modern theories of propositions, true by correspondence or coherence. Using his archaic
examples, he argues that truth was not contrasted with falsity or lies, but with loss of
reputation—with being unsung and of no renown.
34
Marcel Detienne, Les Maîtres de verité dans la grèce archaique (Paris: Librairie François Maspero,
1967), English translation Marcel Detienne, The Masters of Truth in Archaic Greece, trans. Janet Lloyd
(New York: Zone Books, 1996).
35
Pierre Vidal-Naquet, ‘Preface’, Les Maîtres de vérité en grèce archaique (Paris: Librairie François
Maspero, 1967), vii–xii, viii.
36
Detienne, Les Maîtres de verité dans la grèce archaique, chapter 2.
37
I.e. it is not a correspondence theory or a coherence theory of truth; Detienne, Les Maîtres de verité
dans la grèce archaique, 27. Cf. Heidegger, Being and Time, 261.
truth and belief 45
Yet, there is another contrast too. In some archaic poets (such as Simonides), Detienne
finds truth-telling linked to notions of persuasion, trust, and belief, and contrasted with
deception (apate), the trickery of words. Poetry can produce illusions and fictions.
Truth contrasts with mere seeming, with doxa.38 But this contrast, between reality and
appearance, which is so prominent in later philosophical discussions of truth, is a
relatively small part of the semantic range of aletheia in the archaic period, Detienne
thinks. He reckons that it emerges from a strand of religious thought, some considerable
time before Parmenides.39
It is surely reasonable to suppose that the idea of ‘telling the truth’, or singing the
unforgotten deeds of men, is just as old as the idea that there is such truth to be told. So
Detienne’s findings do not undermine my claims about the conceptual dependence of
truth-telling on ontological truth. We would not expect the idea of true utterances to
be chronologically later, especially when our evidence for the use of the word ‘true’ in
the early period is the very poets who tell the tales. Even if true utterances are there
from the beginning, it still makes better sense to think that the ancient concept of truth
has its primary focus in the men that really were and the deeds they really did, not in the
songs that were sung to remember those deeds.
These studies seem to support my earlier reflections, and make it especially clear
why the veridical sense of ‘to be’ has such an important role to play, and why it comes so
naturally to ancient thinkers, as they speak of the underlying truth of which the poets
tell. It is much harder for modern readers, because our philosophical concept of truth
has become inverted.
II.v That there is something similar in Aristotle

Some recent work on Aristotle’s notion of truth lends support to the idea that our
modern notion of truth is inverted. I am thinking particularly of Paolo Crivelli’s work
on Metaphysics Θ.40
Aristotle allows that there might be truth in representational items, such as thoughts
and sentences, but he grounds their truth in the truth of objects that are represented.
The primary bearers of truth, for Aristotle, are the things or states of affairs to which
true sentences and thoughts correspond, and which serve as the objects of beliefs,
hopes, desires, and so on.41 Crivelli, coming, as Vlastos did, with some preconceptions
from modern philosophical ideas about truth, and finding Aristotle’s idea somewhat
odd, suggests that it was Aristotle himself who invented this odd idea of truth as a
38
Detienne, Les Maîtres de verité dans la grèce archaique, chapters 4 and 6. See also Kahn, The Verb ‘Be’
in Ancient Greek, 363–6 and Lambertus Marie de Rijk, Aristotle: semantics and ontology, volume 1: general
introduction: the works on logic. (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 128–9.
39
Detienne, Les Maîtres de verité dans la grèce archaique, 139 and note 121.
40
Crivelli’s conclusions have recently been challenged by David Charles and Michail Peramatzis,
‘Aristotle on Truth Bearers’, Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, 50 (2016), 101–41.
41
Crivelli calls these ‘propositional attitudes’—a bit of a misnomer since his point is that they are not
directed at propositions but at objects and states of affairs. Paolo Crivelli, Aristotle on Truth (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2004), 21–2.
property of objects and states of affairs, because he needed it to explain the notion of
truth in sentences and linguistic entities. But I think that this hypothesis is probably a
mistake, provoked by the same inverted notion of truth I mentioned above. With our
philosophical hats on, we do find it odd to think of truth as a property of things. But
arguably neither Aristotle nor anyone in his vicinity would have found this at all odd.
Once again, Crivelli uses illustrations much like those used by Vlastos in 1965, and
before him Heidegger in 1930, to persuade us that we do still use the word ‘true’ of
things:42 ‘It is not, however’, he says, ‘completely unconnected with ordinary usage:
“true” can be used (both in Greek and in English) to mean “real” (as in “true coin”), and
“real” is connected with “existent” (although “real” and “existent” are used differently,
one can employ the phrase “the contrast between dreams and what is real” to describe
the discrepancy between what exists and what someone would like to exist).’43 But des-
pite this awareness that using ‘true’ to mean ‘real’ is customary and unproblematic
even in modern life, Crivelli, like Vlastos, still thinks that it is abnormal. He seems to
have forgotten its prominent role in Plato. Yet to me there seems no justification for
insisting that aletheia must have started out as a notion of propositional truth and only
later been transferred to the object that is represented.44 The reverse trajectory makes
much more sense. Thinking that ‘true’ can describe things seems hard only because
we have acquired a theoretical commitment to the idea that truth must be a feature of
representational or intentional structures, particularly propositions. To talk of things
as true surely seemed the more natural usage to both Plato and Aristotle, as well as to
their predecessors.
II.vi That it is time to reclaim the spectator model of knowledge and truth
Two recent treatments of Plato have resisted the fashion for assimilating Plato’s thought
to a twentieth-century model of propositional truth.
Lloyd Gerson argues that Plato’s radical distinction between knowledge and belief is
based on the fact that knowledge, for Plato, is not a propositional attitude but relates
the knower to things as they are, not to propositional representations of them.45 The
position that Gerson is endorsing is close to some I discussed in Section I.ii, including
what we called the Vendler view. Gerson’s thesis is partly inspired by Timothy Williamson,
so he too is following current fashions in analytic philosophy, this time one that denies
42
See note 22.
43
Crivelli, Aristotle on Truth, 6. Notice that Crivelli is confusing ‘real’ with ‘existent’ here. On the difference,
see Section II.ii.
44
For the contrary account, showing that the ontological notion predominates in Middle-Period Plato,
see Jan Szaif, Platons Begriff der Wahrheit (Freiburg/München: Alber, 1996). Szaif thinks that the later Plato
replaces this almost wholly with the semantic notion (a Rylean reading of Plato, against which I shall
defend a more unitarian view, although in my view the entities that Plato considers genuinely true are what
we would call semantic or conceptual entities: that is, Forms or descriptors, such as beauty, not extensional
tokens that fall under those descriptions).
45
Gerson, Ancient Epistemology, 27–61.
truth and belief 47
that knowledge is a propositional attitude.46 Gerson uses ‘ontological truth’ as his

preferred term for the truth of things as they really are, a notion that is essential for
understanding what knowledge is, in both Plato and Aristotle. Such truth is not a
value or property of propositions or other representational structures, but means ‘the
objective features of reality’, suggests Gerson.47 Gerson counts as an ally for me to this
extent: although I do not find his way of thinking about knowledge and belief useful,
nor do I agree that belief is a propositional attitude in Plato, nevertheless, I concur
with Gerson in holding (a) that ontological truth is a thing, and (b) that it is prior to
propositional truth.
Another recent and relevant treatment is Andrea Wilson Nightingale’s Spectacles
of Truth.48 Nightingale explores the way in which fourth-century bc philosophy
conceived of knowledge and philosophical discovery as a journey to a vision of some-
thing displayed. Unfortunately, Nightingale does not venture to discuss how truth must
be understood, or what the content of the resulting knowledge would be like, given this
motif of spectacle. Nevertheless, her treatment relates to our present question; for it
points out how the spectator model presupposes that the truths are out there to be
seen, and that the way to knowledge takes the form of a journey to a position from
which they can be (so to speak) viewed, as they really are. Truth and being, the reality
of things, is what must be accessed. Furthermore, she suggests, accessing the truth
seems to involve making the perceiving subject as like to the real being as possible: to
become like the truth, so to speak. We come to understand when the reality of things is
imparted to the soul in intellection: then the mind has itself become a bearer of truth.49
As Nightingale observes, this way of thinking has been the target of a long campaign of
misunderstanding and prejudice.50 The prejudice is particularly evident among those
who dismiss ancient epistemology on various grounds, in particular the idea that it
posits an objective viewpoint—the view from nowhere—that the philosopher must
attain. As Nightingale observes, such charges fit poorly with Plato’s emphasis on the
interestedness of the philosophical lover’s gaze.51
Here we can supplement our earlier diagnosis of the widespread attempts to defend
Plato by aligning him with analytic philosophy. As we saw in Chapter 1, Section II,
both the Rylean Reading and the Fine Reading of Plato’s later epistemology try to
eliminate any trace of unfashionable realism. We can now see that these are ways of
refusing the spectator view: either that Plato never had a spectator view (Fine), or that
he rid himself of it in the later works (Ryleans). Among other examples, Nightingale
cites Charles Kahn, who claims that none of the visual connotations of eidos and idea
46
Williamson, Knowledge and its Limits (on which see Gerson, Ancient Epistemology, 158–63).
47
Gerson, Ancient Epistemology, 49, 84.
48
Andrea Wilson Nightingale, Spectacles of Truth in Classical Greek Philosophy: theoria in its cultural
context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
49
On Heidegger, see Section II.iv. 50 Nightingale, Spectacles, 7–10, 108.
51
For more on this theme see Catherine Osborne, ‘ “No” means “yes”: the seduction of the word in Plato’s
Phaedrus’, Proceedings of the Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy, 15 (1999), 263–81.
have any significance in Plato, on the grounds that ‘the fundamental conception of the
Forms is, from the beginning, linguistic rather than visual in its orientation’.52 Kahn is
evidently rooting for the Fine Reading. But as Nightingale observes, his own discussion
of Forms immediately belies his claims that the visual language is dispensable.53
The point is quite general. Interpreters in the analytic tradition have felt a persistent
need to downplay the visual. They have eagerly pointed to the few passages open to a
more linguistic interpretation. Evidently ideological concerns have been driving these
efforts. Now, however, there is a growing chorus of responses urging that ‘truth’, for
the ancient thinkers, is not confined to propositions or linguistic structures as it is in
analytic philosophy. Once we have embraced their idea of truth, and acknowledged
how it differs from ours, and how it matters to their arguments, we can see how deeply
flawed is the ambition to deny that it exists, or hammer it out to make it resemble ours.
It is deeply unhelpful to reinterpret Plato’s work on knowledge and truth to make it
‘modern’ enough to speak to our concerns. However charitable such a re-reading might
seem to be, it is far less helpful than letting Plato’s alien concept of truth stand, so that
it might prompt us to question our own dogmatic beliefs.
What, then, of the widespread idea that both Plato (at least in his later works) and
Aristotle came to recognize that truth was a property only of propositions and not
of single terms? The key passages in Plato that seem to support such a reading are
(i) Theaetetus 184b–187a, where the distinction that Socrates draws between sense
perception and doxa has been read as an attempt to link truth to propositions; (ii) Sophist
261c–264b which analyses the simple sentence and locates truth and falsity in subject-
predicate compounds; (iii) Cratylus 385b–d which contrasts statements with names,
and asks whether names can be ‘true’; and (iv) some passages in Aristotle which associ-
ate truth values with either formulae composed of a concatenation of linguistic items
of more than one kind,54 or with the declarative assertion of such formulae when uttered
with the intention of making a claim.55 I deal with Theaetetus 184b–187a in Chapter 11,
where I show that it does not use ‘being’ in a sense that would justify the propositional
reading. Space constraints have excluded the other three Platonic passages from detailed
consideration in this book, but there are a few remarks in Chapter 13 on how I propose
to address them in due course. The puzzles relating to Aristotle’s treatment of truth and
being in the Metaphysics would require a whole book to themselves. Suffice it to say
that, as I read Aristotle, he too, like Plato, thinks of truth and reality as the same thing.
He too takes truth to be first a property of things. And as in Plato, truth belongs deriva-
tively to representational states or sentences, insofar as they capture the truth of the
52
Charles H. Kahn, Plato and the Socratic Dialogue: the philosophical use of a literary form (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996), 355. See also M.M. McCabe, ‘Is dialectic as dialectic does? The virtue
of philosophical conversation’ in Burkhard Reis (ed.), The Virtuous Life in Greek Ethics (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2006), 70–98 who wants to reclaim the ‘conversation’ aspect of dialectic.
53
Nightingale, Spectacles, 108, n. 19.
54
Categories 2a4–10; De Interpretatione 1, 16a9–16; De anima 3.8, 432a11.
55
The distinction is expressed e.g. by the difference between φάναι and καταφάναι (as in De anima
431a8–9). On the tricky passage of De interpretatione 19a32–39 see Rijk, Aristotle, vol. 1, 292.
truth and belief 49
complex things they picture.56 For both Plato and Aristotle, statements, images, and
epistemic states can be true, because the things that they describe are true. Similarly
(at least for Plato), names or words can also tell the truth, when they convey the truth
of what they name.
III. That Truth Can Be Observed by Viewing

the Things That Reflect It
To understand what Plato means when he speaks of ‘truth’ and ‘being’, it helps to attend
to the idea that images transmit truth by reflecting the original to which they stand as
image. Truth and being are reflected in things and in images of things. Perhaps true
sentences or propositions can also reflect truth, if they are clear representations of
what is really there. The motif of reflection is explicit in the lowest portion of the
Divided Line in Plato’s Republic. We shall explore it in its own right in Chapter 8.
If truth is a property of what is real, this truth can be transmitted or reflected in
any structure that successfully communicates what is real or shows it how it is. Such
structures are bearers of truth to the extent that they succeed in communicating, to
some degree, the truth that is in reality. Since their capacity to do this can vary, they
need not be either completely true or completely false. Sentences, stories, images, icons,
reflections, and pictures may transmit some faint and distant sense of the original, or
they may provide a clear and informative image of reality. The latter convey more of
the truth, more clearly. So there are degrees of truth or clarity (as Plato suggests in the
Line in the Republic).
This way of thinking might seem worrying, if it implied that we never encounter the
world itself, but only know it by way of reflections, as through a glass darkly. Is there
always some intervening medium, either language or non-linguistic representations?
Are thoughts simply mental images, with no access to the things themselves? Such a
model would encourage the idea that ‘reality’ is something metaphysical and obscure,
lying behind a veil of perception or linguistic representation, and behind our mental
ideas, but never actually accessible. That could then lead to the confused notion that to
check our ideas and beliefs for truth we should need to get behind them, to the things
for which they stand, and compare the reality (which we cannot see) with the mental
contents that stand in some relation to it, only that we cannot tell if they are true to it.
56
See Allan T. Bäck, Aristotle’s Theory of Predication (Leiden: Brill, 2000); Crivelli, Aristotle on Truth;
Rijk, Aristotle, vol. 1; Lambertus Marie de Rijk, Aristotle: semantics and ontology, volume 2: the metaphysics:
semantic in Aristotle’s strategy of argument (Leiden: Brill, 2002); Gabriël Nuchelmans, Theories of the
Proposition: ancient and medieval conceptions of the bearers of truth and falsity (Amsterdam: North
Holland, 1973); Lesley Brown, ‘The verb ‘to be’ in Greek philosophy: some remarks’ in Stephen Everson
(ed.), Language (Companions to Ancient Thought, 3; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994),
212–36. Contrast Charles and Peramatzis, ‘Aristotle on Truth Bearers’, 102, who want to rescue Aristotle
from the ‘unpalatable’ consequences of the above argument—but note that their point that representational
structures are ‘truth-bearers’ does not conflict with the idea that the truth they convey is the things they
represent (see further below).
This risks turning into the mysterious transcendental metaphysics that threatens in
Locke, Berkeley, Kant, and, arguably, in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. Is it there in Plato too,
as many seem to think (that is, many who read Plato in the metaphysical way that
is traditional)?
My view is that there is no risk of reaching that kind of mysticism if we read Plato
correctly, and that no such conclusion follows from taking truth to be reality itself, or
from thinking that we often discover it by attending to reflections that are less than
perfect. Plato does not suppose that there is any image or reflection between us and
what we see. Rather, what we see ‘out there’ (which we see directly) is often not just a
thing in itself (seen directly) but also an image of something else (which can thereby be
seen indirectly). Some of what we see and hear are sentences and stories in words.
Some are pictures, and some are just various particular things and objects or states of
affairs. Even these non-pictorial entities can also speak of something else, or illustrate
some feature or idea for us. These items that we see and hear are not mental items but
things. In other words, things are icons of things. So the imagery that Plato has in mind
is not internal to the mind, but external in the world. No mental imagery stands
between the perceiver and what is perceived.
According to Plato, then, we perceive and grasp reality itself, but everything that we
perceive or grasp can be comprehended in more than one way: either as itself, or as a
likeness or icon, for thinking about something else. This second way of comprehending
something is what I call ‘iconic thinking’. It can be done at every level of abstraction up
to the Forms themselves (all of which can stand as icons of the Form of the Good).57
When we use language or pictorial imagery, then, the sentences and pictures are
real, part of the world, and directly accessible. They can be considered directly, as
items of study in themselves. But since they represent other states of affairs, events,
and so on, we can also use them to think of those other things. Beyond this, we can use
ordinary objects and other things like stories and myths and imaginary situations,
as hints and icons, so as to see with the mind’s eye the kind of thing that can only be
seen with the mind’s eye. Thereby we get closer to grasping what they signify, not by
getting behind our mental states to compare them with the truth, but rather by stepping
through the illustrations provided by language, stories, and objects in the world,
and coming out beyond thinking of something else, something that they stand for
or illustrate.
At no stage should we think of the mind’s content as a mental image. There is no
need to compare the mental content with reality, for when we think of reality, we are
thinking of reality, not creating an image of it. Granted, we have to employ images and
language if we are to express or pass on our knowledge, but our knowledge and under-
standing is not of those representations, nor is it constituted by those representations,
but rather it is of what those representations are of.
See further in Chapter 8.

57
truth and belief 51
III.i That all kinds of deliberate representations and naturally occurring

instances can serve as icons, and that Plato’s methodology makes use of this
From the evidence of the dialogues, it seems that Plato was deeply interested in the
moral and aesthetic ideals that set our standards of aspiration despite not being given
in experience. He was struck by our ability to handle in abstraction various concepts
that are only ever instantiated imperfectly or contextually, and where competent users
can recognize the imperfection of examples they encounter. He was interested in how
we handle terms and concepts without clear boundaries, terms which every competent
user can effectively deploy, even though their competence cannot be based on experience
of all the possible uses, which no one could have.
In the dialogues, Plato makes Socrates demand a definition from his interlocutors.
This is Plato’s way of setting up a problem—a problem with which Plato was to wrestle
for the whole of his life—about our grasp of such concepts. What we know in such cases
is paradoxically both more real and more elusive than any examples encountered in
experience. The puzzle is not just that we possess such concepts, but also what exactly
they are: what exactly do we grasp? What kind of thing are we grasping, when we come
to know ‘what it is’ about some concept? The so-called ‘Theory of Forms’ (or better, ‘types’,
eide), which features prominently in some dialogues, need not be read as a world of
metaphysical objects inaccessible to the mind. Rather, I suggest, it should be seen as a
place-holder or template, into which we must fit the substantial explanations for how it
is that concepts are accessible to the mind. How is it that things in empirical experience
can be understood as imperfect examples of something abstract and generic? How
come they can serve as informative icons for abstract thinking about concepts that
they imperfectly illustrate? Since the world of particulars—including even the shadows,
myths, poetry, and puppets—do (despite all their faults) offer a route for all to grasp
something of the forms, we need some account of the relationship that they bear to
the conceptual world, which makes this epistemic route reliable and a source of true
understanding. For the philosopher, given the right training, such a route can lead to
conceptual understanding of the highest order. What, then, is the mechanism that
facilitates this? What is it that we grasp at that stage?
Many kinds of representations can serve as icons in our thinking about beauty,
justice, goodness, virtue, and so on. Indeed, whereas analytic philosophy typically
confines its evidence base to language and the proposition, for Plato, all kinds of
representations can provide serviceable icons of the truth, I shall argue. I choose the
word ‘icon’ deliberately to capture the motif associated with religious icons, namely
that the icon serves not to obscure one’s attention to the reality depicted, but to direct
it there.58 Furthermore, eikon was apparently Plato’s preferred term in the Republic,
58
For an old treatment of this connection (with which I no longer wholly concur) see Catherine Osborne,
‘The repudiation of representation in Plato’s Republic and its repercussions’, Proceedings of the Cambridge
Philological Society, 33 (1987), 53–73.
although he also used paradeigma (e.g. in the Politicus).59 Everything that we encounter
can channel, if somewhat hazily, the Forms that it instantiates or depicts; any of these
things can be used with profit by philosophical minds, providing one is not confused,
as the lovers of sights and sounds are, about which things are the reality and which are
the icons. Among these ‘many kinds of representations’, I am including stories and
poetry. Perhaps this will seem surprising, given Socrates’ apparent hostility to poetry
and man-made art in the Republic. In response to this, I invite the reader to read on
without that prejudice. For it is clear that Plato himself uses such things, and it is no
accident that they figure hugely in our own lives.
I shall pursue this topic more fully in Chapter 6 (although I shall not, in this volume,
deal directly with the challenge to poetry in the Republic).60 My concern here is to
elucidate Plato’s own methodology, in the Republic in particular. One striking conclusion
that we shall draw is that works of visual art, poetry, drama, film, and fiction can be good
conduits for the truths that the philosopher is seeking, and that this is not despite the
fact that they are reflections but because they are reflections. Furthermore, this remains
true even if their reflection is at several removes from the original that they transmit.
Even the fictional city drawn in the Republic illustrates justice for us, once we have
learnt how to read things, and descriptions of things, as icons of something else.
Since art is Plato’s key to ascending out of the cave, we should use it, as he does, and
not discard it, as so many have blindly imagined he does.
59
Politicus 278eff.
60
See further in Catherine Rowett, ‘Why the philosopher kings will believe the noble lie’, Oxford Studies
in Ancient Philosophy, 50 (2016), 67–100, and further work that I hope to do on this topic shortly.
PA RT I I
Plato’s Meno
3
Introduction and Summary
for Part II: Plato’s Meno
I. In Which We Note That Plato Is Arguing on the Same

Side as Wittgenstein, Against Socratic Essentialism
In the mid-twentieth century, Ludwig Wittgenstein launched an attack on what we call
‘essentialism’. In Text 3.1 Wittgenstein observes that I may know what games are but
not be able to say:
Text 3.1
What does it mean to know what a game is? What does it mean, to know it and not be
able to say it? Is this knowledge somehow equivalent to an unformulated definition?
So that if it were formulated I should be able to recognize it as the expression of my
knowledge? Isn’t my knowledge, my concept of a game, completely expressed in the
explanations that I could give? That is, in my describing examples of various kinds
of game; showing how all sorts of other games can be constructed on the analogy of
these; saying that I should scarcely include this or this among games; and so on.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations §751
Wittgenstein’s imagined opponent (‘the essentialist’) holds that any clear concept must
have an essence, expressible as a single definition. Against the essentialist, Wittgenstein
suggests that no such formula is required and there may not be one at all. For we can
know perfectly well what a game is without being able to provide an account of what
they have in common, or any necessary and sufficient conditions for being a game.
In Chapter 4, I suggest that Plato’s own view on this matter precisely anticipates
Wittgenstein’s: a controversial conclusion, since most readers have assumed that Plato
was an essentialist, endorsing the essentialism expressed by the Socrates character in
most of his dialogues. In truth, I suggest, only the unreformed Socrates is an essentialist.
Plato, on the other hand, is responding and rejecting Socrates’ view. In this section on
the Meno we must undertake some careful work to distinguish between ‘Socrates’ and
Plato, and observe the character ‘Socrates’ changing his position over the course of
the dialogue, such that, by the end, a reformed Socrates adopts a different approach
to the question concerning what virtue is and how we can know.
1
Quotations are from the Anscombe translation.
We should certainly accept that the Socrates character is an essentialist at the start
of the Meno. He insists that if Meno knows what virtue is, he must be able to offer
a successful definition of it, by naming something common to all virtues that makes
them count as virtues. Most readers infer that Plato was endorsing this essentialist
project, and is therefore a prime target for Wittgenstein’s objections. However, since
Socrates is only a character in the dialogue, there is evidently space for the inference to
Plato’s views to be mistaken. Does the dialogue suggest that Socrates was right about the
essentialism he expresses? I shall argue that Plato is showing us how wrong Socrates was.
In Chapter 4, I develop this claim by reviewing the structure of the Meno, including
its key turning points and trajectory. Over the course of the dialogue, as we shall see,
Plato first highlights how unproductive the initial essentialist assumptions are, and
then goes on to explore some alternatives. Whereas in the opening pages of the Meno,
Socrates stubbornly rejects all Meno’s attempts to answer the ‘what is virtue’ question,
because they do not meet the ‘single common factor’ requirement, as the dialogue
proceeds, this attitude is undermined, and the Socrates character is made to rethink
his position. Plato portrays his character undergoing a change of heart. By making
the search for a definition fail (as it does in all other dialogues in which it features), and
by having Socrates turn instead to other philosophical methods, and to other models
of conceptual knowledge, Plato illustrates something important—something close to
what Wittgenstein was also showing. Both authors are suggesting that knowledge of
a concept is not always accompanied by an ability to define it. One may be able to list
examples, and give reasons for including those examples, but the reasons need not be the
same for each, nor is one required to say why that is a reason. In fact, one’s knowledge of
the type grounds one’s ability to explain why some token counts, not the reverse.
II. That the Geometry Episode Proves That One

Can Identify a Precise but Indefinable Length by
Pointing, Not Saying
In the Meno, Socrates puts a geometrical puzzle to an untutored boy, to show that without
much training, the boy can search for a target item (a line that will generate a square of
double the area), deploy concepts (e.g. ‘double’), point to possible examples, give suitable
reasons for choosing them, investigate them, and reject those that don’t meet the criteria.
This exercise figures in both Chapters 4 and 5. One point worth noting here is the fact that
the target concept, namely the line-length that the boy is to find, stands in an irrational
ratio to the side of the square, and cannot be measured by the original line. This feature
is diagnostic, because it shows that Plato is denying that the target knowledge should
or could be represented in a logos (definition or formula). He has deliberately chosen a
case in which the knowledge that is discovered and checked and found true cannot
consist of a logos (or formula): a case where not even the best experts could give a logos,
since the item in question has none.
Introduction and Summary for Part II 57
How exactly does the geometry episode work? What was the boy asked to find?
I shall explore the details in Chapter 5, but this much we should note now: the boy is
to find a length such that it forms the side of a square that is double the given square in
area. At 83e11 Socrates suggests that if he can’t give the answer as a number (arithmein),
then he could just point to a line on the diagram (Text 3.2).
Text 3.2
Socrates: But from which kind [of line]? Try to say it exactly.—And if you don’t
want to put a number on it, then point to which kind of line it would be from.
Boy: By Zeus, Socrates, I really don’t know.
Meno 83e11–84a2
Clearly the boy could not possibly give the answer as a number, since the measure is
given by the side of the original square (length = 2), so the side of the double square
will have an irrational number as its length (length = √8). The object of the search is a
number that is literally ‘unspeakable’, alogon. It has no logos.
Someone might say that we should not assimilate what is alogon in mathematics to
what is unspeakable in language: perhaps Plato is equivocating. But if so, that does not
reduce the significance for understanding Plato’s meaning: Plato surely deliberately
chose such an example wherein the task of giving a certain strict kind of logos is
technically impossible, even for an expert. But in fact, I doubt that it is an equivocation.
One could give a description in words—for instance, we could describe it as ‘a diago-
nal’2—but this only expresses its external relation to other lines, and does not give its
length as measured by the given side, as requested. And besides, words are unnecessary.
The boy can point to it, and see why it fits, without using language at all. So even if there
were a way to pinpoint it with words, the dialogue shows that words are unnecessary,
the proof does not depend upon words, and the first person to find the answer would
not have used words. What prevents the boy from finding the exact number is not the
fact that he is a beginner. No mathematician in the world could state what this number
is exactly. There is no logos. Nevertheless, it can be known. It can be grasped ‘iconically’3
using a diagram, but not in words or numbers.
So we must immediately conclude that, according to Plato, the knowledge that
pre-exists in the soul, and is recollected, does not consist of a definition. If the boy can
find the right line and know that it is right, because he has knowledge in his soul (as
Socrates suggests), that does not equate to having a definition in his soul, for there is no
such definition, nor could there be any. Any mathematician reading this dialogue knows
that. And indeed, by this stage, Socrates is not demanding a definition, nor can he mean
that the boy will need to discover the definition to count as knowing the knowledge
2
Socrates asks ‘from which kind of line?’ (ἀπὸ ποίας), which might mean that a generic description of
the line (e.g. that it is a diagonal of some square) would be acceptable.
3
I.e. using a sensible token as an exemplar. See Chapters 6 to 8.
that he deployed in achieving what he just achieved.4 Were Socrates to insist on that, as
he did at the start of the dialogue, the boy could never come to know it, however long
he continued to think about it. Yet now (at 85c, quoted below, Text 5.10) Socrates says
that the boy can reach complete knowledge that is second to none, simply by repeating
what he has just done, with no theoretical tools at all.
Admittedly Socrates says, at 85c9,5 that the boy does not yet know, having merely
true doxai. Some might say that this is because the boy cannot yet give the logos. But
this will not do: for no one can give that logos, not even someone who knows all there is
to know about geometry. So Socrates cannot mean that turning his current opinions
into knowledge, by repetition of the exercises, includes discovering the logos. We shall
explore what else he might mean in Chapter 5.
In my view, this geometry episode is deliberately chosen to confirm that knowledge
does not consist in, or presuppose, a logos. Pointing intelligently is sufficient evidence
that the boy has grasped the criteria that apply in this case.
III. That Socrates Turns to the Hypothetical Method

Not as a Second Best, but as the Perfect Method for
Dealing with Types That Have No Essential Definition6
After Meno’s paradox,7 and the geometry episode, Socrates changes his method. He
adopts what he calls the ‘hypothetical method’, which allows him to investigate how
virtue is transmitted (Meno’s question), without finishing the quest for ‘what virtue
itself is’ (Socrates’ question). The method involves positing some hypothetical answer
to a prior question, which, supposing it were true, would generate an answer to the
given question (which is currently unanswerable on its own). Such a method can help
with enquiries in mathematics and other subjects where unknown quantities are at
issue, to allow an enquiry to proceed with some unknown factors in play.
Why does Socrates propose the hypothetical method at this stage? Some would say
that it is because he has not bothered to finish finding the common feature shared by
all virtues, and he wants to go on hastily without finishing that enquiry. But there is a
better reason, less lazy and intellectually sloppy. Socrates may choose to proceed in this
way because this is the best method available in a situation where the first question cannot
be answered.8 The hypothetical method is not a second-best procedure, but the best possible
procedure for investigating concepts without a unitary definition, or where there are
disjunctive, vague, underdetermined, or expanding criteria for class-membership.9 It is
4
See Chapter 4, Section I.iii. 5 Text 5.10.
6
What follows is a brief summary. More detail and discussion can be found in Chapter 4.
7
See Chapter 4, Section I.ii.
8
See my discussion in Rowett, ‘Plato, Wittgenstein and the definition of games’, 202.
9
Hugh H. Benson, Clitophon’s Challenge: dialectic in Plato’s Meno, Phaedo, and Republic (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2015), chapter 4 shares my view that the method is not a second best, but not the
idea that it is badly done here.
perfectly suited to such investigations, and arguably virtue is a good example of such a
concept, especially if the various virtues differ, as Meno had suggested at the beginning
of the dialogue.10
Evidently, then, we should understand that Socrates, realizing that no unitary
definition of virtue is forthcoming, has progressed to a better method for cases like that.
In practice, however, the attempt fails. In Chapter 5 I reflect on this failure and argue
that it occurs because Socrates does not apply the method at all well: he does not treat
his proposed hypothesis as one option among disjunctive alternatives; he fails to establish
the entailment from ‘if x is knowledge’ to ‘then x is transmitted by teaching’—indeed
his work with the slave boy had already shown that inference to be unsafe. So however
good the hypothetical method might be in theory, for investigating a concept like
virtue, the way that Socrates carries out the investigation is not a good demonstration
of the method, but is flawed from beginning to end.
Once again, we need to distinguish the character Socrates from the author Plato.
‘Socrates’ fails to make progress, because of faults in his procedure, including his inability
to escape completely from his initial essentialism, or to embrace his alternative method
fully. Progress had been evident in the geometrical episode, when Socrates was thinking
aloud with diagrams: that method was successful, and Socrates is surely right that it
could lead to knowledge. There is further progress in the last part of the dialogue too,
after the hypothetical method has failed. But the hypothetical method turns out to be a
good idea gone wrong, as we shall see.
IV. That Knowing ‘What It Is’ About Some Type F Does

Not Equate to Knowing Which Tokens Fall Under the
Type, or to a Description of the Shared Properties of F
Things, or to Any Classification of the F as a Token of a
More Generic Type
A key move in my interpretation is the idea that Socrates is talking about conceptual
knowledge, and that he describes this kind of knowledge using the formula ‘knowing
the F, what it is’. In this section I support these moves by looking at the start of the Meno,
to consider what Socrates meant by asking Meno ‘what virtue is’, and why he thinks we
must answer that question before asking how it is transmitted.
In response to Meno’s opening question about how virtue is passed on,11 Socrates
objects that the question is out of order since he ‘does not know virtue at all, what it is’.12
In this response, he is drawing a distinction between knowing the type (virtue, or virtues)
10
71e–72a. 11 70a1–3. See Text 5.1, in Chapter 5, Passage A.
12
ὡς οὐδὲ αὐτὸ ὅτι ποτ’ ἐστὶ τὸ παράπαν ἀρετὴ τυγχάνω εἰδώς, Meno 71a6. This is from the imagined
comment from a fellow citizen (see Chapter 5, Text 5.2), but Socrates means it of himself too. See further
in Chapter 5, Section II. The neuter αὐτό treats ‘virtue’ as an abstraction, a logical entity, not as a virtue,
ἀρετή, which would be feminine.
in itself (‘what it is’) and knowing some other necessary or contingent fact about it, or
true description of it (‘what it is like’)—in this case, whether it is taught. This is the first
distinction, which Socrates identifies as the difference between knowing ti esti and
poion esti. In addition Socrates distinguishes between knowing what it is about the type,
and merely listing examples or tokens of the type, as Meno does in his first attempt at an
answer (71e). To know what virtues are is different from knowing which things are virtues.
When Socrates asks a ti esti question, he wants neither list of tokens (a ‘swarm’, 72a) nor
information about what other propositions are true of it (a poion esti answer).
IV.i That the dichotomy between knowing an object and knowing a

proposition is a false one, and that Socrates means neither of those
things when he speaks of knowing virtue ‘what it is’
Scholars have sometimes wondered what Socrates has in mind when he speaks of
‘knowing virtue, what it is’, or ‘knowing Meno, who he is’. For the sake of clarity I will
discuss the case of virtue, but the issue is the same for all the classic enquiries that
Socrates makes into types and moral values. We shall return to whether ‘knowing
Meno’ is different shortly.
The main options considered in the literature are that when Socrates uses this formula
he means either (a) ‘knowing virtue’; or (b) ‘knowing what virtue is’.13 Interpreters
typically assume that these options are disjunctive and exhaustive, and that if Socrates
means (a), then he is talking of knowing some object (virtue) by acquaintance, while if
he means (b), he is talking of knowing some proposition about virtue, namely a prop-
osition that states what virtue is. Scholars do not generally differ on what the options
(a) and (b) mean, but only on which is preferable.
I have argued elsewhere that this is a false dichotomy.14 In my view neither option
(a) nor option (b) correctly identifies what Socrates means, because those options are
suited only to cases where the object of knowledge is a particular thing (known by
acquaintance) or a particular fact or state of affairs (expressible as a proposition). By con-
trast, as we have just seen, Plato’s interest is conceptual knowledge, being competent with
a concept or idea (like knowing what a game is). In the Meno, ‘knowing virtue, what it is’
refers to that kind of knowing what a virtue is, and this is also what is intended in the ti
esti question when Socrates asks ‘what it is’ about virtue or any other item.
Clearly nothing obliges us to think that a concept or type of this kind must be either
an object (to be known by acquaintance) or a proposition or state of affairs (to be known
propositionally). Perhaps it is neither. But if it is neither a thing nor a proposition, what
is it? And what kind of knowing is involved? Surely this is exactly Plato’s question, the
question that he explores persistently in his dialogues. Whether he ever reached an
13
For (a), see R.S. Bluck, Plato Meno (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961); for (b), Gail Fine,
‘Inquiry in the Meno’ in Richard Kraut (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Plato (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1992), 200–26.
14
Rowett, ‘Plato, Wittgenstein and the definition of games’, 207.
answer, or whether he deliberately invites the reader to consider several possible answers,
remains unclear; but two things do seem clear: first, that Plato himself never supposes
that the concept or type consists of a definition, or that the knowledge is of a definition
or any other kind of propositional formula. Nor does he conclude that knowing the
type involves finding a single common factor shared by all tokens of the type. Certainly
Plato portrays Socrates, at the start of many dialogues, mistakenly assuming that to
know the type is to know what the tokens have in common. He does this in the Meno,
where Socrates insists that virtues, like bees, must have some simple diagnostic feature
that they all share.15 But he also shows that Socrates always fails—yet even though he
fails, there is no reason to conclude that he or the other characters involved are not
competent users of the concept (nor indeed is the reader unable to grasp the concept).
We all know what virtues are. We can deploy the idea of ‘virtue’, not least in rejecting
unsuccessful definitions and identifying counter-examples. Yet no common factor will
emerge (at least for the kind of concepts that Socrates cares about), as both reader and
author well know. The concepts that interest Socrates (and Plato) are precisely those
that are hard to define, and for which no simple common factor is apparent; yet these
concepts are just as knowable as those for which a simple definition is available. So
the failure is systematic and predictable.16 But equally, Plato does not think that
knowing a type is knowing a list of tokens, either complete or incomplete. Such an
equation seems to be correctly refuted in the Theaetetus (though, admittedly, it is not
always clear what is correctly refuted and what is mistakenly rejected).17 In the Meno
(as elsewhere), Plato seems to toy with the idea that a type or concept is like an abstract
object that paradigmatically instantiates the idea in question, and that knowledge of
such a paradigm is acquired by some out-of-body intellectual experience. At Meno
81b–c, in a mythological bit that sketches the idea of recollection, Socrates claims
that we have ‘learnt everything’, and that the soul has ‘seen the [things] up here and
the [things] in Hades and all things’. He does not explain what kind of seeing, or what
kind of things, but he concludes on this basis that the soul would be ‘able to remember
about virtue and other things’.18 Some scholars reckon that these mythical bits are what
Socrates does not absolutely affirm (as at 86b).19 However, 86b makes no distinction
between myth and philosophical epistemology. It is more concerned to contrast
(a) the epistemology (both myths and arguments) and (b) the moral message (not to
give up on enquiry). Besides, none of this is in Plato’s voice, so it need be no more
than a thought experiment, and the issues that it explores go far beyond this dialogue,
as we shall see.
15
Pace David Bostock, ‘Plato on understanding language’ in Stephen Everson (ed.), Language
(Companions to Ancient Thought 3) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 10–27, 10, the task is
indeed relatively easy for bees and for many other items in the natural and life sciences.
16
See Section II, and Chapter 4, Section I.iii, on the significance of the indefinable line, and Part IV of
this book on dismissing failed definitions (in the Theaetetus).
17
See Part IV. 18 81c8. 19 See Scott, Plato’s Meno, chapter 10.
Although it does not present an answer to the question about what form conceptual
knowledge takes, the Meno does reject some answers—particularly, that conceptual
knowledge involves knowing a definition or common feature, and that it is reducible to
correct performance or rule-following (especially practical rule-following, which is
the case considered in the dialogue, but the same would probably apply to learning to
use a term in language without understanding it). Since the difference between merely
getting things right, and getting them right on the basis of knowledge, is clearly noted,
Plato cannot mean to reduce knowledge to practical rule-following.20 So although the
Meno is primarily refuting the wrong answers, and not proposing a solution, we might
guess from the hints at ante-natal knowledge that Plato is picturing the conceptual
knowledge as somewhat analogous to a pictorial map, though it needs to be one without
edges and with unlimited density. There is not much to confirm this idea in the Meno,
but the analogy helps to explain several motifs that Plato offers in the Meno, Phaedo,
Phaedrus, Republic, and Symposium, and regardless of whether it is a correct account
of what Plato himself was thinking, I propose that we take it seriously as a model for
conceptual competence. I think that we should not try to reduce conceptual knowledge to
some other kind of knowing, as though, having listed knowledge of things, knowledge
of facts, and knowing how, we have listed all the kinds of knowledge there are and
must therefore reduce conceptual knowledge to one of those. I suggest that this is
exactly what Plato is denying, and correctly so. Knowing what virtue is turns out not to
be reducible to particular factual knowledge, or to a definition, or to happening to act
correctly on the basis of habit or opinion. Nor can we ever become acquainted with any
abstract type or concept in ordinary experience.
IV.ii That the example of ‘knowing Meno, who he is’ is about a type,
not a token, exactly like the case of virtue
It is above all the comparison with ‘knowing Meno’ that encourages scholars to think
that Socrates was thinking of knowledge ‘by acquaintance’. Defending his claim that one
must first know what virtue is before asking how it is acquired, Socrates asserts that
otherwise it is like asking what Meno is like without first knowing Meno, who he is:
Text 3.3
Or do you think that someone who does not know Meno at all, who he is, could tell
whether he is handsome or rich or even aristocratic, or equally the opposite of those
things? Do you think he could?
Meno 71b4–7 (my italics)21
It might seem that in this thought experiment, Meno is a particular man, and to know
him is to be acquainted with that man, and so this must be the same for ‘virtue’, if
20
See Chapter 5, Section III.iv.
21
I render γιγνώσκει as ‘know’ and εἰδέναι as ‘tell’, though this is probably just idiomatic variation. Bluck,
Plato Meno, ad loc. toys (abortively) with the idea that γιγνώσκει means ‘is acquainted with’.
Socrates is comparing like with like. I shall argue that Socrates is comparing like with
like, but in neither case is he talking of acquaintance with an object or an individual
person. When he speaks of ‘knowing Meno, who he is’ Plato does not mean knowing
the man Meno, but grasping an idea (‘Meno’, or what it is to be a Meno), while the man
himself is the exemplar that fits that idea; but the idea of a Meno is not something that
one becomes acquainted with, as one does with a man.
We can momentarily set aside alternative options, such as propositional knowledge
of who Meno is, since accounts that take that option usually equate knowing who
Meno is with knowing facts about a particular man. The interesting question for me is
whether Text 3.3 is talking about knowledge of a particular man at all. If I am right, to
know ‘Meno, who he is’ is to have a descriptor ‘Meno’ in your repertoire of descriptors,
and to have an abstract idea to which you can attach that descriptor, so that it figures
among your usable sortals or types. It is not a matter of knowing or having met a man
who falls under that description, or of knowing or believing any propositions about
that individual. It is about having a sound grasp of the notion of a Meno, which you could
deploy when required, and from which you could draw answers to tricky questions
about which thing counts as Meno and why.
One can ask ‘what is it?’ questions about very general types (like ‘virtue’), and also
about what I call ‘middle terms’: that is, things that are not the most generic, but are
nevertheless descriptors that apply to several particulars. ‘Courage’, for example, is a
token of the type ‘virtue’, and also a type, of which ‘standing firm in battle’ is one example,
among others. But then ‘standing firm in battle’ is also a generic kind which is instanti-
ated on many particular occasions by many brave people. Each such occasion is a case
of standing firm in battle. Hence one can ask ‘what it is’ about standing firm, and one is
still asking about a type, even though that type is also a token of the more generic type
‘courage’. If we ask ‘what it is’ about courage, then responding with ‘standing firm in
battle’ would be mentioning a token of the type, not a definition of the type in question.
Since some things serve both as tokens of more generic types, and as types with
tokens of their own, there is no fixed dichotomy between concepts and objects, or
classes and members of classes. So if episteme is the grasp of a type qua type, episteme
will be of the subspecies too, when that subspecies is treated as a type, but not when it
is seen as a token under another type. Identifying it as a token of a more generic type is
not answering ‘what it is’ about a type: so to say that courage is a virtue is not to say
what courage is, or what virtue is.
So when I say that episteme gives the ‘what it is’ about types qua types, I do not mean
that episteme has a special kind of object (namely types). I mean rather that it is a special
way of knowing the types, namely grasping what it is in itself, as opposed to knowing what
other type it instantiates, or what tokens instantiate it. I am calling this knowledge of a
type qua type ‘conceptual knowledge’, by which I mean possessing and understanding
the concept or type.
Some descriptors apply only to one token case. ‘The sun’ is one such descriptor. Imagine,
for a moment, that at Theaetetus 208d Socrates is defining the sun as ‘the brightest of
the heavenly bodies that circle the earth’.22 Such a formula maps the extension of a class,
and indicates that the class has only one member, since only one thing can be the
brightest one. Presumably, in fact, several things could be the sun successively, for
the same earth, but there can only be one body that satisfies the definition at a time. It
follows that even for classes with only one member, or roles with only one occupant,
we must distinguish between knowing the role, ‘sun’, and finding which item currently
(or eternally) occupies that role (our sun, Sol). Aristotle, for instance, distinguishes
between ‘sun’ (no article), which is a role, and can be defined, and the current occupant
of this role, ‘the Sun’.23 Were the role occupied by a different individual, that object
would be a sun, though not this one.
We can do the same with knowing what it takes to be Meno. This does not mean
anyone who happens to bear the name ‘Meno’, but what it takes to be our Meno. As with
the Sun, there is only one person who qualifies, if we exclude science-fiction cloning.
It evidently follows that knowing that this man is Meno is not the same as knowing
what a Meno is, just as knowing that this is the Sun is not the same as knowing what a
sun is. It is because I know who Meno is that I can recognize someone as Meno, or mistake
someone for Meno. But I can meet and get to know the man, who happens to be Meno,
without knowing that he is Meno, or having an idea of ‘who Meno is’ at all. Grasping
the idea of ‘Meno, son of Alexidemus, of Pharsalus’ is conceptual knowledge, not
knowing which token fits. It is not the same as knowing a man, called Meno, by
acquaintance or any other way. So both Bluck and Fine were, I suggest, mistaken when
they took ‘Meno’ in ‘know Meno, who he is’ to be the man Meno.24
Other examples in the Meno arguably follow the same pattern. Before finding the
road to Larissa, for instance, one can have an idea of such a road, and know what it
would be if there were one. Grasping that idea is a different kind of knowing from the
knowing involved in identifying the right road on the ground. Similarly, in geometry,
where ABCD is a square, ‘diagonals of ABCD’ is a class with two members. It is possible
to grasp the idea of such a diagonal without yet having picked one out. The student can
then look at the square, and search for one. Realizing that the line AC is a diagonal is
like locating Meno when looking for Meno.
Once we see that Plato is talking about grasping the role and not the occupant, we
need not be surprised (as many have been) that Plato illustrates conceptual knowledge
with ‘knowing who Meno is’; and we can settle the dispute about what Plato means by
‘knowing Meno, who he is’, in a third way. It was a false dichotomy between acquaintance
with the man and knowing some proposition about the man. Instead we can now see that
the expression places not the man but the concept ‘Meno’ as direct object of the verb
‘know’. It then specifies that the relevant knowing is knowing it for what it is—that is,
22
I do not read it this way, in fact. See Chapter 12, Section IV.iii for the refutation.
23
Aristotle Metaphysics Z, 1040a27–b4. I thank Victor Caston for reminding me of this.
24
In ‘know Meno, who he is’, ‘who’ is masculine, whereas in ‘know virtue, what it is’ at 71a6, ‘what’ was
neuter, not feminine, but I do not think that we should take that to undermine the idea that the expression
still refers to the role, not the man.
knowing it not as a token of some other type but as the type that it is, qua type. In this as
with other cases, the knowledge is conceptual, knowledge of a type qua type, and is not
a matter of knowing the man (even if it might sometimes be acquired that way).
Should we use the term ‘knowledge’ for this kind of knowledge? Surely yes—but
we should remember that it differs radically from knowing facts and propositions,
and also from the ‘knowing what something is’ that involves classifying it as a token
of a type, such as identifying Meno as a man, or bravery as a virtue. In later chapters
I shall return repeatedly to this idea of knowing what it is (‘ti esti’), about a concept
or type. There is a special use of the verb ‘is’, which I am calling the ‘is’ of conceptual
competence, which appears in this ‘what it is’ expression. I call it the ‘is’ of concep-
tual competence, because it typically appears in statements of what is known when
one grasps a concept, but it actually describes the content of the knowledge (namely,
what Fs are, for some concept F). We must not confuse this use of ‘is’ with the copula,
or the ‘is’ in normal propositional knowledge.
V. That the Distinction Between Episteme and Doxa

in Plato Is the Distinction Between the Intellectual
Grasp of the Type and the Experiential Recognition
of Particular Tokens, Whether With the Senses or
Just in the Mind
In Chapter 4 I argue that Plato portrays his character ‘Socrates’ discovering, during his
discussion with Meno, that ‘knowing virtue, what it is’ consists neither in knowing
a propositional formula, such as a definition, nor in being able to name a common
feature that explains why all virtues count as virtues. Plato, I suggest, was no longer
tempted (if he ever was) by the thought that he puts into Socrates’ mouth at the start of
the Meno, that someone who knows what virtues are must be able to identify a diagnostic
common factor in all virtues.
Chapter 4 clarifies what Plato means by episteme (and other roughly synonymous
vocabulary).25 Episteme is one side of the crucial episteme/doxa opposition, explored
in many of Plato’s works. In Chapter 5 we turn to the other side of that pair, doxa, as it
figures in the Meno. Having established that episteme is the grasp of the type, and is
non-propositional, we need to ask about doxa: is that also non-propositional? Is it
helpful to express the episteme/doxa contrast in terms of knowledge and belief, as has
become classic?26 How like our notion of ‘true belief ’ is Plato’s notion of ‘true’ or ‘correct’
doxa? When Socrates talks of progressing from true doxa to episteme, is he talking about
progressing from true belief to knowledge?
On the vocabulary see Chapter 5, note 1.

25
E.g. Fine, ‘Inquiry in the Meno’; Scott, Plato’s Meno; Gerson, Ancient Epistemology, 28–30 (but see
26
Chapter 5, note 58).

In Chapter 5 I argue that when Plato uses the term doxa, he is typically thinking of
recognizing a token of some type. For some form or type F, identifying some feature in
the world as a token of Fness is doxa (correct if you get it right, and false if you get it
wrong). While knowing the type (‘what Fs are’) is a prerequisite for this, identifying a
token is only ever an application of that knowledge: it never counts as ‘knowing what
Fs are’; nor is it any component of that conceptual knowledge, or any precursor of it.
Many traditional and popular readings of Plato’s Meno treat the dialogue as a discussion
on the relation between knowledge and true belief. They also find in the Meno evidence
that these two cognitive conditions relate to the same content, so that Plato is assuming
that one can also know the very same things about which one can have a true belief that
falls short of knowledge. Indeed, one can believe the very same claims about those
things.27 Then they suppose that Plato is genuinely bemused by a puzzle that he puts
into Socrates’ mouth—a puzzle as to why one needs knowledge at all, and what advantage
it brings, as compared with mere belief on the same matter, if one’s belief is true.
So according to one popular reading of the Meno, this dialogue conflicts, in interest-
ing ways, with Plato’s Middle-Period works, where knowledge is always and only of the
Forms, and faculties such as perception and doxa have another set of objects, namely
particulars—if, that is, you hold that Plato’s Middle-Period works do offer that kind
of two-world view.28 My view of the matter is quite the opposite. In Chapter 5 and
later chapters, I argue that there is no such conflict between the Meno and the Republic,
or any between the Meno and the Theaetetus.29 Instead, I suggest that the Meno is
worth examining because once we understand it for what it is, it clarifies Plato’s
intention in the Republic and the Theaetetus. All these dialogues turn out to be con-
sistent, I reckon; but to see this we need to think in a quite different way about what
Plato means by episteme and doxa, and we must recognize that Plato does not mean
us to follow Socrates unconditionally and uncritically into every blind alley that leads
to impasse.
So let us get clear on the distinction between episteme and doxa. In relation to any
form or type, there are two ways of attending to it. We may either think about the type
itself, or we may recognize and think about instantiations of it, such as individual
virtues that instantiate the generic type ‘virtue’, or cases of knowing that instantiate
‘knowledge’. When we encounter an instance of virtue—something generous, say—we
are not encountering virtue as a type, though the generosity is indeed a virtue.
Recognizing it as a virtuous thing is a case of doxa, for Plato; and is true in this case
27
Gail Fine, ‘Introduction’, Plato on Knowledge and the Forms (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003), 1–43,
7 explicitly argues for these claims.
28
Obviously, there is no apparent conflict for anyone who denies that Plato held that view in the Middle
Period (e.g. Gail Fine, ‘Knowledge and belief in Republic V’, Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, 60
(1978), 121–39 (reprinted in Fine, Plato on Knowledge and Forms, 66–84)). Fine finds consistency across
these dialogues, as I do, but to the opposite effect, aligning all the texts with what she takes to be the
conclusion in the Theaetetus.
29
The traditional readings typically see two changes of heart: first between Meno and dialogues with the
Theory of Forms, and second between those dialogues and the Theaetetus. See Chapter 1, Section II.
because this is a genuine case of virtue. It is doxa because the generosity seems virtuous
(and seeming can be true or false). Hence I believe that translating doxa as ‘belief ’ is
misleading, regardless of which sense of ‘belief ’ is intended.30 In this chapter I am
mainly using ‘true seeming’, or ‘correct impressions’ for the content of veridical cases
of doxa, because I am interested in the etymology of ‘seeming’ in the root of doxa
and doxazein. When, occasionally, I use ‘opinion’, that should not be understood as a
propositional belief, but as thinking of an item of the right kind (e.g. thinking of the
number 27, when asked to think of a number). In Part IV, I shall use ‘discern’ for
the verbal constructions (doxazein with direct object).
By contrast, to know virtue for what it is, in the way explained above, is to grasp the
concept of virtue as such, not simply to notice an instance of it. That is episteme. Given
that translating episteme as ‘knowledge’ is misleading in some contexts, since episteme
never includes the type of ‘knowing that p’ cases that dominate what knowing is for us,
there is a double imperative not to assimilate Plato’s episteme/doxa distinction to the
knowledge/true belief distinction of modern epistemology.
It is true that, of the two, doxa is the one that comes closest to being quasi-propositional.
Is it not doxa that notices, for example, ‘that these sticks are equal’? In such cases, it
comes naturally to us to conceive of this having propositional content, because our
report of such a case, put into words, appears as a proposition. But the experience itself
(of equality instantiated in these sticks) is not in fact propositional or complex.31 For
instance, when we see someone being generous, what strikes us is the generosity of
the act (not ‘that this act is generous’). We have an impression of generosity.32 If, on
occasion, we do see an item under two descriptions (‘that’s a generous act’, or ‘this
generosity is good’), we should count two logically separate cases of doxa coinciding:
I discern (a) an act and (b) a case of generosity, or (a) generosity and (b) goodness. But
the normal case is a single, minimal, impression of one token of one kind (one instance
of generosity, for instance), recognized as such and under no other description. So
although we often use propositional form to describe cases of doxa, the content of the
doxa itself is simply the predicate, not both subject and predicate, or any proposition
that combines them.33
Still, since doxa is always of some instance or trope, it never takes the type or form
itself as content. Virtue itself never seems virtuous. It is virtue. So while episteme is
of the type, doxa is always of a token. There is a clear logical distinction between the
possible content for doxa (tokens, instances, tropes)34 and the possible content for epis-
teme (type, form, generic abstraction). Hence Plato is quite right that doxa and episteme
capture different content, so that episteme can never be a better-grounded or justified
case of doxa. On the contrary, episteme is not a case of doxa, nor is its content in the
same logical category, nor is it grounded or justified at all.
30
On the ambiguity of belief, see Chapter 2, Section I.ii.
31
See discussion in Chapter 2, Section I.ii.
32
Generosity here is a trope (i.e. an individual occurrence of the type generosity). See note 34.
33
See Chapter 11, note 52. 34 See Chapter 11, note 51.
In Chapter 5 I explore the implications of all this. It involves rejecting the traditional
view that the Meno is taking knowledge and true belief to have the same content, and
wondering what advantage could be conferred by knowing it, over and above correctly
believing it. Instead, I suggest that it contrasts reliably correct doxa—namely, regularly
and consistently picking out a particular token correctly—with cases where that correct
identification of tokens is grounded in a philosophically competent, reflective know-
ledge of the abstract idea or type that is being deployed. Plato has Socrates wonder why
we would also need that abstract knowledge, and why we should not be content with
nothing more than the reliably correct recognition of token cases, instilled perhaps by
habit and good training. The question is truly relevant to the issue of training in virtue
and good habits in public life. Why might one want to add philosophical understanding
of what virtue and goodness are in themselves?
If this is the question, what answer do we find? As I interpret the Meno, Socrates is
proposing that simple and reliable recognition of tokens is sufficient to be going on
with for normal life. We can get by like that, he suggests, in both politics and the virtu-
ous life. But Socrates also thinks that something valuable is gained by adding the full
conceptual understanding; that is, by knowing virtue, what it is. What do we gain? This
knowledge, he suggests, enables one to deduce why this or that token is worthy of the
description ‘virtue’, and not just that it is a virtue. In the dialogue, we find Socrates
arguing that knowledge helps by tying down the unstable ability to locate correct
examples, and it can do this because it enables us to see the reason why.
Is this Plato’s considered view, or merely one that he attributes to Socrates for the
sake of discussion? In favour of thinking that it might be seriously entertained by Plato,
we should note that it fits with the idea of an iconic method for acquiring a reflective
grasp of the Forms. Just as one can start with a diagram, and ascend from grasping the
particular to a level of understanding in which the particular is seen as instantiating
the abstract idea, so also one can start with true doxa—by following the road to Larissa
by successfully finding it on the ground—and then proceed to a more abstract grasp
of what makes it count as the right thing, on the basis of which one can give a different
kind of analysis and explanation of what is what. The last part of the dialogue opens, and
partly answers, a question about what exactly we have gained once we have progressed
to thinking of, and understanding, the type in abstraction from its exemplifications on
the ground. It is a question that is arguably more urgent in relation to the wise person’s
understanding of virtue than to mapping the best way to Larissa, or knowing whether
Meno is handsome.
4
Knowing What Virtue Is
in Plato’s Meno
I. In Which We Consider How We Should

Read the Meno
I.i That we must distinguish between Plato and his characters,
including the Socrates character
Like most, if not all, of Plato’s works, the dialogue Meno is a work of fiction. It imagines
the character ‘Socrates’ meeting a young foreigner from Thessaly called Meno, and
examining his claim to know what virtue is. To make sense of such fictional dialogues,
we need to keep in mind the distinction between what the characters are made to say
and what (if anything) the author might want to say, if asked. An author or playwright
does not necessarily agree with any of the characters in his plays.1 This is particularly
relevant for understanding the opening pages of Plato’s Meno. Plato may not approve
of what Socrates says in these pages. He may be portraying Socrates as confused or
mischievous. It is not Plato who is stuck, when Socrates comes to an impasse. Plato
may be interested in the failure: he may be diagnosing what caused it, and exploring
ways to correct it.
When Plato shows Socrates changing course, finding a better approach, making
better progress after a failure, this improvement may provide a clue to the author’s
view on what had gone wrong and how to avoid the error. This is what I believe is
happening in the Meno, and we shall find another example of this in the Republic.2
In both cases, I shall suggest, Plato first shows us a Socrates destined to fail, due to his
misguided essentialism, and then as the dialogue proceeds he has Socrates exploring
alternative methods, especially methods that exploit the epistemic value of diagrams
and images—and finding that they bear more fruit. This softer, more open-minded
1
Michael C. Stokes, Plato’s Socratic Conversations: drama and dialectic in three dialogues (London: The
Athlone Press, 1986) offers a sophisticated analysis of the relation between author and characters but
assumes that Plato approves of Socrates. Christopher Rowe, Plato and the Art of Philosophical Writing
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007) explicitly takes ‘Socrates’ to be expressing Plato’s views.
I am not aware of any predecessors for my view that Plato is diagnosing faults in Socrates’ approach.
2
See Part III. The Theaetetus is similar, except that Socrates is never brought into line with Plato’s
authorial position, remaining barren and unproductive to the end. See Part IV.
Socrates is (I suggest) closer to Plato’s ideal of a philosopher: someone who knows

what it is to know, and finds ways to encourage others to discover and articulate what
they also know; a philosopher who does not leave people in confusion, but helps them
to recover the truth and recognize its importance for their lives.
Given that Socrates is not Plato, we should read the Meno with caution. For instance,
when Socrates insists that enquiry must always begin with a satisfactory definition of
the subject under investigation, Plato’s point is not so much to endorse that project as
watch it in action and question its value, I suggest. As the dialogue proceeds, other
more fruitful approaches, and more promising theories about knowledge-acquisition,
are experimentally put in its place. Clearly we should have more respect for the
approaches that bear fruit than the ones that have to be discarded or revised, because
they failed to generate any progress. The failed methods are surely not Plato’s preferred
method, even if they were the main tools used by his mentor Socrates.
I.ii A review of the key turning points in the dialogue, which show that
Socrates caused the confusion by insisting on the priority of definition
To support this way of reading the Meno, let us look first at the dialogue’s opening pages,
and then at the section where the initial assumptions are shown to be problematic.
At the beginning of the dialogue, Meno asks whether virtue is transmitted by teach-
ing or some other way. Socrates protests that this question is out of order: before asking
what virtue is like (poion esti), you must first know virtue, ‘what it is’,3 and for that you
must be able to define it, Socrates says. Yet for all his efforts, Meno cannot find a satis-
factory definition of virtue,4 and after ten pages he becomes perplexed.5
This moment of perplexity is a real turning point, as I read it, after which Socrates
will be provoked to look at things in a different way. Many readers assume otherwise:
that Meno’s perplexity reflects a failure on his part, rather than on the part of Socrates,
and that the paradox of learning raises only specious problems for Socrates’ defin
itional project. But the dialogue makes better sense if we take the problems as real.
Meno is right that Socrates has been trying to make the enquiry conform to impossible
standards—standards set by theory, not by common sense.6 On my reading, we now
see Plato giving up on definition and searching for a better method of enquiry.7
The sequence goes as follows: first, Meno denounces Socrates’ habit of generating
perplexity in his interlocutor. He blames Socrates for the failure of his inquiries,
because Socrates generates confusion, not clarity. He compares it to the way that a
stingray fish numbs its prey. Socrates protests that he is equally numb himself.8 But this
3
Meno 71a6, 71b3. See Chapter 3, Section IV. 4 Meno 72d2, 74b1, 79b–e, 80a.
5
Meno 80a.
6
Compare Augustine, Confessions XI 14.17, and Wittgenstein, PI 89 for parallels to the idea that the
philosopher creates a problem where there was none before.
7
See Rowett, ‘Plato, Wittgenstein and the definition of games’.
8
Meno 80c3–d1. See Vasilis Politis, ‘Is Socrates paralyzed by his State of Aporia? Meno 79e7–80d4’ in
Michael Erler and Luc Brisson (eds.), Gorgias—Menon: selected papers from the Seventh Symposium
Knowing What Virtue Is in Plato’s Meno 71
is no defence, since a philosopher can confuse himself as much as his listeners

by imposing inappropriate demands based on dogma and theory. It is no virtue to
be confused by your own false assumptions too. Meno, however, cleverly takes up
Socrates’ admission of ignorance and uses it in his next challenge (‘Meno’s Paradox’).9
If both partners in the conversation start from ignorance, and if you can’t know
what you’re talking about unless you first know the definition (as Socrates claims),
then the enquiry is doomed, since they can’t even look for a definition that they don’t
know, or assess what they find, or know whether it is what they wanted. How can
Socrates ever hope to discover anything, since ex hypothesi you don’t know what
you’re looking for?
What is Plato’s response to this challenge? The character Socrates, in the dialogue,
calls it an eristic argument, and responds as if he had a good answer. Most scholars
think that Plato means this answer to be sound, and that it does not undermine either
Socrates’ or Plato’s commitment to the ‘define it first’ principle. According to one
prominent interpretation, Socrates’ opening moves were not vulnerable to Meno’s
challenge, because although Socrates said (truly, according to this interpretation) that
he did not know what virtue is, he never said that he had no true beliefs about it, and
Socrates could therefore dismiss the paradox on the basis that starting your enquiry
from belief is still possible, and a true belief will enable you to recognize the definition
when you have found it; and then this belief can become knowledge when you have
found the definition, whereupon Socrates can escape the paradox while still holding
that we have knowledge only once we have the definition.10 On this interpretation, the
paradox does not constitute a turning point, because it was only Meno who was fazed
by it, whereas Plato had carefully left space for this answer in everything that he made
Socrates say at the beginning.
This is implausible, however. First, it requires that in the opening section, which
was working emphatically to distinguish knowing/asking what virtue is (ti esti) from
knowing/asking what kind of thing it is (poion esti), Plato was all that time silently
drawing a crucial distinction between knowing what it is or what kind of thing it is and
just asking or talking about it, even though Socrates never mentions such a distinction
until after Meno’s paradox.11 This solution is particularly implausible since at 70b–71a,
Platonicum (Sankt Augustin: Academia Verlag, 2007), 268–72, and Alexander Nehamas, ‘Meno’s Paradox
and Socrates as a teacher’, Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, 3 (1985), 1–30 (reprinted in Nehamas,
Virtues of Authenticity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 3–26), 7.
9
Meno 80d5–8, reformulated by Socrates at 80e1–6.
10
Fine, ‘Inquiry in the Meno’, 57. Fine considers and rejects potential objections, including the idea that
Plato is introducing a new epistemology. Scott, Plato’s Meno takes the passage to operate on two levels: at
the deeper level Socrates is ‘on trial’, even though Socrates is right that Meno’s purpose was eristic, Scott
thinks; his double reading shares some common ground with my view, but I think that Plato shows that the
paradox is indeed eristic (it assumes that there is only one way of knowing something, namely definitional,
which is correct as an ad hominem point against Socrates).
11
Fine, ‘Inquiry in the Meno’, 45–50. See also Roslyn Weiss, Virtue in the Cave: moral inquiry in Plato’s Meno
(New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 22 and 24 n. 20, and J.T. Bedu-Addo, ‘Recollection
and the argument “From a Hypothesis” in Plato’s Meno’, Journal of Hellenic Studies, 104 (1984), 1–14.
Socrates ridicules Gorgias’s willingness to answer questions without knowing the

answer;12 so he must mean (a) that you cannot even discuss, let alone answer, a q uestion
unless you know the answer; and (b) that you cannot consider, discuss, or answer a
what it is like (poion) question without knowing the answer to the what it is question
(ti esti). This leaves no space for asking and investigating on the basis of true belief, by
proffering answers that are true but not known, in the way that Fine suggests. Socrates
clearly means that it is unacceptable for Gorgias or anyone else, himself included, to
discuss any question unless one has knowledge.
Even more widespread is another view, which does take the paradox to mark a
turning point, but reaches a conclusion similar to that of the first interpretation.
On this view, Socrates had started by asserting that knowledge was required before
enquiry could begin, but after Meno’s challenge he decides that we can after all enquire
into things we don’t know, by using true beliefs as the basis.13 Readers who take this
line think that Plato endorses this new approach, and they think that Plato means that the
slave boy makes progress under Socrates’ guidance, because both he and Socrates have
true beliefs, and do not disavow their beliefs.14 However, it is hard to fit this reading to
the text, given that the slave boy makes progress only after all his existing beliefs have
been faulted and once he disavows even the faintest belief. Socrates comments on how
important it is that the boy reach a numb perplexity before continuing.15 His situation
is thus the reverse of what these interpretations suggest (this applies to both readings).
What we learn from the slave-boy episode is that successful enquiry starts from a
situation where we discard all prior beliefs, whether correct or incorrect.16
Here is a further reason against subscribing to either of those readings. How very
odd it would be dramatically if Socrates were to be claiming—either all along, or only
after the paradox—that it is acceptable to start an enquiry from a mere belief, without
knowing the answer to the definition question, since that was evidently what Meno
supposed in the first place (apparently rightly, on this view), while Socrates, not Meno,
insisted (irrelevantly, it now seems) that they must first demonstrate a fully articulate
definitional knowledge of the subject of conversation, before beginning on serious
enquiry! That makes for dramatic nonsense: Socrates is either a knave or a fool; his ten
pages of insistence that enquiry cannot start without a definition would be bonkers,
12
He pretends that all the Athenians would also object to such behaviour. See Chapter 5, Section II.
13
This is (as Alexander Nehamas, ‘Socratic intellectualism’, Proceedings of the Boston Area Colloquium in
Ancient Philosophy, 2 (1987), 275–316 (reprinted in Nehamas, Virtues of Authenticity (Princeton, NJ,
1999), 27–58), 281 observes) the usual response to the ‘Socratic fallacy’ charge levelled by Peter Geach,
‘Plato’s Euthyphro: an analysis and commentary’, The Monist, 50 (1966), 369–82. Nehamas traces it in
Terence Irwin, Plato’s Moral Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 41 and Gerasimos Santas,
Socrates (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979). See also Terence Irwin, Plato’s Ethics (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1995), 132.
14
Fine, ‘Inquiry in the Meno’, 56–7. 15 Meno 84c.
16
Members of the audience at the Oxford Ancient Philosophy Workshop usefully helped me to articu-
late how my view differs from these standard readings. On the difference from Scott see note 10.
and his claim that Meno’s slave boy recovers existing knowledge out of himself (85d)
would be either a lie or a misleading untruth. If Socrates were now suggesting that one
can proceed by using true opinion, why would he say that the boy found the answer
because he had knowledge in him?
The dialogue makes more sense, surely, if Socrates never relaxes his claim that you
must know what you are talking about. He does, however, come to realize, when faced
with Meno’s paradox, that there is a different kind of knowing, which does not require
knowing a definition (nor does it equate to belief or true belief).17 Contrary to what he
had assumed at the start, people can evidently know things, even when they cannot
articulate their knowledge as a definition. In such cases one can (like the slave boy) use
the inarticulate knowledge to recognize examples and know that they are sound; and
this provides a sound basis from which to proceed towards a more articulate k nowledge
through reflection and philosophy. So enquiry is not pointless: it helps you to reach
clarity by articulating the inarticulate knowledge from which you began—the hidden
knowledge that enabled you to pick out examples, and identify which ones survive
testing and which do not, because after all they are not good examples when examined
more closely.
So, on my view, the paradox marks an important turning point in the Meno, which
must not be concealed or swept under the carpet. It is not that Socrates abandons or
relaxes his requirement that you need to know ‘what it is’, about a concept, before
enquiring into its contingent or sortal features. He does not advocate turning to the
second question (is virtue teachable?) without knowledge of what virtue is, nor does
he resort to using true belief in place of knowledge. Rather, he discovers that the requisite
kind of knowledge of ‘what it is’ is already there. The mistake was to think that this
came as an articulate definition. If the knowledge of ‘what it is’ does not yet, or perhaps
ever, emerge as a clear definition of the kind that Socrates originally had in mind, he
was wrong to insist on first getting a definition before proceeding, but he was not
wrong to insist that we must start with a knowledge of what it is. Once we see that quest
for a definition was pointless, we can now move straight to the ‘what kind of thing’
question. For we did not really lack the knowledge of ‘what it is’ after all.
Something is different, however. The ‘what kind of thing’ enquiry, asking whether
virtue is teachable, will not now be quite as Socrates had initially envisaged, for it
cannot proceed by deriving information deductively from the definition, since we
have no definition, nor do we know whether there can be one. Thus it transpires that
Socrates had been wrong to say that he did not know what virtue is, and he had been
wrong about the proper order of events in an enquiry into virtue. This is quite sufficient
to justify a considerable change of plan about how to continue the investigation into
whether virtue can be taught.
17
Nehamas, ‘Socratic intellectualism’ makes some of these moves but he still thinks that there are spe-
cialist things that cannot be known without the definition, of which teachability is one.
I.iii That Plato’s chosen illustration, the search for the indefinable side
of the double square, is intended to prove that what someone knows
may not be definable (by anyone, in principle, not just in practice)
After Meno’s paradox, Socrates introduces the idea of ‘recollection’, which he illustrates
by getting a young slave to solve a geometrical problem (Meno 81b–86b). I shall begin
with what I take to be a wrong (though common) reading of this famous passage.
Readers wedded to the idea that, for Socrates and for Plato, knowing a concept is
knowing a definition will typically interpret the recollection theory thus: people have a
store of latent conceptual knowledge, which consists of essential definitions, and in
recollection we bring these definitions to the surface. However, this fits rather badly
with the text. In the geometry episode, no definition is ever sought or produced.
Furthermore, if the slave-boy episode was designed to show that Meno’s soul really
does contain latent knowledge of the true definition of virtue, which just needs to be
brought to the surface by elenchus, then the next move should be to return at once to
the search for a definition, since we would now know that the search was not vain, that
the definition is there to be found. Socrates would be the more justified in insisting on
finding it. But in fact, quite the reverse happens. No more definition-hunting happens
after the slave-boy passage. Instead Socrates immediately does exactly what on that
interpretation he should not do: he stops asking for the definition and starts examining
the teachability question without it.18 Does Socrates show one thing and immediately
do the opposite? Surely not.
In another popular interpretation, based on the same assumption that knowledge
requires definitions, the slave-boy experiment reveals latent true beliefs (not definitions,
so not knowledge). Knowledge then follows only later once we reach a definition. But
(a) this saddles Socrates with a ludicrous view whereby Adam, who can recognize a
horse but not define it, does not know what a horse is, while Esther does know what a
horse is, because she can define ‘horse’ (‘a hinnible animal’) even though when sent to
look for one she buys a donkey instead, being unable to recognize any example of
the type;19 and (b) the boy will not have drawn existing knowledge out of himself
(as Socrates claims), but only true belief, with no evidence that it came from prior
knowledge, or could deliver future knowledge. In any case, this variant does not reduce
the total incongruity of Socrates’ behaviour in the later part of the dialogue.20
There is a much better way to make the dialogue talk sense. Once we see that the
slave-boy passage does not show or claim that there is a definition in the student’s soul,
but rather proves the opposite (that knowledge is there, without a definition), then it
18
Meno 86d. 19 See Plato’s own version of this paradox, at Phaedrus 260b–c.
20
Scott, Plato’s Meno, 131–3, 140–2 tries to avoid the incongruity by claiming that Plato still holds to the
ideal of finding a definition, and that the hypothetical method is an inferior compromise. He thinks the
compromise is necessary because the purist approach has proven ineffective, not unnecessary, for know-
ledge. On my reading, definition turns out not to be required for knowledge, and sometimes impossible,
while the hypothetical method is the best available in such cases.
makes perfect sense to stop looking for a definition, and to behave as if we already
know the answer to ‘virtue, what it is’. Evidently Meno was right; his paradox consti-
tutes a serious objection to the position that Socrates had adopted at the start.21
Socrates had rejected the use of examples; he had imposed a certain model of defin
ition, using sample definitions of ‘shape’ and ‘bees’ as paradigms to which all definitions
of all concepts should conform. All attempts to follow these paradigms for defining
virtue had failed. When Meno was unable to comply, Socrates inferred that Meno
did not know what he was talking about, because he supposed that to know is to have
a definition of that kind. That is the assumption that has now been found faulty. Not
surprisingly, then, Socrates changes tack after dealing with Meno’s paradox. He no
longer insists on a definition before asking what something is like, as though you didn’t
know what it is without a definition. And that is exactly what we should expect.22
I.iv That Socrates still wants to know ‘what virtue is’ before asking other
questions, but knowing ‘what it is’ no longer means giving a definition
Although Socrates now turns to considering how virtue is transmitted (which is
a ‘poion esti’ question), he has not given up thinking that one should first find out ‘what
it is’ (ti esti):
Text 4.1
Socrates: If I were the one in control—not just of myself but of you as well, Meno,—
we wouldn’t enquire whether virtue is teachable or not, in advance, before we’d
first sought the thing itself, what it is. But since you’re not trying to take control of
yourself, so as to be free, but you’re trying to take control of me, and you are in
control of me, I’m going to go along with your plan. For what else can I do? So it
looks like we’ve got to enquire what kind of thing it is, about something which we
don’t yet know what it is.
Meno 86d3–e1
For all the irony in this exchange, I take Socrates to be serious in saying that Meno has
diverted him from the ‘what it is’ quest, and that they are taking things somewhat out
of order. However, what is important, if my argument in Section I.iii is correct, is that
Socrates no longer speaks of needing a definition to answer the ti esti question, and
also, since the geometry episode proved that the boy could find particular answers to
21
Nehamas, ‘Meno’s Paradox’ 8–9 agrees that Plato treats the paradox as a serious, not eristic, challenge.
David Charles, ‘Types of definition in the Meno’ in Lindsay Judson and Vassilis Karasmanis (eds.),
Remembering Socrates (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 110–28, 120 takes Socrates to be confusing
two definitional questions, or use and mention. But this cannot be a relevant criticism, since the use/
mention distinction is vacuous for conceptual knowledge, and the two definitional questions collapse to
one. See further detail in note 37 below.
22
Contrast my view with Weiss, Virtue in the Cave: moral inquiry in Plato’s Meno, who holds that
Socrates gives up demanding definitional knowledge, but not on principle (she gives a moralizing account,
based on Meno’s character). In my view Meno is not deficient in understanding, and his grasp of what
virtue is does not fall short.
particular questions without needing to define the concepts he was using, or the lines
that he was choosing on the diagram, Socrates no longer has any reason to deny that it
is possible to consider poion esti questions, such as whether virtue is teachable, without
first answering the ti esti questions about the terms of the enquiry. Certainly, he still
disapproves of Meno’s hasty diversion to the poion esti question, but he now treats this
as merely acratic—a consequence of Meno’s lack of self-control—and not, as he surely
did at the start of the dialogue, impossible.
II. In Which We Note That the Hypothetical Method

(If Well Done) Is Ideal for Poion Esti Questions About
Vague Concepts With No Neat Definitions
When Socrates resumes the discussion with Meno, he uses what he calls a ‘hypothetical
method’ (86e). Since Socrates gives no theoretical explanation of the method, but only
a somewhat sketchy example (see p. 77), there has been much discussion as to what
exactly Plato had in mind.23 The idea is that, given a problem question, you do not
answer that question directly, but first you start by positing a claim that might be true,
and which (if true) could help with the original question. You can then redirect your
attention to establishing the truth of the posited claim. For instance, suppose that we
know that if p is true, then q will be true. Then one way to find out whether q is true is to
test whether p is true.24
There are two ways to reach a conclusive answer by this method: the first is to prove
conclusively that p is true, and thereby confirm that q, which follows from p, is true.
At this point the method is no longer hypothetical but it is still an indirect way of estab-
lishing q. The second way to get a conclusive result without confirming the hypothesis
is when we can find two or more alternative hypotheses, which are jointly exhaustive of
all the possibilities, and show that q follows from all of them. So if we know that one or
other of p or r must be true, and that q follows either way, then we need not establish
whether p is true. We can safely infer that q is true even though there are unknowns in
the equation.25
However, it is also possible to use the method to obtain an answer that is disjunctive
rather than conclusive. There are times when we need to establish that there are
two possible outcomes and what those would be. If we do not know whether p or r
will happen, and different results will follow depending on which occurs (if p then q,
23
There is a new, extensive, and helpful discussion in Benson, Clitophon’s Challenge, chapter 5 which
appeared too late to inform my discussion here (though I was already working with Hugh Benson, ‘The
method of hypothesis in the Meno’, Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy, 18 (2002 (2003)),
95–126). Benson’s understanding coheres with my account in many respects.
24
See the appendix in Bluck, Plato Meno and Benson, Clitophon’s Challenge.
25
E.g. we are given an unknown number x which might be either even or odd, and we must discover
whether 2x is even or odd. We need not settle the question whether x is even or odd, or what number it is,
because on either hypothesis it will follow that 2x is even.
if r then o), then we can keep both uncertainties in the equation and reach a disjunctive
conclusion. Socrates explains this method, and its disjunctive results, with an instance
from geometry, at Meno 86e4–87a7.26 The disjunctive result can be useful, for example
when waiting for the number one candidate to accept a job offer. Once the result comes
in (we know that p), this confirms which hypothesis is satisfied, and we now know that
p, therefore q.
Thus to get a single answer, instead of a disjunction, we have to confirm one of the
two hypotheses. Confirming the hypothesis, and thereby getting a definitive answer to
the main question, can sometimes be done without settling all the details (e.g. with the
actual number or name still unknown, we might establish that whatever number it is, it
is going to be even, or that whoever it is, it will certainly be an ethicist who can teach
Ethics 101 and not a philosopher of science).
II.i The failure of the hypothetical method: that Socrates is to blame

Socrates says that he will apply the hypothetical method to the question of whether
virtue is transmitted by teaching or some other way. He suggests that we could infer
that virtue is taught on the hypothesis that virtue is a kind of knowledge (87c). Here he
has just one hypothesis, not a disjunction: ‘If virtue is knowledge, then virtue is taught’.
He offers no alternatives to say what might be true if virtue turns out not to be a kind of
knowledge. Without an exhaustive list of alternative disjunctive hypotheses, we shall
quickly get stuck, since we cannot deduce what will happen if the hypothesis is false. In
addition, the inference from ‘x is knowledge’ to ‘x is passed on by teaching’ is already in
doubt. So the method is insecure from the start, both in failing to provide exhaustive
alternatives and in failing to identify even one proposed entailment that holds good.
So although the method itself is sound enough, Socrates is not doing a good job with it.
Ideally, to get a useful result, he needs a list of exhaustive possibilities—say, either every
virtue is a kind of knowledge or at least some virtues are not kinds of knowledge—and
then (as in the examples above) preferably he needs to show that his desired conclusion
follows either way, regardless of which situation is actually realized. Or, second best, he
could produce an argument that yields different conclusions on each of the alternative
assumptions, so as to draw a disjunctive conclusion: ‘If virtue is a kind of knowledge
then p, but if not then q’. Then, if the disjunctive conclusion is not enough for the pur-
pose of the enquiry, and it matters which situation obtains, he would need to confirm
one of the hypotheses—but at that point he would no longer be operating hypothetic-
ally, but would be substituting a deductive proof from a proven premise.
But Socrates does none of that. In the first place, he fails to show that the proposed
conclusion follows from the hypothesis, even if true. He has himself already questioned
26
Socrates imagines an enquiry into whether a certain area can be inscribed as a triangle in a given cir-
cle. Classic treatments of the passage are found in Richard Robinson, Plato’s Earlier Dialectic (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1941) and H.-P. Stahl, ‘Beginnings of propositional logic in Plato’ in Malcolm Brown
(ed.), Plato’s Meno: Text and essays (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1971), 180–97, and see also Benson,
Clitophon’s Challenge, chapter 5.
the inference from ‘it’s knowledge’ to ‘it’s taught’—indeed, that was explicitly rejected
in the previous section of the dialogue, where the slave boy discovered unexpected
knowledge without having been taught, as Socrates emphatically asserts at 85d3.27 So
Socrates already knows that not all knowledge comes by teaching, and not all learning
requires a teacher who knows what he is teaching.28 So the conclusion would not f ollow
from the hypothesis, even if the hypothesis were true, and the inference is therefore not
safe. This fault is obvious to any careful reader.
Second, Socrates’ application of the method is faulty because he considers just one
disjunct (that virtue might be knowledge). This is one possibility, but suppose it is not so.
If it is a hypothesis—something assumed for the sake of argument but not something
that we know—then there must be other possibilities too. Nothing can be proved from
just one hypothesis like this, unless it is not a hypothesis but a premise whose truth is
known. In which case we are not working with hypotheses.
Socrates does try to offer some support for his hypothesis ‘that virtue might be
knowledge’. For two pages (87d–88c) the discussion begins to look promising, though
not very hypothetical. At 87d, Socrates posits a further hypothesis (‘if x is good, then
x is, or is accompanied by, knowledge’) to support the first (‘that virtue might be knowl
edge’). Since virtue is (evidently) something good, and supposing that all good actions
are accompanied by wisdom, then virtue would be a kind of wisdom (87d–88c). In
Text 4.2, he concludes that if a psychological condition is to be valuable, it must be
accompanied by wisdom:
Text 4.2
Socrates: So if virtue is something in the soul, and it’s got to be something helpful,
then it had better be wisdom (phronesis), given that psychological things just by
themselves are neither helpful nor harmful, but they become harmful or helpful by
the addition of wisdom or stupidity. So by that reasoning, virtue must be a certain
wisdom, seeing as how it’s something helpful.
Meno 88c4–d3
Text 4.2 tries to add prima facie plausibility to the premise ‘virtue is knowledge’, on the
grounds that the claim that ‘virtue is good’ seems intuitive. It then claims a connection
between ‘good’ and ‘accompanied by wisdom’, on the basis of common experience,
and guesses that wisdom and knowledge must be related. By now Socrates has several
extra premises, which he is using to defend the truth of the first premise, that virtue is
27
See also 84c–d. Socrates is right about this. See further Chapter 5, Section IV.i.
28
How can Socrates think (89d) that if something is learnt, there must be teachers and pupils, given how
he insisted repeatedly that the slave boy attained knowledge with no teaching at all (82e4, 84c–d, 85d3)?
Scott, Plato’s Meno, 142–4 makes Socrates consistent by taking 89d to mean the kind of teaching that was
described as not teaching in the earlier passage, namely maieutic teaching. But such ‘consistency’ amounts
to incoherence. Socrates’ claim that ‘teachable’ and ‘recollectable’ are interchangeable expressions (87b7)
cannot help, because the use of teachers to guide enquiry, whether maieutic or didactic, is a contingent
feature of current ways of learning. The absence of teachers could never show that the knowledge was not
teachable in principle.
knowledge, but none of them seems to be kept in anything like a hypothetical status.
Rather than reasoning on the basis of hypotheticals, ‘if this is so then that will be so’,
without assuming that either is so, Socrates tries to show, in Text 4.2, that because this
is so, therefore that and that must be so. Such progress as there is in this passage is not
achieved by hypothetical reasoning, but by deductive reasoning from premises sup-
ported by evidence from intuitions and common experience. This is not by any stretch
of the imagination a good illustration of a hypothetical method, I submit.
After this initial progress, Socrates loses confidence—and rightly so.
Text 4.3
Meno: This seems to me to be necessary. And it’s clear, Socrates, according to the
hypothesis, that if virtue is episteme, then it is teachable.
Socrates: Perhaps, by Zeus. But maybe that’s something we agreed to improperly?
Meno: Well it seemed properly stated just a moment ago.
Socrates: Well it ought to seem properly stated not only just then, but also now
and in future, if there’s to be any health in it.
Meno 89c2–10
Socrates is right to have doubts, since the assumptions he has been making conflict
with what he said before, but he diagnoses the faults in quite the wrong place:
Text 4.4
Meno: What’s the matter? What stumbling block have you spotted, that’s causing
you to doubt that virtue is knowledge?
Socrates: I’ll tell you, Meno. I’m not withdrawing the first claim, that if it’s
knowledge it must be teachable; but the second one, consider whether you think it’s
right to be sceptical about that one—that it might not be knowledge. Tell me this
Meno: if a thing’s teachable (not just virtue), mustn’t there be teachers of it and pupils?
Meno: To me it seems so.
Socrates: And the converse: wouldn’t we be drawing sound inferences if we
inferred that something of which there are neither teachers nor pupils is not some-
thing teachable?
Meno 89d1–e3
Here Socrates raises an objection that is both perverse and ill-specified. It is perverse
for two reasons: first because (as we noted) the immediately preceding discussion had
shown that knowledge does not always have to be taught (or perhaps is never taught),29
so an absence of teachers or teaching is no evidence that the commodity is not
knowledge; and second because the entire enquiry was designed to find out whether
29
On the absence of teaching, see Section I.iii of this chapter, and Chapter 5, Section IV.i.
virtue is taught, so the fact that one does not see it being taught cannot be used to disprove
the premise (that virtue is knowledge) that was introduced to prove that it is taught.
The objection is ill-specified because there are several reasons why one might not
see anyone teaching it, even if virtue is knowledge. The hypothesis need not be false, as
Socrates assumes. For example, we might not detect cases of teaching that are happen-
ing, if we come with a faulty concept of teaching; or there may be other ways of trans-
mitting knowledge besides having professional teachers who teach; or perhaps virtue
happens not to be transmitted in Athens, so we don’t see it taught there, though it is
taught elsewhere. Even if all knowledge were transmitted by professional teachers, the
absence of teachers would not prove that what is currently not being taught is not a
kind of knowledge (compare the situation that would obtain if Ancient Greek were
no longer taught in British schools). But in any case, we already know that not all
knowledge is taught.
Be that as it may, Socrates naively takes his own objection seriously. Because he has
not used the method correctly, and has posited a premise that needs to be proven, not a
set of exhaustive hypotheses, progress becomes impossible once doubt arises. Socrates
and Meno fall into perplexity again (96c–d). The hypothetical method appears to have
failed. Yet had the method been properly applied, they might have made more progress.
As it is, because Socrates offered only one hypothesis, with which they could progress
only if they could confirm that it was true of all cases of virtue, and that one hypothesis
has now been faulted (needlessly but fatally), Socrates finds himself hopelessly stuck
again, and falls back into his accustomed essentialism.
II.ii A better attempt at explaining how we become competent

with the virtue concept without any need to define it
This is a second moment of perplexity,30 and signals another turning point, but it is not
the end of the dialogue. In fact, a potential solution to the puzzle was already implicit at
the moment when Socrates asked the slave boy to point to a line that he couldn’t
define.31 If we recall that moment (as Socrates seems not to do), we should realize that
regardless of whether virtue admits of a definition, or is a circumscribed concept, it
might still be something we can come to know, or perhaps we already know. And it can
still be something that we can discover for ourselves, even without any formal teaching.
We may learn to recognize instances of it, apply the concept, and engender knowledge
of ‘what it is’ in other people, by looking at the world along with them and pointing to
examples—all this without ever needing to give an account of it, and without ‘teaching
it’ in the sense of passing the knowledge from one knower to another, which is what
Socrates calls ‘teaching’ at various points.32
30
Meno 96c–d. 31 See Chapter 3, Section II, and Text 3.2.
32
82e4, 84c–d, 85d3, probably 89d–e. See Section II.i and note 28, this chapter. Socrates mentions ‘those
most experienced in the subject’ (89e7), and crafts transmitted from master to apprentice for payment
(90c–e). Factual knowledge may be transmitted in this way (see Bernard A.O. Williams, ‘Knowledge and
reasons’ in A.W. Moore (ed.), Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
After a bit, Socrates suggests that doxa is no less effective as a guide to conduct than
knowledge.33 If this is so, then earlier (at 88b), when he asserted that things are done
well or rightly only if they are done with knowledge, he was going too quickly. That
claim was intended to support the hypothesis that virtue is knowledge, and led to the
proposal, in Text 4.2, that psychological conditions are only helpful if accompanied by
phronesis. Now Socrates revises that, finding that we don’t need actual knowledge or
wisdom, since we can get by with correct impressions (doxa). Knowledge is not, after
all, a necessary condition for success.
Is this a new point, divorced from what went earlier? We shall see that it is not, if we
link it to the passage in which Socrates asked the slave boy to find a line on the diagram.
After many incorrect guesses, the boy found a suitable line on the diagram (Text 3.2).
This achievement is not just an indicator that he was drawing on some (as yet inarticu-
late) conceptual knowledge (more on that in Chapter 5), but also an example of correct
doxa: he was required to get one right answer by pointing to one particular line (not to
a concept or a generic kind, but just one instance that satisfies the requirements). There
were other lines that would also do, but he chose one, a sound one, and that was all
he needed.
Socrates describes that successful result as a case of the boy bringing out his correct
doxai from his own resources (85b).34 If I am right, this is the right way to describe it,
because the boy has identified a particular that falls under a type, and such cases are
always an exercise of doxa. The task is just like finding a road that goes to Larissa: one
road will do, and if you can find it you will succeed. Similarly, we might say, whenever
we choose to act virtuously this will be by exercising doxa (by recognizing and choos-
ing a particular action as the virtuous thing to do). Habitual virtue in practice still
qualifies as virtue, even without explicit reflection or analysis of the concept virtue. By
doing what virtuous people do we can achieve the equivalent of travelling the right
road to Larissa, without needing to recover or examine our latent knowledge of what
virtue is (96d–97a)—although that is the conceptual knowledge that we are in fact
deploying in an unreflective way.35
So when Socrates says that right doxa works just as well as knowledge for real life, we
should not take this to be ironic. It is the right conclusion, and justifies abandoning the
priority of definition requirement. Practical success involves picking out worthy things
to do, and enquiry can start with an examination of those practices by attending to
the tokens as identified in our everyday behaviour (virtuous actions, or virtuous char-
acteristics, in this case). Then later (if at all) we might move towards articulating an
explicit account of the type that they instantiate (virtue). What Socrates calls ‘episteme’
is the grasp of the type, particularly when it has become explicit and reflectively
available. But we do not start from that. We progress to that by working up from attention
Press, 1972/2006), 47–56 and Nehamas, ‘Meno’s Paradox’), but conceptual knowledge, such as knowing what
a virtue is, is surely not of that kind.
Meno 97b9. 34 Text 5.9. 35 See Chapter 5, Section III.i (Passage C, stage 1).
33
to particulars; and we can do that even for concepts that are not circumscribed
(i.e. those that have no necessary and sufficient conditions to be taught by rote).
It follows that we need not learn about virtue from someone who can define it. We
can learn just as well by acquiring virtuous intuitions and habits from someone who
lives virtuously on that basis. The virtuous person can get things right in the same way
that the slave focused his choice on a suitable line. Later, perhaps, we might want to
turn to philosophy, to think about why this counts as virtuous and that does not, but
philosophical understanding (episteme) is not strictly necessary for effective action.
It also seems that the ‘virtue is knowledge’ thesis was a bit of a red herring. For if it
means that we must have a grasp of the concept of virtue in order to apply it, this applies
no more to virtue than to any other concept. For equally, if one is to use the concept
‘double’ reliably, one must know what double is. That does not make it true that ‘double
is knowledge’. But if it means that virtue is to be reduced to the knowledge of some-
thing else, other than knowledge of ‘virtue, what it is’, then it is unclear why the
knowledge of something else would count as virtue, rather than as that other matter
(goodness, for instance).
III. In Which We Conclude That Not Being Able to Say

‘What It Is’ Concerning Some Concept Is Perfectly
Compatible With Knowing ‘What It Is’
As we saw, Bluck supposed that knowing what virtues are is like knowing an object, as
though ‘virtue’ were a thing, and each virtue were another thing of the same kind.36
Perhaps it is common to suppose that when Plato spoke of an eidos for each type of
thing, he was thinking of some object of that kind (although his word eidos, usually
rendered ‘Form’, merely means ‘type’). It is true that the token that instantiates the type
is usually a thing: what Socrates drew was a ‘double square’; the road to Larissa was a
road.37 Those probably count as ‘things’; but the concepts or types that they instantiate
are not objects, and grasping one is not knowing a thing.
Nor is it a definition. On the contrary, we devise a definition on the basis of what we
know. Nor is it a know-how, such as the ability to pick out examples (though being able
36
Chapter 3, Section IV.
37
Charles rightly insists on the distinction between (a) knowing to what item the word ‘Meno’ or
‘Larissa Road’ refers (where an external object is designated) and (b) knowing the essence. In Charles,
‘Types of definition in the Meno’, his distinction between Question 1 (what is it that makes all shapes count
as shapes?) and Question 2 (what is it that we call by the name shape?) does apply where there is a real ref-
erent of the name, not merely an idea. This distinction looks temptingly valid for ‘Meno’ and ‘Larissa Road’,
but that is only because for each there is an occupant of the role, and just one. The temptation would be
appropriate if Question 2 were requesting a list of things that are shapes. But that is surely not what Socrates
intends (nor does Charles imagine so, I think). What would the name ‘Larissa Road’ designate if there were
no road to Larissa? The name would still have meaning. Meanings of that kind (‘senses’, if you like) are not
exhausted by the objects that instantiate them. As a consequence, knowing what the word means turns out
to collapse into knowing why certain things qualify—that is, competence with the concept.
to do so may also be evidence of knowing). Nor is it a linguistic know-how, being able

to utter the word reliably in true sentences on appropriate occasions: that too is
sometimes evidence that the person knows what they are talking about, but in some
cases people can do that without knowledge. Someone with the requisite knowledge
typically displays all these abilities, but as the slave-boy passage suggests, these capabil-
ities are evidence that the knowledge is already there, grounding the increasingly
articulate and accurate application of it in practice.
So it is surely true that Meno might know what a virtue is, and yet not be able to say,
and Plato was surely alerting us to this fact, not only here but whenever he displays the
failure of Socrates’ quest for definitions. In the Meno Plato also identifies serious prob-
lems that follow from the assumption that one does not know unless one can define
what one knows: problems about how learning or enquiry are even possible. So the
essentialist theory leads either to a kind of scepticism (the Socratic declaration of
ignorance with nowhere to go) or to a misological despair, whereby enquiry is inevit-
ably hopeless. But as Plato shows in the Meno, these problems result from the essential-
ist moves, such as the priority of definition, and equating conceptual knowledge with
knowledge of a definition or single common factor.
My suggestion is that Plato was alerting us to the faults in Socrates’ opening s trategies.
Plato dramatizes an episode in which Socrates first makes and then withdraws the
demand that we must first find a definition or common feature before making any
other claims about either the type or its tokens. The reader might eventually come to
see that reaching a sound definition must come as a mature expression of the concep-
tual knowledge, if it comes at all. But it need not be possible at all.
Furthermore, we can infer that the knowledge (episteme) that Plato was interested in
was neither knowledge of things, nor propositional knowledge. It was conceptual
knowledge, including such things as knowing what virtues are, or knowing what
makes a bee a bee.
5
Knowledge and Correct
Impressions in Plato’s Meno
I. Orientation: Issues About the Relation Between

Doxa and Episteme Arising From Chapter 4
In Chapter 4 I argued that knowing virtue, what it is, is not to be equated with grasping
a definition or common factor in all virtues, nor need it manifest itself in an ability to
identify a common factor. Conceptual competence is manifested in many ways, such
as the ability to list paradigm cases or point to instances. We found that it is possible to
progress from identifying one or more tokens (as exemplars) to a more reflective
understanding of the type, a move that Socrates compares to the ability to recall some-
thing previously known, because it seems as though we already possess the generic
concept, since we were already using it to find and point to the exemplar, which stands
to it as a token of the relevant type.
Some of the moves in that argument involve a distinction between episteme (and
other knowledge terms) on the one hand, and true or correct doxa, which is what the
slave boy is said to have after the geometry exercise.1 More specifically, the boy is said
to have a plurality of true impressions (aletheis doxai),2 and these stand to become a
plurality of epistemai (knowings),3 if and when he has practised enough to recover the
knowledge stored in his soul (86a6–b4). In general, Socrates says, we can pursue our
investigations in good hope, once we are aware that the truth is there in the soul and
that we have this capacity to recover full knowledge, even of things that we don’t cur-
rently know, by a kind of remembering (86b).
How do these ‘true impressions’ that the boy has at this stage relate to the ‘knowings’
that he will have in the end? Will his ‘knowings’ be episteme in the sense of conceptual
1
Meno 85c. Here and below, I call this section of the dialogue ‘Passage B’. The verbs for ‘knowing’,
eidenai and epistasthai, seem to be interchangeable throughout Passage B: see 85c6–7, d1, 4, 6, 9, 12; 86a8,
b3 etc. In Passage C Plato uses phronimos, phronôn, phronêsis (97a6, b7, b10, c1), and eidôs (97a9) as
synonyms for epistasthai, episteme etc.
2
85c7, 10, e7, 86a7 etc. In this chapter I translate doxa as ‘impression’ or ‘seeming’. Contrast Chapter 9,
and Chapter 11, Section I.i where I opt to leave the term doxa (which acquires a technical sense in the
Theaetetus) transliterated, and to use ‘discern’ and ‘discernment’ for doxastic perceptions.
3
86a8. See further Section III.vi.
Knowledge and Correct Impressions in Plato’s Meno 85
competence (as we described that in Chapter 4) or are they factual knowledge, or some-
thing else? Are they improved true impressions? Do his doxai turn into epistemai?
To answer these puzzles we need to examine two passages of the Meno. One (Passage B,
85b–86c) is the text from which I just cited those claims about true impressions being
the first stage in the recovery of knowledge, and about how they subsequently become
knowings. The other (Passage C, 96d–100a) comes near the end of the dialogue, when
Socrates realizes that true impressions can be just as useful for guiding action, and
that he knows of no teachers of virtue. In due course (Section III) we shall start with
Passage C. However, before that, we should look at the stage-setting in the Meno,
particularly some allusions to the sophist Gorgias, and Meno as a pupil of Gorgias.
These are in Passage A, to which we now turn.
II. Concerning Passage A: The Opening

Pages of the Meno (70a–71e)
II.i That there is no one left in Athens who can answer Meno’s question,
‘because Gorgias has gone to Larissa’
Text 5.1
Meno: Can you tell me, Socrates, whether virtue is teachable? Or is it not taught
but drilled in by practice? Or neither drilled nor learned but gets added to human
beings by nature or by some other means?
Meno 70a1–4
Meno’s question about whether virtue is teachable occupies the opening words of the
text. It is answered by a long and elaborately ironic disclaimer from Socrates (part of
which is translated as Text 5.2), to the effect that neither he nor anyone else in Athens
could possibly attempt an answer to this impossible question. This non-response
includes several cross-references to the end of the dialogue (Passage C), and is a med-
ley of in-jokes. The conversation is taking place in Athens, Socrates’ city,4 but Meno is a
visitor from Thessaly, a place with a reputation for caring more about money and
horses than about philosophy. Now, however, the sophist Gorgias has gone there to
educate the Thessalians (70b4), and surprise surprise (Socrates quips), the people
there have suddenly acquired a reputation for being willing to answer any question
that anyone cares to put to them—i.e. they claim the skill that Gorgias notoriously
boasted about—while the Athenians are bereft in the absence of Gorgias, and suffering
from a brain drain as everyone pursues the fount of all wisdom to Thessaly (70c4).5
Even Meno’s own lover Aristippus has become more enamoured of wisdom than of
Meno. In keeping with this joke, Plato rounds off Passage A by having Meno gaily answer
the ‘what is virtue?’ question—ostensibly a truly difficult question—with Gorgianic
See 70c2, ἐνθάδε. 5 Meno 70c1–2; cf. Gorgias 447d–448a.

4
bravado: ‘But it’s not hard to say . . .’, he begins (71e1). There is probably a further allu-
sion to this whole rigmarole when Socrates chooses ‘the road to Larissa’ as an example
of something about which you can be right without knowledge (97b1, in Passage C).6
Concerning the significance of all these allusions to Gorgias’s mode of answering
questions, Dominic Scott draws the opposite conclusion from the one I shall recom-
mend. He thinks that Gorgias had his students learn set speeches by rote, and Scott
understands this as transmission of knowledge from an expert teacher to the pupil so
Meno’s confident answer to the ‘what is virtue?’ question is based on a memorized
speech from Gorgias.7 He thinks that Plato is contrasting Socratic teaching (drawing
knowledge out) with Gorgianic teaching (putting instruction in). I see no support for
this in the text. By contrast, I take Meno’s confidence to come from learning (from
Gorgias) that one can answer any question impressively without knowing the answer.
I see Plato juxtaposing Socrates, who initially assumes that enquiry must proceed from
prior knowledge, with Gorgias (and Meno) who assume that you can start by hazarding
a guess. This is the crucial theme of the dialogue. In the end it is not Socrates who is
vindicated, in Passage B, but Gorgias; and likewise Passage C reveals (with Gorgias)
that the guiding expert needs no more than a correct impression: for most tasks in life
we can get by with the kind of pragmatic success that Gorgias and Prodicus can
offer. By the end of the dialogue we have realized that answering practical questions
without pretending that your answer is based on episteme is acceptable and legitimate.
Furthermore, if virtue is simply a matter of making a success of life, without any epi-
stemic requirements on how you achieve that, then this non-expert guidance will be
enough to deliver at least that kind of virtue. Even Socrates can deliver that kind of
‘teaching’ in Passage B, without ‘teaching’ in the sense of imparting knowledge that he
himself possesses on the subject.8 What is more, if Socrates is right that knowledge can
eventually be secured after starting out in this way, we need not despair of obtaining
real virtue that does include an epistemic requirement, despite starting with something
far less stringent. We do not need to find anyone who teaches from a position of already
knowing. Other kinds of teaching are available and provide a route to knowledge. That
is why listening to Socrates, who does not claim knowledge, can still be a good way to
learn. But then so could listening to Gorgias.
II.ii That Socrates cannot answer Meno’s question ‘because

he does not know the answer’
With Gorgias gone to Thessaly, there is no one left in Athens who would even attempt
to answer Meno’s question about virtue, Socrates claims. If Meno asks anyone in
Athens now, he’ll get this answer:
6
Perhaps we are to imagine that Gorgias’s ‘recent visit to Athens’ is the event relayed in the Gorgias. The
details and chronology need not concern us here.
7
Scott, Plato’s Meno, 12–13, 23–5 and passim. When Scott mentions ‘Gorgias’s view’ he often means one
of Meno’s views, because he thinks that Meno is described as a rote learner at 71c.
8
See Section IV.
Text 5.2
“Well, stranger, apparently I’ve given you the impression that I’m some kind of saint,
someone who can tell whether virtue comes by teaching or how it comes, but in
fact I’m so far from knowing whether it comes by teaching or not by teaching, that
I actually don’t know the first thing even about what thing virtue is.”
Meno 71a3–69
Here Socrates absurdly claims that no one but Gorgias would be prepared to give a
view on whether virtue is taught unless they (a) know the answer, and (b) know what
virtue is. Socrates pretends that these are normal constraints accepted by all and sun-
dry in Athens, and broken only by extremists like Gorgias. Yet as it turns out, these are
precisely the purist requirements that get overturned in Passages B and C, where we
find that an untrained slave who has avowed his own ignorance can give correct
answers to geometry questions, and that one can find the road to Larissa without
knowing it first.10
Of course, Socrates is often ironic, and there is plenty of irony in Passage A. But
some of what he says is clearly meant to be serious. Throughout the first part of the
dialogue he insists in all seriousness that Meno must first prove that he knows what he
is talking about before answering any questions—so much so that many serious scholars
have taken Plato himself to be committed to that view, in his own voice, along with
Socrates, despite all the moves in the later part of the dialogue that undermine it. There
is no doubt that in Passage A, Socrates is saying that without knowledge, one cannot
profess to be able to answer the question set, even when the question is about second-
ary features of the item in question, such as whether virtue is teachable.
Gorgias is Plato’s archetype of the show-off who displays his ability to answer ques-
tions he knows nothing about, and who tells you how to live without knowing whether
that is the right way to live. Gorgias travels through life and philosophy on the basis of
mere doxa. He displays total confidence and that is how he acquires his glory and repu-
tation, which is underpinned by nothing at all.
III. Passage C: How Knowledge Differs

From a Merely Correct Impression
Why then would we ever need abstract enquiry into ‘what virtue is’, of the kind that
Socrates favours, if it does not affect the results? In practice we need policies that work,
so if correct impressions are sufficient, philosophy is redundant. Plato needs to address
this result.11
9
The verb idiomatically rendered ‘can tell’ (line 4) is the same verb as the one rendered ‘know’ in lines
5 and 6.
10
See Section IV. 11 See further Section V.
III.i Passage C, stage 1: it is possible to answer a question from a position

that is not knowledge
Text 5.3 is the beginning of Passage C:
Text 5.3
Socrates: It looks as though we’re idiots, you and I, Meno, and that Gorgias didn’t
teach you adequately, nor Prodicus me.12 We need to pay much more attention to them,
and we need to look into who might be able to make us better, in one way at least.
I’m saying this on the basis of looking back at our last enquiry: how ridiculously we
missed the fact that it’s not just by knowledge that human affairs get well and rightly
managed and that’s perhaps why knowledge of how good men arise is eluding us.
Meno 96d4–e5
Realizing rather late in the day that the Sophists must be right, that there is after all a
kind of success that falls short of knowledge, and a kind of ‘teaching’ that falls short of
imparting knowledge, Socrates sees that this provides a solution to the puzzle about
whether goodness is transmitted by teaching or not. Now we see that there are two
kinds of teaching, only one of which requires episteme and imparts knowledge, while
the other neither presupposes nor imparts anything so grand. This resolves the puzzle
about whether there are experts who teach virtue,13 and it also reveals that Gorgias
might, after all, be an adequate guide on many questions, including questions about
virtue, without needing to claim knowledge about it.
However, Passage C does not immediately move to optimism about the possibility
of upgrading from correct seeming to knowledge. Rather, Socrates stops to wonder
what is the difference between the two, if the results are just the same for all practical
purposes. His example is the road to Larissa.
III.ii Passage C, stage 2: the road to Larissa

Passage C continues as follows:
Text 5.4
Meno: What do you mean, Socrates?
(i) Socrates: This is what I mean. We agreed, rightly, that good people must be
helpful. That can’t be wrong can it?
Meno: Quite.
(ii) Socrates: And that they’ll be helpful if they guide us in our affairs aright?
We were right to agree to that, weren’t we?
12
The reference to Prodicus (as teacher of Socrates) cross-refers not to Passage A, but to 75e3 (a comic
passage where Socrates tries to make the terms of his definition acceptable to Meno). Cf. Cratylus 384b, where
Socrates claims that he took only the one drachma session, not the fifty-drachma course with Prodicus.
13
The puzzle at Meno 89e: see Chapter 4, Section II.i.
Meno: Yes.
(iii) Socrates: But it’s looking like we weren’t right to say that you can’t guide aright
unless you’re wise (phronimos).
Meno: Why do you say that?
(iv) Socrates: I’ll tell you. In a case where you know the road that goes to Larissa
(or wherever else), and go there, and take others, evidently you’d go the right way,
and you’d do the guiding act pretty well?
Meno: Indeed.
(v) Socrates: But what if someone has the right impression about which is the
road,14 but he hasn’t been there, nor does he have the knowledge, wouldn’t he do the
guiding correctly too?
Meno: Yes indeed.
Meno 96e4–97a12
This text raises two problems. First, Socrates implies that one person can know the
road to Larissa, while another discerns it correctly (doxazei) but doesn’t know which
it is.15 This makes it seems as though what the wiser person knows is the very same
answer to the very same question as the other person gets by lucky guesswork instead
of knowledge. This is how most commentators read the passage,16 but that reading
would not be compatible with my hypothesis that the term ‘episteme’ is consistently
reserved for grasping a type, not a token, while doxa relates to the token that instantiates
the type. My project is to show that Plato is meticulous and clear about that distinction,
so we do not want him to fudge it here.
Second, Text 5.4 implies (or so it seems) that the difference between the two guides,
one with episteme and the other with correct doxa, is that the former has already trav-
elled the road, while the latter has not. So it would seem that ‘knowing’ the road comes
from direct experience of the token, rather than a grasp of the type. This too is what
most interpreters suppose is intended.17 But this would be incompatible with my thesis
that when one lacks ‘knowledge’ what one lacks is a grasp of the abstract idea, not
experience of some concrete token case. Text 5.4 also suggests that it is for lack of
experiential knowledge of a particular that doxa is an inferior epistemic condition,
whereas if I am right, experience of the particular is the stereotypical domain of doxa.
14
The construction in sentence (v) has the verb doxazein with the relative clause, indicating that the
content, if expressed as a proposition, would be ‘that this one is the road to Larissa’.
15
On the verb doxazein (discern) see further in Chapter 11.
16
See I.M. Crombie, An Examination of Plato’s Doctrines (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963),
vol. 2, 50; Robert W. Sharples, Plato Meno, trans. Robert W. Sharples (Warminster: Aris and Phillips, 1985),
11; Weiss, Virtue in the Cave: moral inquiry in Plato’s Meno, 154, among others, who accept that the content
of the two kinds of cognition is the same.
17
See Weiss, Virtue in the Cave: moral inquiry in Plato’s Meno, 154 for the claim that ‘having been there’
is at least a necessary condition for knowing the road. Fine, ‘Inquiry in the Meno’, note 42, notes that Plato
does not quite say this.
Cognition of the particular is precisely what doxa does have, not what it lacks; while
what it lacks should be the generic grasp of the type qua type. So the difference that
Socrates describes here seems to be exactly the wrong way round for my thesis. My pro-
ject is to show that Plato is careful about this, so we do not want him to mess it up here.
Should I abandon my thesis then? Or must I decide, as many do, that these moves
in the Meno modify or conflict with what Plato suggests elsewhere? Certainly when
we come to Text 5.4 with contemporary expectations about knowledge of things, or
propositions about things, and the value of eye-witness knowledge over testimony or
guesswork, it can seem very tempting and easy to read it in the way that it is usually
read.18 But there is another way to read it. I think that we can, in fact, make better
sense of it when we do engage the distinction that I have been urging, between grasp
of a type (episteme) and recognition of a token (doxa). Let us suppose that there is a
certain abstract notion of a ‘Road to Larissa’ which one can think about, independ-
ently of identifying any road that fits that description—indeed this is what we are
doing now.19 As regards practical action, this notion is not any good by itself. To be
useful, it must be deployed: we must pick on a certain road, preferably the right road,
and follow it. Unless we can do that, our idea that such a road might exist is useless.
But selecting the right road in practice may come either before or after coming to a
fully developed grasp of what such a road must be like. I can either first explore in
detail what such a road must be like (using a map, say, or a compass or some other
method, or perhaps by learning directions from someone who knows), before I travel
that way, and before I show anyone else the way; or I can do it the other way round,
learning in detail, for the first time, about the road by actually going that way (despite
not knowing in advance what it will be like). In the latter case, I use the road itself, the
token, as the means to acquire a fuller idea of what makes a road to Larissa. This
second way of grasping the definitive requirements that such a road must satisfy, by
discovering the token that qualifies and measuring its features, is exactly parallel to
the process illustrated by the slave boy in Passage B, who learns by experience what
are the required criteria that his abstract square must satisfy, a square of which he had
only a very vague notion in advance but no detailed understanding of the criteria.
As with geometry, so too with roads, it is also possible to learn more about the abstract
type from examining the token, not just to learn about the token by applying an existing
knowledge of the type.
So in response to the first problem, we need not suppose that, when Socrates speaks
of ‘knowing the road’ in Text 5.4 sentence (iv),20 he means knowing the concrete par-
ticular, the road that we actually travel on. Just as we found that ‘knowing Meno, who
he is’ involved knowing what it would be to be Meno (but not which man is the one),21
so also ‘knowing the road to Larissa’ involves knowing in the abstract what would count
On this issue, see also Chapter 12. 19 See Chapter 3, Section IV.ii.
18
εἴδως τὴν ὁδὸν, 97a9. 21 See Chapter 3, Text 3.2.

20
as a road to Larissa, but not which road is the one.22 By contrast, doxa is selecting a
token (correct doxa when we select one correctly: there may only be one). Socrates’
point would be this: that one can do that—one can point to the required road before
one has developed much understanding of the abstract essence, or knowing the ‘what
it is’, about it.
Evidently, then, one may acquire that abstract grasp of which features characterize a
road from Athens to Larissa, from the experience of travelling on the very road that is a
good example, perhaps the only example, of the type, as we have just explained. It is
possible to move from acquaintance with the concrete particular to the grasp of the
abstraction. Thus we can acquire episteme (grasp of the type qua type) by travelling on
the road, by an encounter with the token qua exemplar of the type.23
Second, when Socrates says, in Text 5.4 sentence (v), ‘But what if someone has the
right impression about which is the road, but he has not been there, nor does he have
knowledge, wouldn’t he do the guiding correctly too?’, we should not assume that ‘he
has not been there’, and ‘nor does he have the knowledge’ both state the same condi-
tion, as though ‘nor does he have the knowledge’ is an alternative way of saying ‘he has
not been there’, or is a consequence of his not having been there; as though Socrates
had said, ‘He has not been there, so he does not have the knowledge’. That would be
one possible way of reading the Greek in sentence (v), and it would imply that the
knowledge that this person lacks is experience, that it can only be got by direct
acquaintance with the object that he is to identify, and that such acquaintance is
exclusively delivered by actually travelling the road. But as we have just seen, although
travelling the road could be one way of grasping what the relevant road is, there may
be other more abstract ways of finding out. So we can read the ‘or’ in ‘nor does he have
the knowledge’ as a genuine disjunctive ‘or’, meaning ‘or alternatively’, not an epexe-
getic ‘or’, meaning ‘i.e.’, or an explanatory ‘or’, meaning ‘so’. If we read it as disjunctive,
and take ‘know’ to mean ‘grasp its essence, in the abstract’, then in sentence (v) Socrates
would be saying that the person with merely a correct impression has no clear grasp
in the abstract of what the road must be, neither from an encounter with the road
itself, nor from any other source—either being possible ways to acquire the detailed
knowledge in the abstract.
Read like this, sentence (v) suggests that of the various ways one might acquire full
conceptual knowledge of ‘what it is’, one is to garner it from acquaintance with some-
thing that instantiates it (in this case, the road itself). So we can read the word knowledge
in sentence (v) in the same way as before, as a reference to abstract grasp of the type qua
type. ‘Knowing the road’ would be having a good grasp, in the abstract, of the idea of a
‘road to Larissa’. Mere doxa would be choosing (rightly or wrongly) a certain road,
without any prior knowledge of what it needs to be like. If we read it like this, Socrates
22
That is, knowledge of the type does not itself include identification of the token, although Socrates
evidently supposes that knowing also facilitates finding the right token.
23
This is what I call the ‘iconic method’. I explore it in more detail in Part III of the book.
is saying that it is possible to get things right, nevertheless, without much prior
theoretical understanding of what you are looking for, and without having found it
before. Even without any theory, and without explicit knowledge of the type, you can
still pick the right road, for the very first time; so that even on your first attempt you
get there just as well as someone who knew. Your lack of prior knowledge makes no
practical difference.
So I suggest that we can make better sense of Text 5.4 as a whole, and of its place in
this dialogue, if we follow the project that I have been recommending, and if we take
Plato to be careful in his distinctions between abstract knowledge and practical appli-
cations of it. We should understand doxa to mean identifying the concrete token, and
episteme (or eidôs or phronôn) as the well-developed grasp (in the abstract) of the type
qua type. Episteme need not be delivered by experience but (as we have now learned in
this dialogue) it turns out, somewhat to our surprise, that it can be, because one can
learn about the type from a token (as in the geometry experiment),24 and that is why
Socrates says, in sentence (v), about the one who lacks knowledge, that, perchance, he
has not been that way.
III.iii Passage C, stage 3: knowledge about and knowledge of

Can we deploy the same solution for the next part of Passage C (Text 5.5)? Here Socrates
discovers, to his surprise, that doxa is a useful guide to life so long as it happens to be
right. Here again it is superficially tempting to think that doxa and episteme must be
meant to have the same content, which would explain why Socrates puzzles over how
knowledge differs from, or improves on, impressions that are invariably correct. The
puzzle would make sense if he was assuming that they have the same content, and achieve
the same result. But this would be incompatible with the position that I have been
defending, so we must see whether there is an alternative way to understand Text 5.5.
Text 5.5
Socrates: (i) And so long as he has correct doxa about the things about which the
other chap has episteme, he will be no worse a guide—thinking true things, but not
knowing—than the one who knows this thing.
Meno: No.
Socrates: (ii) So true seeming is no worse a guide for correct practice than know-
ledge. And this is what we omitted just now in our enquiry about virtue, about what
kind of thing it might be, when we said that only knowledge has direction of correct
practice. Because there was also another thing, true seeming.
Meno: It looks like it.
Socrates: (iii) So correct seeming is no less useful than knowledge.
Meno 97b5–c5
See Chapter 3, Section V and this chapter, Section IV.

24
When Socrates says, in sentence (i), that ‘he has correct doxa about the things about
which the other has episteme’, he clearly means that there is one set of things about which
one can have both kinds of cognition. But we should not hastily jump to the conclusion
that we have episteme and doxa of the very same things, because there is a difference
between knowledge about and knowledge of something. The expression ‘about which’,25
in sentence (i), fudges the difference between episteme of the type and doxa of the
tokens, both of which are indeed about the same set of things (that is, the set of members
that count as tokens of that type). The two kinds of cognition may still be of different
things, though they are both about the same set of things.
This thought is at least partially confirmed by the end of sentence (i) in Text 5.5.
‘He will be no worse a guide—thinking true things, but not knowing—than the one
who knows this thing’, says Socrates.26 Notice the change from plural to singular. The
person who has doxa thinks true things (alêthê in the plural), while the one who knows
‘knows this’ (touto) in the singular. The implication is that there is one (generic) thing
that the knower knows, while there are many particular things that one picks up by
doxa. Both are about, say, which thing or things is, or are, the virtuous things (or which
is, or are, the road(s) to Larissa), but one type of cognition, doxa, identifies the tokens
(it is a thought of many things), and the other, episteme, identifies the abstract type that
defines them as a group (it is a grasp of one thing, touto).
In the next comment, sentence (ii) in Text 5.5, we need to notice the phrase ‘for cor-
rect practice’.27 ‘So true seeming is no worse a guide for correct practice than knowledge’,
Socrates says. He does not say that there is no context in which knowledge is superior,
but merely that it turns out not to be superior where what is required is finding the
correct item, action, or policy in practice. These are cases where one must identify the
correct particular. We can survive in virtue and politics if (like the slave boy with his
diagram, and Gorgias with his choice of roads to get to Larissa) we can identify the
right thing on the ground. For practical purposes, abstract knowledge adds nothing.
Many scholars take the conclusions in Text 5.5 to be not serious in some way, to
excuse Plato from any serious claim that true belief suffices for practical purposes—an
understandable ambition given that we do not normally expect Plato to claim that
knowledge just is true beliefs, or that knowing adds nothing besides stability, which is
what these scholars take Socrates to be saying here. I share the view that Plato would
not say that, but on my interpretation neither Plato nor Socrates says any of those
things in this text. If ‘knowledge’ has a quite different content—content which has no
direct relevance or benefit to practical work with particulars—then it will indeed be
true that the politicians can operate successfully day-by-day on the basis of true beliefs,
if indeed their beliefs are reliably and consistently true. Plato can certainly say that, and
seriously wonder, then, why politicians would need any further more abstract kind of
knowledge. That is a genuine question, to which the answer indeed appears to be that
they do not.
περὶ ὧν, 97b5. 26 97b6–7. 27 πρὸς ὀρθότητα πράξεως, 97b9.

25
This is a genuinely surprising conclusion, which Plato needs to address. In general,

I take the end of the Meno to be serious, not ironic, in asserting that true impressions
are what you need for action. This is not strange, so long as we observe that it relates
solely to practical purposes such as finding the right road on the ground.28
So I would argue that likewise in sentence (ii), we can retain the idea that know-
ledge is of the abstract, and doxa is of the particular. For practical life, it is the latter
that we need, as Socrates rightly observes. It is for practical life that no special advan-
tage comes from abstract thinking about the types in abstraction from the tokens.
Teachers of virtue can follow what we might call a particularist approach and their
results will be fine. Why, then, should anyone bother to ask in the abstract what virtue
is? It gains us nothing in real life.
III.iv Passage C, stage 4: the advantage of knowledge over true seeming

Having concluded, in Text 5.5, that doxa is as useful as knowledge for practical
purposes, Socrates seems initially content (though this need not mean that Plato is
content).
Even within the characterization of Socrates, the pause for breath at this point may
be primarily for ironic or dramatic effect. It is Meno who protests that knowledge must
convey some advantage. Surely, he suggests, at 97c6, knowledge would improve the
chances of hitting the right target. In fact (Text 5.6), it would ensure success:
Text 5.6
Well, it would [sc. be more useful] to this extent, Socrates—in that the person who
has knowledge would always succeed (epitunchanoi), whereas the one with correct
seeming would sometimes succeed and sometimes not.
Meno 97c6–8
Meno correctly focuses (as Socrates had) on practical achievements. The verb epitun-
chanein in Text 5.6 clearly refers to success with particular things in the practical
sphere. The issue is whether any practical advantage comes from operating with
knowledge.
Taken charitably, Meno’s suggestion in Text 5.6 seems promising. He is surely
suggesting that knowledge would deliver correct impressions more reliably and with-
out fail. This seems right, especially if Meno is understanding ‘knowledge’ to mean an
expert grasp of ‘what Fs are’ about the relevant type F for which one is seeking token
cases of Fness. By contrast, choosing things to do on the basis of luck or ill-informed
intuitions, without a good grasp of ‘what Fs are’, is no way to ensure that you are sys-
tematically and repeatedly correct, though we can agree that on the occasions when
you do choose aright, you are no worse off.
28
Scott, Plato’s Meno, 178–93 tries to read the conclusion as serious, but he ignores the practicality
aspect, and hence infers—falsely in my view—(i) that the argument attributes no advantage whatever to
knowledge other than stability of beliefs, and (ii) that this is Plato’s own view.
Socrates responds to Meno’s suggestion in a less than charitable way, even somewhat
perversely, and thereby prolongs the puzzle. He insists on seeking some advantage
even in the particular cases where you have chosen correctly. Meno had only suggested
that you would more regularly do the right thing, not that when you did there was
some advantage in doing so from knowledge. Socrates replies that for anyone who
invariably does get the right answer, there’s nothing inferior about it.29 This is true, but
only because Socrates is imagining someone who always gets things right. It does not
satisfactorily exclude Meno’s thought that such consistent success is improbable, and
would be significantly more likely if one works from knowledge. He is right that
Socrates has narrowed the enquiry, and is only considering the relative value of the
correct impression itself, when it is correct, and not the wider advantages that knowledge
might convey in practice. As a result, Meno and Socrates are once more baffled.
III.v Passage C, stage 5: the statues of Daedalus, and explanatory reasoning

Then follows an entertaining passage (Text 5.7) in which Socrates compares the true
impressions to the famous moving statues made by Daedalus.30 Passage C continues as
follows:
Text 5.7
Socrates: Do you know why you’re baffled, or shall I tell you?
Meno: Yes, do tell me.
Socrates: It’s because you haven’t paid attention to the statues of Daedalus. Maybe
they don’t have them where you live?31
Meno: What are you saying that for?
Socrates: Because they too, if they’re not tied down, run away and make off, but if
they’re tied up, they stay.
(97e1)
Meno: So what?
Socrates: So owning one of Daedalus’s works that’s untied isn’t worth much, like a
runaway man—it doesn’t stay—but a bound one is worth a lot. They’re extremely fine
pieces.—But why am I telling you this? It’s in relation to the true impressions. True
impressions, as long as they stay put, are a very fine thing too, and produce loads of
good results. (98a1) But they don’t like to stay. They escape from a person’s soul, so
they’re not worth a lot, until one can tie them down by means of explanatory reasoning.
97d4–98a4
29
97c9–10.
30
Jokes about Daedalus and his moving statues feature frequently in Plato’s dialogues (Euthyphro 11c1–4;
11d1; Hippias Major 282a1; Laws 677d; First Alcibiades 121a1; Republic 529d6–530) and in Attic tragedy
and comedy. Exactly what the statues were, if they existed, remains unclear. See Sarah P. Morris, Daidalos
and the Origins of Greek Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 223–5.
31
I.e. Thessaly.
The idea is that knowledge is valued because if you have it, your true impressions don’t
run away; but it is unclear exactly what Socrates means by saying (in the last sentence
of Text 5.7) that one’s correct impressions might get up and go. The main options seem
to be either (i) although today you rightly took this impression to be true, by tomorrow
you might doubt or even reject it, though it is still true, because you have no good rea-
son for accepting it; or (ii) the impression which you rightly took to be true today
might turn out to be false tomorrow without you realizing that, because things are
changeable, and you lack any grasp of why it is or isn’t true, so you will end up with a
false belief. Of these two possibilities the first makes better sense of the idea (implicit in
Text 5.7) that the doxai themselves escape from your mind. The metaphor of ‘tying the
impressions down’ sounds right if it is about securing one’s confidence, so that one
retains a good thought and is not dissuaded. By contrast, option (ii) would imply that
one’s impression perversely stays after ceasing to be true, in which case the problem is
not (as in the text) that it has gone when you wanted it to stay, but quite the reverse: it
stays when it should be long gone.32 This does not fit what Socrates is saying.
If we accept option (i) as the better explanation of ‘running away’, then, a further
puzzle now arises about what exactly is the role of ‘explanatory reasoning’ (aitias logis-
mos) in helping to secure the true impressions.33 There are three main options here.
Reading (a): Working out the explanation turns what was a true impression into a
case of knowledge, where the previous true impression and the new case of knowing
are of exactly the same thing. If we read it this way, once you have worked out the
explanation you no longer have a true impression. Instead you have knowledge in its
place (i.e. knowledge of that of which you had an impression before, not knowledge of
the explanation).34
Or, Reading (b), the situation is much as described in (a) but the true impression
turns into knowledge without ceasing to be a true impression (because, say, knowing is
having a true impression plus something else).35
32
Scholars sometimes complain that option (i) is implausible because opinions do not run off easily.
It is true that ignorant people often cling to their beliefs obstinately, but I doubt that Socrates is claiming
that every ungrounded opinion is unstable, but that unjustified doubt or misguided persuasion can
more easily get a hold in the absence of knowledge. Equally irrelevant is the thought that knowledge
could help false opinions to leave more quickly. The effect of knowledge on false impressions was no part
of the discussion.
33
See the last sentence of Text 5.7.
34
On the significance of ‘explanation’ (not ‘justification’) see Burnyeat, ‘Socrates and the jury’, and on
the significance of reasoning to the explanation, not just having one, see Rachel Barney, Names and Nature
in Plato’s Cratylus (New York; London: Routledge, 2001), 172.
35
The difference between (a) and (b) turns on the difference between (a) theories which suppose that
knowledge is not a kind of belief, but that beliefs can be exchanged for knowledge of the same thing
(‘becoming’ knowledge, as tadpoles turn into frogs or acorns into oak trees) and (b) theories that sup-
pose that knowledge is a kind of true belief (justified true belief, for instance) and mere beliefs can
develop into beliefs-with-whatever-it takes-to-make-them-knowledge (‘becoming’ knowledge as paper
becomes a book, or a man becomes an artist). See David Sedley, ‘Three Platonist interpretations of the
Theaetetus’ in Christopher Gill and M.M. McCabe (eds.), Form and Argument in Late Plato (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1996), 79–103, 93.
The third option, Reading (c), takes it that what binds down true impressions, so
that they will not leave, is knowledge of something else, and more particularly a grasp
of whatever counts as the explanation, the aitia. So the true impressions do not become
knowledge, but they are tied down by it.
On Reading (c), the reason why the true impressions do not leave is not because they
have become or turned into knowledge, but because the knowledge that is added helps
us to hold onto the true impressions and prevent them from making off. The knowledge
provides the chain that binds them, but it does not change them, and they are not them-
selves the knowledge. They are still just true impressions, but grounded in knowledge.
So (for example) things that rightly seemed to be virtuous still seem to be virtuous,
only now we understand the reason why, and that makes us more secure in holding on
to those views, even when challenged.
On Reading (c) the knowledge is of the reason why. It does not replace the impres-
sion of the particular, and it is not knowledge of the particular.
My preference is to take Reading (c), although there is nothing in this part of the text
that forces us to take it. One thing that makes it immediately more attractive is that it
explains why reasoning is involved (that is what leads to a grasp of the reason or cause,
which is what is known) and it explains why knowledge makes the true impression
more secure (because the knowledge is an understanding of the causal factor, which
then grounds the opinion about some particular correct choice). We shall see why this
pattern looks promising when we return to apply it to Passage B. It will also help to
explain why Socrates says (in Text 5.8, immediately after the end of Text 5.7) that this is
what we agreed was ‘recollection’ in the earlier passage.36
If we take Reading (c), it transpires that nothing here implies that there can be
knowledge and true opinion of the same things. Rather, the practical task of correctly
identifying a particular token is always assigned to doxa, and it remains doxa even when
the person doing it also has knowledge of something that explains why. Knowing what
virtues are (episteme) makes me more secure in identifying something virtuous (doxa).
I could get that right (true doxa) even if I did not know what virtues are (episteme), but
once I do, my knowledge grounds my particular impressions (doxa) of the virtuousness
of particular actions. I am less likely to abandon my commitment to this choice (which
is the right choice). But it still remains a particular choice, which is always a case of doxa,
since episteme is the grasp of the type itself, and provides explanations but not actions.
This also makes sense of Socrates’ contrast between Teiresias and the flitting shades
in the underworld (Meno 99e4–100a7), which contrasts (i) someone whose correct
impressions about virtuous actions are underpinned by an understanding of virtue in
the abstract, and (ii) one who makes the same decisions without a reflective grasp of
the concept.37
36
Meno 98a4, sentence (i) of Text 5.8.
37
Here Plato anticipates or echoes ideas in the Republic. The reference to shadows invites interplay with
the shadows at the bottom of the line and the cave.
III.vi Passage C, stage 6: a difficulty—do seemings become knowings?

However, there is a difficulty for Reading (c) in the next few lines (Text 5.8). Here
Socrates seems to speak of seemings becoming knowings,38 as though we were dealing
with a case like either Reading (a) (where what were seemings are no longer seemings
but turn into knowings) or Reading (b) (where the seemings, though still seemings,
have been upgraded to become knowings). Passage C continues thus:
Text 5.8
Socrates: (i) This is “recollection”, Meno my friend, as we agreed in the earlier
discussion. (ii) But once tied down, first they become knowledges, and then
permanent. (iii) And that’s the reason why knowledge is more highly prized than
correct seeming, and knowledge differs from correct seeming by the chain.
Meno: My God, Socrates, it does look like it’s something of that sort.
(b1) Socrates: (iv) Though mind you, I’m not speaking as an expert who already
knows. I’m just thinking by means of illustrations.39 (v) But when I say that cor-
rect seeming and knowledge are different in kind, that doesn’t seem to me to be
just a case of “it looks like it”.40 (vi) If there’s anything I’d claim to know that would
be one of the things.
Meno 98a4–b5
Most of Text 5.8 is compatible with Reading (c). For instance, the affirmation marked
(v), that knowledge and correct seeming are two quite different kinds of things, and,
in sentence (iv), Socrates’ disavowal of expertise, which modifies his claims about how
exactly knowledge and correct seeming differ, are both compatible with Reading (c).
The problem comes in the sentence marked (ii), at 98a5, when Socrates speaks of true
impressions becoming knowledges (in the plural) as though there was a particular
knowing that replaces every particular seeming; as though every recognition of a
token as falling under a type could be converted from ‘seeming to be one of those’ to
‘knowing it to be one of those’. Taken thus, sentence (ii) conflicts with the idea, in
Reading (c), that what we know (episteme) is always the type, which then provides the
explanation why, whereas spotting that this is virtuous is still just recognition of a token
(doxa), even when we have added the knowledge of why.
At this stage of our investigations, we cannot immediately resolve the problem that
sentence (ii) seems to pose for Reading (c). We shall return to it in Section V. Rather
38
98a5.
39
The verb here is εἰκάζων which is often translated ‘guessing’. See also Text 4.4 where I translated it
‘inference’. Here I have chosen ‘thinking by means of illustrations’ to make explicit the reference to like-
nesses and iconic thinking. Socrates means that he is working from illustrations (here the statues of
Daedalus, a metaphor for knowledge). This approach (which is also used in the Republic motifs of sun, line,
cave etc.) is analogous to the iconic reasoning whereby we move from particular instances to grasp the
generic form that they illustrate. On the iconic method, see further in Part III.
40
εἰκάζειν (see note 39).
than concluding in haste that Reading (c) is impossible, we should first consider
Passage B, which comes earlier in the text, and has already made some relevant points.
Indeed, Passage C explicitly refers us back to Passage B (sentence (i), in Text 5.8).
Socrates claims there that converting correct impressions into knowledges by way of
explanatory reasoning is what they had earlier agreed to call ‘recollection’. That is a
back reference to Passage B.41
We need to analyse Passage B, then. This will allow us to make better sense of the
idea of ‘explanatory reasoning’, and to work out what is supposed to be tied down by it.
IV. Passage B: Lessons From the Slave-Boy Passage

IV.i That ‘the boy did not already know’, meaning ‘the boy did not
have the knowledge already available’; and that Socrates does not
teach him anything that he did not know
We should turn back, at last, to Passage B, 85b–86c. Here, you will recall,42 when Meno’s
slave has gone back to his post, Socrates and Meno consider what they can infer from
his ability to discover the right answer, and when and how he could have acquired the
knowledge that he was using.
In this passage, I am translating doxa as ‘opinion’, simply because it sounds more
natural in the context of mathematics, but we should understand this as before: we
are dealing with something ‘seeming’ to be F, or someone having an ‘impression’ of an
F thing (those being the terms used elsewhere in this chapter).
Passage B starts as follows:
Text 5.9
(i) Socrates: What’s your opinion, Meno? Has he given any answer that is not his
own opinion?
Meno: No, they’re his own.
(ii) Socrates: And he didn’t already know—as we said a little earlier?
Meno: True.
(iii) Socrates: But these opinions were in him. Or not?
Meno: Yes.
(iv) Socrates: So there are true opinions in one who doesn’t know about the things
he doesn’t know, about these things that he doesn’t know.
Meno: It appears so.
Meno 85b8–c8
41
The relevant passage is discussed in Section IV.iii, and the conclusion to be drawn is considered in
Section V.
42
See Chapter 4, Section I.iii.
The sequence of thought in Text 5.9 is evidently supposed to be this:

1. First, Socrates checks that the boy gave his own opinions, not someone else’s. The
answers he gave came from himself and were not put there by someone else. This is
clearly what is meant by saying that they were ‘in him’ (iii) and that they were ‘his own’ (ii).
2. Second—
—But wait. We should stop here for a moment to dismiss a protest from those who
read this passage too quickly. It is sometimes said that the ideas are not ‘his own’ and
that they are not coming from the boy but are put there, or come from, Socrates, so that
it seems that Socrates ‘taught’ the boy.43 This mistaken reaction can be dispelled by
observing that the method illustrated is the same as the method by which they (or
we) would proceed if neither party—neither Socrates nor the boy—already knew the
answer. Does Socrates know the answer? Or does he get the boy to work it out? Nothing
forces us to think that Socrates already knows the result, as he selects which line to try,
and works out with the boy whether it is correct. If two equally ignorant people could
use this method to discover the answer, evidently it is not a method of ‘teaching’ but a
method of enquiry, in which Socrates happens to take a leading role. At 84c11 Socrates
says that the boy is ‘searching with me’.
—So, with that sorted, we return to the sequence of argument in Passage B.
2. Second, Socrates reminds Meno that the boy did not already know the answer
(85c2). This refers to the moment at 84a in Text 3.2, when the boy gave the wrong
answer, thereby clearly proving that he did not know.44 That is what Socrates means
by ‘a little earlier’ in sentence (ii) of Text 5.9. He does not mean that the boy generally
didn’t know any geometry (although that is also sort of true),45 but specifically that
he didn’t know the answer to what Socrates was asking, namely what line produces the
8-foot square.
3. Third, Socrates says that there were true opinions in him, in sentences (iii) and
(iv) of Text 5.9 (85c4 and 6).
IV.ii Passage B continues: the boy did have knowledge

Were we to stop reading at the point just reached, we might be tempted to think that
Socrates is saying, of the boy, that he did not know the answer, but he did produce true
43
Weiss, Virtue in the Cave: moral inquiry in Plato’s Meno, 94–107 argues in all seriousness that the
passage is not even supposed to illustrate recollection but is a clear case of teaching. Others are more apolo-
getic. The fact that the diagonals are not noticed until late in the procedure is no evidence (as Weiss would
have it) for a process of teaching: for this exactly mirrors the kind of thing that happens in trying to solve
a puzzle. Too often the evidence stands unnoticed before you until you rid yourself of misconceptions that
divert you from attending to the right bit.
44
Both there and here the verb eidenai is used (of knowing this quasi-propositional fact ‘which is the
line of the 8-foot area’).
45
The boy is not currently knowledgeable in geometry, but that is not the point here. Socrates would
hardly want to say that he lacked knowledge, since he will shortly conclude that there is knowledge in him
that can potentially be recovered (see Section IV.ii).
opinions—and hence (evidently) one can produce true opinions about things that one
does not know (perhaps even in cases where we know that we don’t know, since by the
time that he gets to the right answer the boy knows that he does not know). Taken thus,
the passage would imply that what Socrates calls ‘recollection’ is a situation where we
can generate true opinions, without knowledge, about things we actually do not know.
It is true that such a claim could be invoked to support Socrates’ claim that enquiry is
worthwhile. It would be a possible response to Meno’s paradox. Even if it does not yield
knowledge, enquiry could deliver good results in the form of true opinions. And if
those can be converted to knowledge (as Socrates seems to suggest), then enquiry
could lead ultimately to knowledge, even though its immediate results are mere opin-
ion. Some interpreters try to read the passage to that effect.46
But Passage B does not stop there. In fact, Socrates wants to say that the boy did have
knowledge. This is how Passage B continues:
Text 5.10
Socrates: (i) And at the moment these opinions have just been stirred up in him as
if in a dream. (ii) But if someone questions him frequently and in various ways about
these same things, you see that he’ll end up knowing about them, no less precisely
than anyone else does.
Meno: It looks like it.
Socrates: (iii) So he will have knowledge, even though no one has taught him but
only questioned him, because he’s drawn the knowledge up out of himself?
Meno: Yes.
Meno 85c9–d5
Here Socrates moves from saying (i) that the boy does not yet have knowledge, but
only true opinions stirred up as in a dream, to saying (ii) that—with further practice—
he will end up with knowledge, and then to saying (iii) that he will have drawn the
knowledge, that he eventually gets, ‘out of himself ’. The verb in (iii) is analambanein,
which typically—though not necessarily—implies the recovery or recalling of previous
memories.
So the impression that Socrates meant to deny that the boy has knowledge, by saying
that he didn’t know at the beginning, and still does not really know, and by contrasting
mere true opinions with real knowledge, seems to have been wrong. Rather Socrates
contrasted both the boy’s temporary lack of knowledge (before the start of the exercise
and at the point when he was reduced to aporia) and his temporary condition of mere
46
Weiss, Virtue in the Cave: moral inquiry in Plato’s Meno, 110–12 insists that the boy has no more than
opinion. Others express bemused acknowledgement that Socrates changes from claiming that he has opinion
to claiming that he has knowledge, and offer explanations invoking latent knowledge, future knowledge,
past knowledge, or other ways to avoid contradiction (e.g. Sharples, Plato Meno, 155; Fine, ‘Inquiry in the
Meno’, n. 40; Scott, Plato’s Meno, 108–12). See further below on 85d9, Text 5.11.
dreaming (at the point when he gets the answer right) with the boy’s more fundamental
condition of being a knower no less knowledgeable than any expert—a condition of full
reflective knowledge to which he will return, through his own resources, by the mere
exercise of his faculties in response to questions. Basically, the boy has knowledge in
him. The answers that he has just given may not seem to be based on knowledge as yet,
but it will emerge that they are in fact, and that the knowledge on which they are based
can be resuscitated. He will not need to be taught.
This interpretation of what Socrates has just said is confirmed by his next two
remarks. Passage B continues:
Text 5.11
Socrates: But drawing up knowledge that is in oneself is “remembering” isn’t it?
Meno: Indeed.
Socrates: So this knowledge which he now has . . .
Meno 85d6–9
Evidently, the verb analambanein (which occurred in Text 5.10, sentence (iii), and
again here) is indeed supposed to mean remembering something you knew before
(not converting something new into knowledge for the first time), and there is a sense
in which the boy still has this knowledge now (not just that he had it in the past and will
have it in the future). The boy’s true opinion is not, after all, contrasted with knowledge.
It is, rather, a symptom of it.
IV.iii Locating the back reference in Passage C

Where in Passage B is the point at which (as Socrates suggests in Passage C)47 they
agreed to use the term ‘recollection’ for the explanatory reasoning which ties down
true opinions? Some commentators insist that Socrates never did say this, and that the
back reference represents a sleight of hand.48 But this is a counsel of despair and repre-
sents too literal-minded an approach to what might be meant by saying that we already
mentioned ‘explanatory reasoning’ and called it ‘recollection’.49 The back reference is
presumably to a place where Socrates had previously talked about the process or cog-
nitive condition which he is now, at this later stage, calling ‘explanatory reasoning’. So
the good news is that we can gain some assistance with understanding ‘explanatory
reasoning’ in Passage C by locating the place in Passage B that Socrates has in mind,
where he called it ‘recollection’.
Still, there are two possible candidates in Passage B. One is 81d, early in the recollec-
tion section, when Socrates says that recollection is possible because (a) the soul is
immortal, and (b) ‘all nature is akin . . . so that once the soul has recollected one thing
47
98a4 (Text 5.8). See Section III.vi.
48
E.g. Weiss, Virtue in the Cave: moral inquiry in Plato’s Meno, 156. 98a4, Text 5.8 (i).
49
(what people call learning), nothing stops it from going on to discover all the rest’.50
The other is 85c–d, which we just explored in Section IV.ii,51 where Socrates says that
the boy can draw up knowledge from his own soul, by repeating the exercises he has
been using. I favour this second option, since (a) it includes the crucial claim that this
process should be called ‘recollection’ (85d6, Text 5.11), and (b) it speaks of converting
a set of true doxai into knowledge, or rather ‘knowledges’ (epistemai 86a7),52 by using
a process of questioning.53 If this latter option is the one, then evidently the process
called ‘explanatory reasoning’ in Passage C (Text 5.7) is the same as what would
happen were the boy to be exposed to repeated questioning from someone who merely
asks him but does not teach (85c10),54 whereby he would draw existing knowledge
from his soul and turn his doxai into epistemai.
But what exactly would he draw up that is not already there in the true opinions that
he has already expressed? The answer seems to be that he will, so to speak, ‘get it’: he
will discover how to abstract from the particular to a recognition of what the right
answer that he has found illustrates about the problem taken as a generic problem and
examined in the abstract. He will realize that not just this line AB is the right one, but
any line of this type will do, because he will see that it counts as the right one because it
is of this type. That is the inference to the reason why. In other words, he will recognize
his chosen line as representative of a certain type.
There are two ways to describe this: either we say that he now understands ‘why’
line AB will do, not just that it will do; or we say that he now understands what makes
AB count as the right answer. Socrates had once supposed that the knowledge of
‘what makes an F count as an F’ would consist of a definition, as in knowing ‘what a
virtue is’, for instance. That is what would enable us to explain what makes courage a
virtue. So grasping the reason why, in such cases, just is the same thing as grasping
‘what it is to be an F’, and hence what Socrates calls ‘explanatory reasoning’, in Text 5.7,
is what generates a grasp of the reason why precisely because it generates a grasp of
‘what it is’, about the type qua type, together with an understanding of its relation to
the token just perceived.
V. Once Again, Can True Doxa Turn Into Knowledge?

Passage B continues. Socrates and Meno speculate about when exactly the boy acquired
the conceptual competence that underpins his answers about the double square.
We do not, for our purposes, need to solve all the puzzles raised by that section of the
50
81c9–d3. Scott, Plato’s Meno, 179 favours this option, together with 82e12–13 ‘recollecting in
sequential order, as one is obliged to do in cases of recollecting’.
51
Texts 5.10, 5.11. 52 Cf. 98a5 (Text 5.8). See Section III.vi.
53
This is the majority view: Bluck, Plato Meno, 414; Gregory Vlastos, ‘Anamnesis in the Meno’, Dialogue,
4 (1965), 143–67, 156–7; Sharples, Plato Meno, 155, among others.
54
Text 5.10, sentence (ii).
dialogue. What we should address is the idea that true seemings (doxai) can turn into
‘knowings’ (epistemai). This was the problem we left hanging earlier, in Section III.vi.
If my suggestions in Section IV.iii are correct, then what ties down the opinions and
prevents them from running away is abstract knowledge of something else, in which
case it would be wrong to say that the opinions become knowledge. The opinion will
not itself be or become the knowledge that is required to tie it down. And in that case,
we do not come to know the particular token, but we deploy the generic grasp of the type
(episteme), which is what explains why the token we have identified counts as correct,
and enables us to understand and substantiate its qualifications and hang on to that
view when challenged.
The kind of knowledge that the boy needs, to be sure that his answer is indeed the
right answer, is an understanding of why that square counts as double—understanding
it not just intuitively but because he has grasped how it meets the requirements for
counting as double. He needs to see this in a generic sense that could be replicated in
controlled repetitions. He needs to see how to go on and do the same again, for this and
other tasks. Thus he can acquire not just one right answer but the whole science, leading
to consistently right answers and an ability to reject wrong answers, with knowledge of
why they are wrong. To reach this reliable scientific understanding of the subject, one
does not assemble a set of disconnected propositional facts about this or that answer
proving right on this or that occasion. Rather one develops a generic and abstract con-
ceptual knowledge of ‘what a double is’, ‘what a right angle is’, and so on. According to
Socrates, this developed conceptual knowledge draws on truth already ‘in his soul’,55
not external input. We could extend this to give a parallel account of what would
ground one’s reliable grasp of which is the right road to Larissa.
This interpretation faces a prima facie difficulty, which explains why it is not always
favoured in the literature. For Socrates says that seemings turn into (γίγνονται) know-
ings. How should we understand the verb gignesthai (to become or turn into)? Does he
not mean that particular factual opinions (doxai) become particular factual pieces of
knowledge (epistemai)?
There are two ways to avoid this difficulty. The first involves distinguishing carefully
between (a) ‘knowings’ in the plural (epistemai), which is distinctively used in these
two passages, and (b) ‘knowledge’ (episteme) in the singular. While reserving the term
episteme, in the singular, for the grasp of a type qua type (as in knowing virtue, what it is),
and understanding this as a mass noun, we can also allow that there is another usage
where episteme is a count noun and comes in the plural (‘knowings’),56 and we can take
this term to refer to cases where a particular token-identification (that was a case of
true doxa) is underpinned by reflective knowledge (episteme) of the type qua type, and
thereby becomes one of those doxai that is tied down by knowledge. Arguably the
55
86b2, and Text 5.11.
56
We might compare this to the distinction between ‘belief ’ as a mass term and ‘beliefs’ as a count noun
in English, on which see Chapter 2.
term epistemai in the plural, the count-noun usage, refers to those secured right
answers, and they, unlike the knowledge that ties them down, are of particular token
things.57 The plural ‘knowings’ refers to these knowledgeable seemings, which are not
mere seemings.58
A second solution to the puzzle about whether the (mere) seemings become or turn
into knowings is also available, if we take ‘becoming’ to mean something other than
what it has traditionally been taken to mean. What kind of ‘becoming’ is intended?
Does the knowledge that ties an opinion down change the content or status of the
opinion? What kind of a change is it? Is this a Cambridge change?
We should look first at the relevant sentence in Passage B, and then at the corresponding
sentence in Passage C, and ask what Plato meant exactly. In Passage B we encounter
the following:
Text 5.12
If, then, there are going to be true seemings within him for any and all of the time
when he was human, and also any and all of the time when he wasn’t human too,
which, once having been aroused by questioning, emerge as knowings, won’t his
soul be already learned for the whole of time?
Meno 86a6–8
In Passage C we encounter this:
Text 5.13 (=Text 5.8 ii–iii)
But when they [sc. the true seemings] are tied down, first they turn out to be knowings,
and secondly, lasting; and it’s for this reason that knowledge is more highly prized
than correct seeming; and knowledge differs from correct seeming by a chain.
Meno 98a5–8
In both cases Socrates claims that true seemings turn out to be or emerge (gignontai)
as knowings, in Text 5.12 once they have been ‘aroused’ and in Text 5.13 (=Text 5.8 ii–iii)
once they have been ‘tied down’. The metaphor of what causes the change is different,
but arguably the change described is the same one. But is it a change, or is it a discov-
ery about the existing nature of the item in question? We should take note of the
grammatical tenses: in Text 5.12, from Passage B, we have the future tenses of discov-
ery or proof: that is, the future tense in the hypothesis ‘if there are going to be true
seemings . . .’ 59 is not a claim about the future. It is about what is true of the boy over
all time, both the past and the future, before and after this life. So it does not mean ‘if
there will at some future time be true seemings’, but rather ‘if it is going to turn out to
57
I am not making a general claim about epistemai in the plural, which is more common in Greek than
‘knowledges’ in English. It can often mean ‘sciences’, as in the Republic and Theaetetus.
58
For something on these lines, see Gerson, Ancient Epistemology, 30, n. 4, correcting the standard
interpretation of the road to Larissa passage described, but not endorsed, in the main text on that page.
59
ἐνέσονται αὐτῷ ἀληθεῖς δόξαι, 86a7.
be the case that’. The motif of ‘turning out to be’ reflects the timetable of philosophical
enquiry: ‘it will turn out that . . .’ means ‘we shall find that . . .’ .
The language is similar in Passage C, in the sequence ‘first they turn out to be know-
ings, and then lasting’60 in Text 5.13 (=Text 5.8 ii–iii). As Sharples notes,61 this sequence
is not temporal (first they turn into knowings and then they become lasting). It is a list,
possibly indicating logical dependence, with epeita meaning ‘second’ rather than
‘later’. That is why I have translated gignontai as ‘turn out to be’, rather than ‘become’ or
‘turn into’: it is in virtue of being tied down that the seemings count as knowings. This
is something we shall find out, as if it were a new event. As a consequence of that,
though not temporally removed from it, they are also stable. The tenses, and the tem-
poral markers, serve a logical role, and so too does the verb gignesthai. This sense of
gignesthai is regular and familiar. It is used, for example, at 99a7, where virtue ‘turns
out not to be knowledge’ after all. There is no process of becoming in that case, but
rather a discovery of an existing situation.62
So we should not imagine that Socrates means that reflective enquiry adds something
new—such as justification or evidence—to an existing true opinion, and thereby turns the
opinion into knowledge. This thought is tempting only because we are addicted to ‘justi-
fied true belief ’ models of knowledge, I would suggest. It is not there in the text. The text is
talking about the way in which a process of enquiry brings to light the conceptual under-
pinning, which was there already. It was already making the right answer seem right. The
boy reached his correct view by deploying a dream-like awareness of the necessary con-
ceptual resources. By making the conceptual basis clearer, something becomes apparent
that had been true all along. Even what at first were mere seemings were all the while
grounded in a kind of knowing. As this becomes clear over time, as the boy comes to
articulate the knowledge underpinning his correct answers, the explicit knowledge will
then tie down the opinions and they will turn out to be the knowings that they really are.
So there are two ways in which a closer examination of these claims about seemings
becoming knowings reveals that they do not imply that what were once mere seemings
become cases of knowledge. Rather, what seemed to be mere seemings without knowledge
turn out to be underpinned by conceptual understanding of a type, and as the source of
their reliability becomes clear, so their status as mere seemings is corrected, because it
turns out that they are really symptoms of what someone who knows can do when they
correctly deploy their knowledge.
VI. Conclusion: That Neither Doxa Nor Episteme

Is a Propositional Attitude
I have argued in this chapter that we should not take doxa and episteme to be propos-
itional attitudes with the same content. My claim is that neither is a propositional
πρῶτον μὲν ἐπιστῆμαι γίγνονται, ἔπειτα μόνιμοι, 98a6. 61 Sharples, Plato Meno, ad loc.
60
For another example, see Republic 433b3–4 (in Chapter 7, note 21).
62
attitude; that they are two different kinds of grasp of two logically different kinds of
objects: doxa is token-recognition or ‘seeing as’ (and the occasional use of epistemai in
the plural also refers to token-recognition, when bound by episteme), while episteme is
one’s grasp of the type or concept in itself, which is a pre-requisite for recognition.
Doxa can be right or wrong, because one can be right or wrong in taking what is before
one as a token of such and such a type. Since episteme does not involve seeing a particu-
lar item under a description, but is the grasp of the descriptor as such, it cannot be
incorrect in the way that doxa can, but it can be absent, or more or less available, and
more or less reflective and articulate. For any case of doxa (correct or incorrect) the
relevant descriptor must be available to some degree, even if only in some shadowy
way.63 For instance, the boy needed some grasp of what ‘double’ means even to begin to
seek a square that might be ‘double in area’, and even to make a mistake about it; so even
incorrect doxa requires some existing capacity to understand the terms of the task.
However, even with a good grasp of the type (episteme), one may still make a mistake
in recognizing a token. Episteme comes in degrees: degrees of articulation and reflective
awareness. Even though some idea of what ‘double’ means is already there, and is
deployed in the boy’s first mistaken guesses, it is knowledge to which he currently has
only a dream-like access, under questioning from Socrates. Eventually, when he
becomes aware of it as an object of attention, and considers how exactly something
qualifies for that description (when he considers ‘the double, what it is’), only then will
he develop a fully articulate grasp of what the double is that can ground all his opinions
and make them secure. Then his right answers (doxa) will turn out to be epistemai.
On this account, neither episteme, nor doxa, nor the plural epistemai—none of these is
genuinely propositional or complex. In learning to recognize which things fall under a
concept of which we have some grasp, we often come first to the particulars, and learn by
experience that such things as these are called ‘virtues’, say, and are the ‘things you ought
to do’. Socrates suggests, in these famous passages, that our explicit grasp of the type qua
type is preceded by practical identification of tokens, and that the fully articulate grasp of
the concept is developed by calculation of the reason why, from the preceding doxastic
grasp of tokens. We use tokens iconically, to derive from them a better understanding of
the type, even while our implicit grasp of the type is all the while what explains the inclu-
sion of just those cases as the ones to which we attend. The type itself is the aitia. Those
cases count as good examples of the type because they do illustrate the type, so when we
see them as examples of the type, even in the early stages of our understanding, there is a
way in which we are already using and applying a concept effectively—well enough for
success in the real world. In that sense we already have the knowledge, but that know-
ledge will later become more reflective and explanatory, and that is the role that philoso-
phy can play, and the reason why it has something worthwhile to offer even to someone
who is practising virtue correctly in an unreflective way all through his life and teaching.
More on this in Chapter 9.

63
PA RT I I I
Plato’s Republic
6
for Part III: Plato’s Republic
I. In Which We Consider the Plan of the Republic,

and Why the Quest for a Definition Is Abandoned
In Part III we turn to the central books of Plato’s Republic, to test whether our findings
about doxa and episteme can be applied there, and to explore another case that supports
the claim that Plato rejects the demand for definitions and replaces it, in this case, with
an iconic method of enquiry into ‘what it is’ about the key concepts under discussion
(in this case ‘justice’).
Ostensibly, the Republic investigates whether the just person gains any benefit from
being just. But as a preparation for answering that question, Socrates sets out to discover
what justice is, beginning with a classic Socratic quest for a definition, which occupies much
of Book 1. However, in Book 2 Socrates turns to constructing an imaginary political
community such that it will display the various political virtues, including justice. How
can this help with the question ‘what justice is’ or whether it pays to be just? Does Socrates
ever define justice? Does Plato think that we have to define justice before asking whether
it pays? These are my questions here.
In Chapter 7 I argue that Plato is not seeking a definition of justice in the Republic.
In the Republic, as in the Meno, Socrates discovers a new method (the iconic method)
for working towards knowledge of ‘what justice is’ and whether it pays, without
defining it. With this new method it is possible to make progress on the puzzles about
moral and evaluative concepts that remained unsolved in the aporetic dialogues. The
Republic goes further than the Meno in its explicit work on the nature of conceptual
knowledge (episteme) and what can be known thereby, and about the value of images
and the ordinary things of experience, for philosophical inquiry. The Republic illustrates
a method in which images, not definitions, are the main tools for philosophical enquiry,
and explains why it works.
When we read the Republic in this way, the text teems with issues of interest to
contemporary philosophy, and its suggestions are also genuinely enlightening. There
is so much relevant material in the Republic that it would deserve a whole book to itself.
For now I must just sketch in outline how it fits my current narrative. I shall also show
(in passing) how the reading I am proposing defuses certain classic objections, which
turn out to be missing the point.
I shall consider four issues, two in Chapter 7 and two in Chapter 8. It is usually said
that Plato defines justice as ‘one man, one job’, or minding one’s own business, or
harmony of the elements of the soul or state—all these being roughly equivalent—and
that the same definition is supposed to apply to both the soul and the state. In Chapter 7
I argue that neither of these assumptions is correct, since first, in the relevant passage,
Socrates is not defining anything, least of all justice as such. In fact he is identifying a
feature in his imagined city that is instantiating the virtue of justice (for that city).
Having found such a feature in the one example (the city), he then engages analogical
tools to seek out a comparable feature that instantiates the same type, justice, in a
different thing, namely a just soul. Neither of these particular domain-specific and
token-specific features is intended to be generalized, or to be equated with ‘what justice
is’ in the abstract. Rather, to get an idea of what justice is in itself, Socrates ‘rubs the two
examples together’, to work out why these two features, though different, are both cases
of justice. It is then that we begin to understand what justice is in itself, and we make
the discovery entirely without attempting a definition of justice, and without any temp-
tation to generalize from the examples described, or by making all instances conform to
the same criteria.
II. That We Can Avoid Ascribing Fallacies to

Plato Once We Understand Plato’s Method
A key issue in the Republic is what it would mean for the term ‘justice’ to be univocal
across the two domains, political and personal. I show that Plato does not expect them
to share a common definition, whereupon I can defuse two famous charges of fallacy
which still dominate discussions of the Republic in Anglo-American philosophy
schools. Both Bernard Williams and David Sachs, I argue, mistakenly assume that
Plato equates univocity with a shared unitary definition.1
Socrates’ new method, starting from Book Two of the Republic, involves examining
a token case and then rubbing it together with another from another domain as just
described. The method is clearly a deliberate substitute for Socrates’ original search
for definitions with which he had started in Book One. In Chapter 8 I reflect further
upon this new Platonic methodology (the iconic method). I explore why Socrates
gives up the quest for definition, why he turns to using icons, and why it works. We
consider Socrates’ distinction between the tough method of enquiry prescribed for
training philosopher kings (the ‘longer way’), and the ‘shortcut’, which is taken by the
characters in Plato’s dialogue (and also by his readers, presumably). I argue that Socrates
never embarks upon the longer route, but that the discussions in the Republic are all on
the shortcut, offering a mere sketch of what the philosopher kings will eventually
need to know.
1
See Chapter 7, Sections IV and V.
Introduction and Summary for Part III 113
Some commentators have claimed that Socrates does not completely abandon the
longer route. Some think that it is not just mentioned, but actually taken, in Republic
6 and 7.2 Dominic Scott hedges his bets on whether it is deployed in Books 8 and 9,
equating the ‘longer route’ with arguments that depend on the metaphysics of
Books 5 to 7.3 Christopher Rowe thinks that Book 10 includes an example of the longer
route (concerning the soul).4 I argue that none of these are supposed to be the long
way: that within the dialogue we never step beyond the second-best (or perhaps
third-best) approach. But we should not blame this on the shortcomings of the dialogue’s
characters.5 The short way suffices for what readers of the Republic need, which is to
understand what the rulers of a city based on knowledge would need to know, and
how they could be expected to achieve it. It does not try to give us that knowledge,
but still (I argue) the dialogue’s clever use of images, inviting us to think about things
beyond our intellectual reach, provides an approximation to the best method. I argue
in Chapter 8 that even the longer route, to be attempted by the trainee philosopher
kings, will follow a similar methodology. It too would use exemplars as icons, though
its exemplars would already be intelligible, not imaginary or sensory particulars as in
the Republic. Arguably the Republic’s short route provides the lower rungs of a ladder
leading to a fully fledged philosophical enquiry.6
The conclusions of Chapter 8 invite us to challenge some traditional misconceptions
about Plato’s views on images and artistic representations, and on the value of sensible
things—a theme deserving more extended treatment in another context. Here I focus
on the ‘Divided Line’, which (I suggest) reveals not the worthlessness of images, but
rather their value in philosophy. Plato takes sensation’s grasp of a particular as a model
for the intellect’s grasp of the corresponding concept or type, partly because the token
stands to the type as icon to original, and partly because (as a consequence, perhaps)
the perception of the former is analogous to the intellection of the latter, and this too is
iconic. Given this analogy, and the method it spawns, we should not imagine that Plato
takes the target knowledge to be propositional or linguistic; nor need the knowledge be
expressible in any definition or logos.
2
E.g. James Adam (ed.), The Republic of Plato (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1902), at
435D; Terry Penner, ‘The Forms in the Republic’ in Gerasimos Santas (ed.), The Blackwell Guide to Plato’s
Republic (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006), 234–62, 240, 249.
3
Dominic Scott, Levels of Argument: A Comparative Study of Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Nicomachean
Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015) (Scott’s book appeared after the first submission of this
manuscript to the Press).
4
Rowe, Plato and the Art of Philosophical Writing, 164–7 argues that the shorter route offers an avowedly
inaccurate account of the soul, while a better (‘longer’) account of the soul is offered in Book 10, 611b9–d8.
I disagree on that, though it may hint (611d) at things to think about, should we go that way. I share his
view that the shortcut uses visible models, but he thinks of empirical vs. rational enquiry, by contrast with
my distinction between visible and intelligible models. (See Chapter 8, note 3.)
5
As e.g. Mitchell Miller, ‘Beginning the “longer way” ’ in G.R.F. Ferrari (ed.), The Cambridge Companion
to Plato’s Republic (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 310–44, 310.
6
Thus we should not see a major contrast in methodology (as does Scott, Levels of Argument), but rather
the short route provides an adumbration of how the longer one would work.
Chapter 8 ends by reflecting on what Plato means when Socrates says that after
taking the longer route the dialectician will be able to give a logos of what he knows,
whereas those who take the shortcut cannot. Does this undermine my claim that episteme
never takes a logos as its content, and is never correctly or completely expressed in any
logos? I suggest that it does not.
Both chapters reach similar conclusions. In the Republic, I suggest, Socrates tries to
discover what justice is, with a view to ascertaining whether justice pays. To explain
what it is, he does not define it, or even try to do so, but instead uses an illustration
(the imaginary city).7 Many interpreters have tried to read the Republic as though the
illustration was meant to provide a definition of justice. But, I suggest, Socrates’ point
is the very opposite: he means that no such account can be given, unless one has taken
the longer road (as explained in Chapter 8). If we have learnt anything at all from this
text, we shall not take the token city described in the Republic to be the type or concept
‘Justice’ or even ‘Just City’.8 Nor should we imagine that the way that it instantiates
justice is the only way. That would be to make the very mistake that the sight-lovers
make, when they take the token cases of beauty to be Beauty itself.9 As in beauty, so in
justice; what makes one way of life just for one person, in one city, may be the very
thing that makes that life unjust for another, who occupies a different role, with different
responsibilities and obligations; each person in Plato’s city has a distinctive role, so what
is just for one is not just for another. Likewise, the structures that constitute justice in
another city might be quite different—for instance, a city where no one is inclined to
philosophy, but they do act well towards one another, will still be a just city, though not
in the same way. Nothing in Plato’s Republic suggests that a city must be organized in
that way to count as just.
7
Benson, Clitophon’s Challenge, 252 notices this possibility concerning the Republic’s method, but does
not endorse it. Benson’s work appeared after this manuscript was complete, but this paragraph and my
Chapter 8, Section III encapsulate my response.
8
See Myles Burnyeat, ‘Utopia and fantasy: the practicability of Plato’s ideally just city’ in J. Hopkins and
A. Savile (eds.), Psychoanalysis, Mind and Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); Francis MacDonald
Cornford (ed.), The Republic of Plato, Translated with Introduction and Notes (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1941), 171; and Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies, Volume I: Plato (London: Routledge, 1945).
It can’t really be Cornford’s view, given his note on 592b.
9
Republic V, 476c–d. See Chapter 7, Section VI.
7
Discovering What Justice Is
in Plato’s Republic
In this chapter I challenge two assumptions that are almost universal, namely that (i) Plato
aims to define justice in the Republic, and (ii) he provides a definition in Book 4. The
passage in Republic 4 that is normally construed as a definition of justice is, I argue, not
intended as a definition of justice but is the moment where Socrates identifies a specific
feature in his imaginary city which constitutes its justice. At that point he does not discover
justice as such, but the justice of this particular imaginary city.
There are two ways of establishing this point. One is to read the text carefully, which
we shall do in Section II, and the other is to think about the logic of the argument in the
Republic as a whole. I shall start with the latter.
I. In Which We Examine the Argument of the Republic

and Discover That Plato Is Not Trying to Define Justice
but Is Using a Method That Bypasses the Need for
Definition
We are often told that Plato defines ‘justice’ as ‘doing your own thing’ or ‘one man, one
job’ or ‘distribution of labour according to ability’ and so on.1 The relevant passage,
where scholars generally find the supposed definition, comes in Republic 4 and is
translated below in Text 7.4. It is the point at 433a1–6, when Socrates remembers the
earlier decision ‘that each and every one ought to attend to just one of the city’s needs,
just the one to which their nature would be most fitted’, and suggests that this was all
along the thing that they had been searching for, in their quest for what constitutes the
city’s justice. As we shall see below, that was their quest: to discover what constitutes
the city’s justice.
1
Patrick Coby, ‘Mind your own business: the trouble with justice in Plato’s “Republic” ’, Interpretation, 31
(2003), 37–58; Charles H. Kahn, ‘The meaning of “justice” and the theory of forms’, The Journal of Philosophy,
69 (1972), 567–79; Gregory Vlastos, ‘Justice and happiness in the Republic’ in Gregory Vlastos (ed.),
Platonic Studies (2nd edn; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), 111–39. See also Popper, Open
Society, 31–4 who attributes ‘methodological essentialism’ to Plato. Others speak of an ‘account’ rather than
a ‘definition’, but seem to mean the same thing.
This had better not be intended as a definition of justice itself, for if that were the
intention, Socrates’ argument would be seriously ropey. Socrates finds a feature in
the one case that he has examined (an imaginary city). Does he then assume without
argument that this feature is what all cases of justice must share? Or that it is a generic
description of justice that applies to all instances? To infer that it is correct for all cases,
one would first need to know that the feature is applicable in all cases, but we have
examined only one, and merely asserted of that one that this is what makes it just. It
would seem to beg the question, and deliver a rubbish argument.2
The many problems that arise if one takes the ‘minding your own business’ formula
as Plato’s definition of justice have not been ignored by those who read it in that way.
Scholars have not hesitated to complain that the definition fails to meet the Socratic
demand for a single factor applicable to all examples of justice in all domains (or even
just the two domains under discussion),3 and that what it defines is not the relevant
kind of justice that was at issue in Republic 1.4 But if, as I shall suggest, the formula was
not intended as a definition of justice, these objections miss the mark, and the puzzles
fall away. It is rather more puzzling why scholars have been so very busy finding fault
with Plato for not succeeding in a project that he should not succeed in, since most
scholars also think that Socratic essentialism is misguided. So why would it be a fault if
Plato failed to do what we all agree he should not have done, and should not have thought
he should do? And why do they insist that he must have been trying unsuccessfully to
do that misguided thing?
Someone might think that it is obvious from the start that Plato is looking for a
definition of justice. Certainly, Socrates starts in Republic 1 by making his companions
search for a definition. Before considering whether justice benefits a person, he says,
we first need to discover what justice is. His strictures here recall the distinction in the
Meno, between (a) asking ti esti (what it is) and (b) asking poion esti (what kind of thing
it is).5 In the Meno, too, Socrates was unwilling, at least to begin with, to investigate
poion esti (such as whether virtue is teachable) before first finding ‘virtue itself, what
it is’.6 There too, he meant that he wanted a definition or single common factor for all
virtues, and here likewise, in Republic 1, when Socrates insists that he must first discover
what justice is, before asking whether it pays, he means that he wants a definition that is
2
Jonathan Barnes, ‘Justice writ large’, Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, Supplementary Volume (2012),
31–49 derides Plato on this basis. Presumably Barnes thought that he was making a serious contribution to
scholarship. Perhaps he thought he was being funny. But since Barnes’s paper has not been damned, as it
deserves, in the reviews, we must presume that other scholars too take those faults to be not due to Barnes’s
misreading of Plato. Perhaps they also think that Barnes’s imprecise and unreferenced rubbishing of Plato’s
arguments is acceptable in a publication of that kind. I disagree.
3
E.g. Bernard Williams, ‘The analogy of city and soul in Plato’s Republic’ in Myles Burnyeat (ed.), The
Sense of the Past: essays in the history of philosophy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 108–17
(on which see Section V of this chapter).
4
See Section IV, addressing Sachs.
5
Republic 354b. Compare Meno 71a6, b4, discussed in Chapter 4, Section I. 6 Meno 71a6–7.
Discovering What Justice Is in Plato’s Republic 117
immune to counter-examples.7 But as in other dialogues, Plato portrays this quest for
a definition as a fruitless failure.8 None of the proposed definitions survives the
elenchus, and after Republic 1, we hear no more of that quest.
While it is true that Socrates requested a unitary definition for justice in Republic 1,
that need not mean that Plato wanted him to find one. As we proceed to Republic 2,
neither Socrates nor Glaucon nor Adeimantus are asking for one. It is true that Socrates
still hopes to discover what justice is, but as we saw in the Meno, this need not mean that
he wants a definition. There are other ways of saying what it is, which do not involve
naming a common factor.
So, as in the Meno, Socrates silently and discreetly abandons his fruitless definitional
enquiry.9 Rather than imagine that Republic 1 was once a stand-alone Socratic dialogue,
ending in aporia, we should see it as perfectly designed for its current role. By making
Republic 1 end in failure, Plato nicely dramatizes the transfiguration of the ‘what is it?’
question—a transfiguration engineered at the start of Republic 2, as Socrates discovers
another way to examine what justice is and whether it pays.
Starting in Republic 2, Socrates turns to something different. He starts describing an
instance of justice in practice, or, rather, an imaginary instance, in an imaginary city.
This involves ‘founding’ an imaginary city and then looking to identify, for each of its
several virtues, what aspect of the city’s structure allows it to instantiate that virtue.
As we shall see, in Section II, in these investigations into the virtues of his city, Socrates
is not hunting for a definition of each virtue, but for an instance of the virtue embodied
in a functioning agent (in this case, a political community), though this will eventu-
ally contribute to the enquiry into justice itself, ‘what it is’, and whether it is valuable
for anything.10
So the procedure in the Republic goes like this. First Socrates creates his city. Then,
in Book 4, he identifies a certain feature of it as its justice. Then, by analogy, he looks
for something comparable in an individual soul—another case of justice, both of them
instances of justice. This is still not answering the generic question ‘what is justice
as such?’ We cannot infer from one or two cases that everything will share those
features—for, as we saw in Republic 1, extrapolation to a generic definition based on
a few cases always fails, and Socrates can always find a counter-example. So we cannot
7
See, for example, 331c–d where a definition of justice as paying one’s debts is refuted by a counter-example,
and 336c–337c where Socrates protests that Thrasymachus has outlawed by fiat all the definitions that
Socrates might have taken to be candidates of the right kind.
8
For the same pattern in the Meno, see Chapter 4.
9
Vlastos thinks that the Socratic essentialism is still governing (and vitiating) the argument that draws
analogies between state and soul at Republic 441c–e (Gregory Vlastos, ‘Justice and psychic harmony in the
Republic’, The Journal of Philosophy, 66 (1969), 505–21, reiterated in Vlastos, ‘Justice and happiness in
the Republic’, 131). He also supposes that Plato ‘takes this for an axiomatic truth’, so he does not consider it
just a Socratic fault. I think we can read the argument without making either of those claims.
10
368c: they are to track down what each of justice and injustice are (no definite articles, 368b6); and
their usefulness.
think that Socrates now intends to generalize from his imaginary city and read off a
generic definition that applies to everything on that basis.
In fact, to explain how the paradigms can become the basis for knowledge of justice
as such, Socrates will first need to explain the education of the Guardians. The central
books of the Republic are devoted to showing, in a range of images, how one can move
from examining a good diagram to understanding what the diagram illustrates, without
falling into the mistake of thinking that all cases are like the one that we have seen first.
That procedure, whereby we move from examining an exemplar to grasping the abstract
type that it exemplifies, is what I shall call the ‘iconic method’. This will be my focus in
Chapter 8. It is also worth noting that in the early books, when Socrates sets up his
imaginary exemplar, he uses what has come to be called the ‘genealogy’ method—a
method used over the centuries by Hobbes, Nietzsche, Rawls, and others, as well as
Aristotle and Protagoras. This method typically involves a fictional narrative about the
origin of some human institution or virtue, and it is used as a tool for examining
the nature and value of the relevant institution, in this case justice.11
II. In Which We Examine the Text More Closely, to

Reconstruct the Hunt for the City’s Justice in Republic 4,
and We Discover No Definition
Our second task is to look closely at the relevant passages of text (Passage A) to show
that the interpretation I have just outlined fits what Socrates says about his discovery,
in the dialogue.
II.i That the hunting in Passage A is a hunt for the city’s justice,
not for justice as such
II.i.i Passage A: Republic 432b4–433a6
Once the city has been sufficiently described, Socrates and his companions begin to
investigate its internal dispositions, including its justice and injustice. For each virtue
that his city is supposed to exemplify, Socrates asks ‘where in this city do we find its
courage/temperance/wisdom etc.?’ At 432b4, having already trapped three of the city’s
four political virtues, Socrates turns to look for its justice among whatever remains.
Text 7.1
But what would the remaining feature be, whereby the city has some share in virtue?
For that’s evidently going to be its justice.
432b4–6
11
On the genealogy method and its virtues, see Bernard Williams, Truth and Truthfulness: an essay in
genealogy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 31–5. Oddly Williams does not seem to see
that the Republic is an example. More on this in another place.
He then develops an elaborate hunting metaphor, whose pomposity has often been
noticed:12
Text 7.2
So Glaucon, we now need to station ourselves like some hunters encircling a wood,
and keeping our eyes skinned, lest the city’s justice should escape and elude us, by
becoming invisible. Plainly it’s got to be in here somewhere. So you look and try to
see, in case you see it before I do, and tell me if you do.
432b8–c2
This is how things are at 432c. The wood is dark and tangled. There seems no hope of
seeing the quarry (432c5–10). But then, suddenly, by 432d Socrates surprises himself
by catching it right at their feet:
Text 7.3
And then I saw it: “Tally ho, Glaucon!” I cried. “It seems we’ve got a scent. I don’t
think it’s going to elude us much longer.” . . . “Well, my lucky friend, it’s apparently
been rolling around here at our feet, from way back at the start (πρὸ ποδῶν ἡμῖν ἐξ
ἀρχῆς κυλινδεῖσθαι), and we didn’t see it. What laughing stocks we were, like people
who sometimes search high and low for something that they’re holding in their
hands!”
432d2–e1
Socrates had been looking for something obscure, distant, hidden in the dark wood.
What he finds, in Text 7.3, is that the quarry was something that they’d already caught,
though they hadn’t seen it under the description justice. They’ve ‘been uttering it and
hearing it for a long time, without realizing it’, Socrates says.13
It turns out that what he has identified is the careful distribution of roles:
Text 7.4
But, said I, pay attention to whether I’m saying something. What we established
back at the beginning, when we founded the city—this, it seems to me, or something
of this kind, is its justice. If I remember rightly, didn’t we establish and repeat many
times, that each and every one ought to attend to just one of the city’s needs, just the
one to which their nature would be most fitted.
433a1–6
This, says Socrates, is the city’s justice.
12
The comical grandeur marks its importance, as observed by Myles Burnyeat, ‘Justice writ large and
small’ in Verity Harte and Melissa Lane (eds.), Politeia in Greek and Roman Philosophy (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2013), 212–30, 213–14 (contra Popper, Open Society, 99).
13
432e4–6: ὡς δοκοῦμέν μοι καὶ λέγοντες αὐτὸ καὶ ἀκούοντες πάλαι οὐ μανθάνειν ἡμῶν αὐτῶν, ὅτι
ἐλέγομεν τρόπον τινὰ αὐτό.
As we can see from the wording in Text 7.4 (and also Texts 7.1 and 7.2), what they are
hunting for is not justice in general, but the justice in this city. Socrates concludes that
its justice lies in a certain internal structure that it has, in much the same way as the
beauty of a work of art might lie in its unique colour or design. Searching for the justice
in the city is like noticing the beauty in a painting. On the gallery tour someone points
to its vibrant colours, and proposes that they are what make it so beautiful. Evidently
not every beautiful thing must have vibrant colours. Not even all good paintings have
that. But in this painting, the vibrant colours are its beauty.
II.ii That the method and the finding are comparable to finding the line
on the diagram in the Meno, and to the things admired by the lovers of
sights and sounds
The task of hunting for the city’s justice is comparable in some respects to the slave boy’s
task in the Meno.14 Here in the Republic the diagram is the verbal description of a city.
Socrates must find where in this diagram there is a feature that can be called its justice,
and point to that feature as the boy in the Meno pointed to a line that would do the job
that was required.
In Text 7.3 Socrates is surprised to find that the city’s justice was rolling around at
their feet. The ‘rolling around’ verb (κυλινδεῖται, 432d) occurs twice in the Republic,
first here, and later, in Republic 5, at 479e where we hear that sensible features ‘roll
around’ between being and not-being because of their contextual variability.15 This is
telling, because it makes a connection between this passage and the passage where the
lovers of sights and sounds mistakenly take something that is merely a particular case
of beauty to be Beauty itself, the Form Beautiful. Socrates explains that such particular
beautiful things roll around between being and not-being, and the lovers of sights and
sounds show their confusion by taking such a thing to be the Form itself. So we should
note that what the hunters find in Passage A is, in fact, a thing of that kind—a mere
instance of justice in a visible thing, and just as the lovers of sights and sounds wrongly
take the instance of beauty to be the beautiful, so scholars have been prone to take
the instance of justice that Socrates finds rolling at his feet to be the Just itself. Their
mistake is exactly the one that Socrates explains in Republic 5, when he proves that
those people who pride themselves on knowledge of many beautiful things do not know
about the Beautiful itself.
Equally, in the search for the city’s bravery, finding what makes this city brave does not
produce a defining explanation for all kinds of bravery. The city’s courageous citizens
are not courage itself. Indeed, there are many ways of being brave, and many ways of
being just. This is what makes these moral and aesthetic concepts so interesting to
Plato.16 Arguably that is why justice belongs among the Forms. Socrates himself says,
See Chapter 5, Section IV. 15 For other occurrences see Phaedrus 275e1, Laws 893e.
14
See Republic 523c–524b, contrasting instances of ‘finger’ with instances of relational concepts like ‘big’
16
and ‘small’.
of the search for courage in the city, that although he does not know how they found it,
its courage is ‘not difficult to see’ (429a5). That makes sense, because it is not hard to
pick out in some particular case what counts for it being a case of courage, whether it
be an imaginary city, or an army general. It is just like observing a painting, and consid-
ering what makes it beautiful. That is not hard for a particular case, but it does not provide
a definition of beauty. Given this, it makes no sense to think that Plato’s Socrates is
supposing that he has found the single common factor, or a necessary and sufficient
condition for justice, in examining one city’s method of working. Plato has a better
argument if Republic 4 is not even pretending to search for justice itself, or for the
necessary and sufficient conditions for all just things. If Socrates is aiming to do no
more than describe one city, and then identify in this particular city where that city’s
virtue is embodied, then there is nothing faulty in the procedure.
So taking this to be the answer to the generic question ‘what is justice?’ from Republic 1
is a misreading.17 Republic 4 provides the answer to a different question, a new question,
set up in Republic 2, at 368d to 369a, when Socrates suggested that he could view the
justice in a soul more easily if he first looked at a single case of justice writ large, in a
city. Creating a city would allow them ‘to see its justice emerging, and its injustice’.18
II.iii That this ought to be a bad answer to the ‘what is justice?’ question,
by Socrates’ own previous standards
In some other dialogues, such as the Euthyphro, Socrates complains when people try
to answer ‘what is it?’ questions by mentioning particular instances or examples of
the relevant virtue.19 Yet here in the Republic Socrates himself is offering a particular
example of the virtue of justice, instantiated in a unique city founded precisely to do just
this, without asking how else justice might be exemplified in other cities or circumstances.
Socrates seems to do just what Euthyphro was ridiculed for doing.
But we can see that his procedure is not open to that ridicule in the Republic, provided
that Socrates designed his city simply to identify its particular virtues: its courage, its
wisdom, and so on. This much is achieved in Republic 4. It does not immediately entitle
him to jump to any conclusions about justice in general, but it is also not the end of his
enquiry. As the dialogue proceeds, Plato shows, with the help of the famous images
of sun, line, and cave, as well as by means of the Republic itself and its ideal city, that
philosophers need to be able to use a particular exemplar as an icon, so as to think not
17
For examples of this misreading, see note 1. Also Burnyeat, ‘Justice writ large and small’ where the
heading on page 213 and the conclusions on page 216 reveal, in what is otherwise an accurate exegesis, that
Burnyeat has missed the distinction that I am sketching here, between defining justice and discovering the
city’s justice, and that he takes the talk about the latter to be talk about the former. By contrast, Rachana
Kamtekar, ‘Ethics and politics in Socrates’ defense of justice’ in Mark L. McPherran (ed.), Plato’s Republic:
a critical guide (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 65–82, 78–9 notes that Socrates investigates
and finds the justice in a city and in a soul (but I think she is probably taking these to be generic, as ‘justice
in cities’, ‘justice in souls’).
18
369a7, τὴν δικαιοσύνην αὐτῆς ἴδοιμεν ἂν γιγνομένην καὶ τὴν ἀδικίαν. Note the possessive αὐτῆς.
19
Euthyphro 6d9–10.
only about it, but also about the form or type it instantiates. In the Republic the reader is
encouraged to do this for herself: to take one well-developed example (the justice in
this city), place it alongside a second example (a case of justice in a soul with three
parts), and ‘rub them together’, so as to get an idea of what justice in general is.20
The investigation works, because—contrary to what Socrates had mistakenly
supposed in the Euthyphro—looking at an instance is a perfectly good way to get a
grasp of what it instantiates. On the other hand, he was certainly right, in the Euthyphro,
that citing an instance is not giving the answer to the abstract ‘what is it?’ question
about the type. This is something that we, as readers of the Republic, need to remember.
It has not often been remembered, and that is what leads scholars into the trap of thinking
that ‘doing one’s own job’ was supposed to define justice in general. When Socrates says
‘we have discovered the justice’ (ἡ δικαιοσύνη) in Text 7.4, he does not mean that we have
discovered what justice is, or the form of justice, or the definition of justice. He means
that we have discovered the justice in the city we have just designed.21
II.iv Ontological interlude: Forms and tropes

In stressing that what Socrates finds is the justice of this city, not justice itself, I have
made use of a distinction between three things, namely (i) justice (the type or Form),
(ii) the justice of the city (an instance or token of the type, a trope), and (iii) the city that
is just (the entity that has or manifests the token property). We know that Plato was
aware of the difference between these things, since he makes these very distinctions
(in regard to tallness) at Phaedo102b8–c5. There we encounter (i) ‘tallness as such’ (the
type or Form), (ii) Simmias’s tallness (an instance or token of the type, a trope), and
(iii) Simmias who is tall (the entity that has or manifests the token property, his tallness).
Simmias is not the same thing as ‘the Tall’, nor is he the same thing as his own tallness,
since he can gain or lose his tallness without ceasing to be Simmias. Simmias himself is
neither a case of tallness nor a case of any of the other properties that he manifests, nor,
I suggest, is he merely a collection of such properties.22 Whatever Simmias is, he is not
the instance of tallness that he happens temporarily to have. That is clear.23
Since there are, in this way, two kinds of plural particulars, namely (i) items like
Simmias, Cebes, Meno, Theaetetus, Athens, Larisa, and Callipolis; and (ii) instances of
20
Republic 435a. See further below.
21
The definite article is universally omitted in English translations. It is often right to omit a definite
article, if the reference is to the type, not the token. But here the reference is to a token (the justice in this
city), so the definite article should be kept. English uses a definite article to mark the contrast between
token and type. Cf. also 433b3–4, Τοῦτο τοίνυν, ἦν δ’ ἐγώ, ὦ φίλε, κινδυνεύει τρόπον τινὰ γιγνόμενον ἡ
δικαιοσύνη εἶναι, τὸ τὰ αὑτοῦ πράττειν (So it’s this, my friend, ‘minding one’s own business’ that turns out
somehow to be the justice, in all likelihood, I said). On the use of γιγνόμενον here cf. Chapter 5, Section V.
22
Pace Wolfgang-Rainer Mann, The Discovery of Things: Aristotle’s categories and their context (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 84–107. For various reasons I doubt that Plato thinks of individuals
as property bundles: for souls at least, I think he treats the individual as a subject of intentional awareness,
or of cognitive states. This is not a thesis I can defend here.
23
There is clearly a notion of ‘Simmias’, about which we could know ‘who Simmias is’ in the same way
as we can know ‘who Meno is’ (Chapter 4), as also with knowing Theaetetus (Chapter 12).
tall, small, beautiful, and so on, which pop in and out of particulars of the first kind,
Plato ends up with a threefold ontology and a threefold system of naming things. On
the one hand there are the Forms (the Just, the Good, the Beautiful, Tallness itself),
which are the proper bearers of the names ‘just’, ‘beautiful’, and so on; second, there
are the token instances of those properties such as the tallness of Simmias, which
borrow the names of the Forms they instantiate; and third, there are individual things
in which they occur, such as Simmias and the imaginary city that Socrates invents. These
too can be described using the names of the forms that they instantiate, so long as they
continue to possess the property in question, so that Simmias is said to ‘be tall’, and the
city is correctly said to ‘be just’. Yet ‘tall’ is not Simmias’s proper name. Socrates calls
this an adopted name (ἐπωνυμία) when Simmias is said to be tall.24 And the word ‘is’
means something very different when we say that Simmias is tall, as opposed to when
we say that he is Simmias.
So we should now be clear that the task initiated in Republic Book 2 is not to give an
account of justice itself, but to refocus the enquiry onto locating a single token of justice,
occurring in one particular city. The question that we answer is ‘What, in this particu-
lar city, is its particular token instance of justice?’ It is a question about a trope, in a
particular. It is not a question about the Form.
III. In Which We Consider How Socrates Is Able

to Move Forward From Identifying the Justice of a
Particular City, to Grasping What Justice Is
Now that we are clear about what exactly Socrates has discovered in Passage A, we can
avoid further mistakes about the status of his analogy between the city and the soul.
Having constructed one exemplary city that instantiates all the virtues, Socrates then
juxtaposes it with an exemplary soul that has the corresponding personal virtues. By
juxtaposing these two examples, we are supposed to generate a fuller understanding of
what justice and the other virtues are in the abstract.
For this to work, we need not imagine that every case of justice in any polis requires a
structure exactly like that of the imaginary city, or that every case of justice in any soul
shares exactly the same aetiology as justice in some corresponding city. Nor should we
assume that Plato means to generalize uncritically from just one case and thereby
obtain a single account of what justice is, that applies to all cases. None of those dodgy
moves is required.
Instead, something different—something much more odd and much more exciting—
is going on. It turns out that by looking at this pretend city, while lucidly aware that it
embodies just one way of being just, we can nevertheless use it (once we have correctly
located the source of its justice) to answer questions about justice as such. We can
Phaedo 102c10, and cf. 103a11–c2.

24
transcend its particularity in some way, and thereby grasp truths about the virtues that
it exemplifies. In this way the iconic method eschews the old Socratic demand for a
single common feature or a unitary definition. That essentialist myth is something that
we are hereby learning to evade. The beauty of the method is that it allows us to see
things that cannot be said, and it thereby explains why Socrates’ interlocutors often
seemed to be quite good at deploying evaluative concepts and virtue terms, even when
they were quite unable to say ‘what it is’ about the concept in question.
III.i That Socrates uses the analogy of rubbing sticks together

to explain his method
At 434c Socrates recapitulates his proposed method of enquiry as he understands it.
The aim is to see justice more clearly by looking at a case of it in something large. To that
end we founded a city with some evident justice and injustice in it. The idea was that by
looking at that enlarged instance first, we would then find it easier to see the justice in a
smaller one. In Text 7.5 Socrates starts on the second part of that plan:
Text 7.5
Socrates: So, let us transfer what emerged for us there, to the individual, and if we
find agreement that will be fine. But if something else seems to be significant in the
individual case, we can bring it back to the city again and test it there, and with luck,
by looking at them side by side and rubbing them together, we shall make justice
appear like lighting a fire by rubbing sticks. And once it has come to light, then we
can get a good hold of it for ourselves.
Glaucon: What you’ve said is in accordance with the method and that is how we
must proceed.
Republic 434e2–435a5
The idea is to locate the justice in the larger one, compare it with the smaller one, and
‘rub the two together’ to make sparks to light the fire. Lighting the fire is a metaphor for
enlightenment, in this case grasping the idea of Justice itself. Presumably the rubbing
together is supposed to bring to light some sense of a pattern or general rule emergent
from the different exemplars: it plainly acknowledges that we cannot expect to find
one definitive feature that is constant.25 Glaucon’s emphatic reply draws attention to
the methodology: ‘What you’ve said is in accordance with the method and that is how
we must proceed.’
The method involves treating each exemplar of justice as iconic. This means that it
can (if used correctly, and ‘rubbed’ against other examples, from other domains) lead
the investigator to grasp the idea of Justice as univocal across domains, despite the fact
that we do not find any single common feature or ‘essence’. As a result, once the rubbing
together has been done, Socrates is entitled to claim (at 444a) that ‘we would not be
Compare Wittgenstein, PI, §67: family resemblances are not causes but symptoms of being in a family.
25
much mistaken’ to think that we have discovered ‘the just person’ and ‘the just state’
and ‘what justice turns out to be’ in these two contexts. That is, by describing a just city,
and a just soul, and finding a particular way of being just in each, we also acquired a
more general understanding of how they both instantiate Justice itself. In fact, we have
now managed to acquire at least an outline grasp, not just of the two tokens, but also of
the type they exemplify.26
III.ii That there are other passages that explain the method
Several further passages in the Republic reinforce these points about the procedure and
what it can achieve. For instance, in Text 7.6, Socrates remarks that the dream has
come true:
Text 7.6
So finally our dream has come true, as we predicted. Some god has seen to it that no
sooner did we start on the founding of our city than we chanced to hit upon an
archetype (arche kai tupon) of justice . . . And that was a kind of image (eidolon) of
justice . . . and it’s for that reason that it’s useful. And in truth, justice is something of
this kind, but it’s not about external practices . . .
Republic IV, 443b–c27
No sooner did we start on the founding of our city, than we hit upon an archetype . . .
Tempting though it might seem, the term arche kai tupon (‘starting point and imprint’)
in Text 7.6 clearly cannot mean the Form of Justice; for we did not hit upon the Form of
Justice at that point. Rather, it must mean that what we found was a single imprint or
stamp (τύπον) from the original, like a print in sealing wax. This imprint of justice
served conveniently as our source (arche) of knowledge of what the seal that stamped it
must be like: a familiar procedure from the use of imprints of seals to demonstrate the
origin of something sealed with the correct image. So the example of justice seen in the
newly founded city was an imprint or eidolon of the type—the original—from which it
is imprinted.28
Similarly, in Republic 5, when Socrates is about to face the so-called ‘third wave’, he
prefaces his new revelations with some reminders to the company (Text 7.7) about the
model they have been using, and how it works as a kind of paradigm for thinking, to
help with finding out what justice is like. It was, he says, not a political blueprint, but an
iconic illustration:
Text 7.7
. . . First we have to remember that we’ve arrived here by looking for what justice is
like, and injustice . . . But if we discover what justice is like, are we going to demand
26
For the idea of an outline grasp, see Chapter 8.
27
From just after Passage B, discussed in Section IV.
28
For the term eidolon see also 532b–c and 586b–c.
that the just man has to be exactly like that and can’t diverge from justice in any way,
but must be the very kind of thing in every respect that justice is? Or shall we be content
if the just man is as close as possible to justice and shares in most of the things that
justice shares in?29—Yes, we’ll be content with that.—So we were enquiring into
what justice itself is like, and asking whether the perfectly just man could exist, and
what he would be like if he did, and similarly for injustice and the most unjust man.
That was in order to use them as a model (paradeigma), so that we could look at
them and see how they fared as regards happiness and the reverse, and that way we’d
reach agreement about ourselves too—that one of us who was as like to them as
possible would fare likewise in gaining the same rewards. We weren’t doing it for the
sake of showing that these things could actually happen.
Republic V 472c–d30
Text 7.7 explains that the unrealistic ‘most just person’ and ‘most unjust person’ are
there to use as a model (paradeigma). This paradeigma is not a Form, but an imagined
case of justice and injustice used for modelling what the just or unjust person would be
like. When Socrates says that the paradigm can’t be realized, he does not mean that it is
too abstract, or too idealized, or that it cannot be instantiated because it is a Form, to
which reality approximates less than perfectly.31 Some readers have taken it in that
way.32 But this will not do. For (i) it would be most odd, then, that he speaks also of a
paradigm of injustice and of the unjust man; and (ii) the question whether the perfectly
just man exists is related, but not identical, to the enquiry into ‘justice’, since both are
mentioned in Text 7.7. For sure, we can imagine a perfectly just man existing, but such
a person would still be a man manifesting the characteristics of justice. He would not
be justice.
Text 7.7 explains that we are using an imaginary particular individual that instantiates
(as all individuals do) both justice and injustice; we are using it as a kind of diagram or
maquette, like a sculptor’s or architect’s model (paradeigma). In my view, the Republic
29
I.e. has some of the same predicates as ‘justice’ has, when justice is treated as a subject of predication (in
saying what justice is like). E.g. if justice is admirable, then the just man too will be admirable: both share
in ‘the admirable’.
30
The repeated expression οἷόν ἐστι (what kind of thing it is or what it is like) is surprising, given that
Socrates usually contrasts knowing the F, what it is with merely what it is like (cf. Chapter 3, Section IV).
Rather than dismiss it as a careless variant for τί ἐστι—which would be odd given the weight attached to
the distinction here and in other dialogues—we should remember that Socrates wanted to discover not just
what justice is, but also whether justice pays (a ‘poion esti’ question). The latter issue is addressed here when
the paradigms of just city and just man illustrate how justice relates to happiness.
31
See note 29.
32
Those who insist that the Republic’s Utopia is ‘not a Form’ sometimes assign it a special status as ‘an
idealized exemplar’. E.g. David Sedley, ‘Philosophy, the forms, and the art of ruling’ in G.R.F. Ferrari (ed.),
The Cambridge Companion to Plato’s Republic (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 256–83, 267.
Burnyeat, ‘Utopia and fantasy’ thinks of it as a paradigm, intelligible model, perfectly just (apparently
equating mind-dependence with intelligibility). Cf. Donald R. Morrison, ‘The utopian character of Plato’s
ideal city’ in G.R.F. Ferrari (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Plato’s Republic (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2007), 232–55, 234–5.
presents a possible particular, just as a drawing of a bridle or a bed might illustrate

no particular bridle or bed, but nevertheless one of the kind. The drawing in words is
as particular and sensible as the diagram in the sand tray that is used by a geometer. We
can make it stand in for an instance of justice in the same way as a geometer would
make the diagram stand in for an instance of circularity. Using the imaginary city or
soul as a maquette helps us to see the shape of what the real thing will be like if it comes
to pass. Socrates creates this maquette to enquire not only into what justice is like (οἷόν
ἐστι) and what a perfectly just man would be like (οἷος ἂν εἴη),33 but also injustice and
the most unjust person too.34 Evidently the model instantiates both, as any man would
(and as a hand-drawn diagram in geometry would instantiate not just circularity but
some failure to be circular too).
Likewise for the ideal city: at 369a we were explicitly told that, as the city developed,
we should see its justice and its injustice developing. Evidently, then, this is not such a
perfect city that it is immune from injustice. It is an ordinary city instantiating both
opposites, albeit the best that they can make. Yet despite the fact that it only approxi-
mates to perfection, it can, nevertheless, serve as an icon to direct our attention to
something more abstract of which it is an imperfect exemplar. This is the same point as
the point about the most just person imaginable that is made in Text 7.7.35
The method is not designed to deliver practical results, but theoretical ones. As
Text 7.7 insists, Socrates is not seeking a blueprint for politics. His aim is to do philo-
sophical work, on the value and rewards of justice. That is why he says, in Text 7.7,
‘That was in order to use them as a model (paradeigma), so that we could look at them
and see how they fared as regards happiness and the reverse . . . We weren’t doing it for
the sake of showing that these things could actually happen.’
III.iii That the ambitions of the method are not to define justice
Once again we can use these enquiries into the iconic method to clarify what kind of
knowledge Socrates might achieve thereby, and dismiss the idea that he expects it
to deliver a definition. If I am right about how the method is supposed to work, as
explained in Section III.ii, Socrates should be able to use it to investigate why the
one-man-one-job system counts as the just-making feature in this city. An analogy
will help to explain why this is so. Imagine that it strikes you that two games, tennis and
badminton, both use racquets and nets. Obviously you cannot immediately conclude
that what makes all games count as games is having racquets and nets, but you might
feel that the use of such things in these two cases has some relevance to making them
count as games. Having noticed those shared features, you can then start to consider
why they seem relevant.
33
472c4, c6. 34 472c6–7.
35
For this motif of ‘approximation’ as a key to Plato’s thinking, I am indebted to Gabriel Richardson
Lear, Happy Lives and the Highest Good: an essay on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
In the same way, when he looks at the inner structures of his imaginary city,36 Socrates
finds an organizational feature that strikes him as explanatory for why the city qualifies
as just. It is not that just any feature will serve, nor will just any similarities between souls
and states be the ones to notice. One cannot infer, from the fact that the distribution of
duties in this city seems to be the relevant thing, that this is what justice is, any more
than we inferred that using racquets and nets is what games are. Rather, we should
say that justice can sometimes take the form of a careful distribution of duties in
accordance with nature, so that the justice of an establishment might sometimes reside
in that organizational feature, and in that case it would be fair to conclude, as Socrates
does in Text 7.4, that we have discovered what makes it just. Socrates reached that
insight by investigating the maquette that was instantiating the virtue that he sought
to understand.
IV. In Which We Consider David Sachs’s Objection,

That There Is a Fallacy of Equating ‘Platonic Justice’
With ‘Vulgar Justice’
Few modern readers are happy with what Socrates finds in Republic 4. Many think that
what matters for justice is good external relations with others, whereas one’s internal
harmony—if it is justice at all—is not the justice that was under discussion at the start
of the enquiry. This complaint was levelled at Plato by David Sachs in a widely cited
article of 1963, in which he argued that the proposed answer misfires, because when
Socrates proves that the person with a well-ordered soul is happy, he is not addressing
the challenge, which was about whether the person who acts justly is happy.37
According to Sachs, the procedure is fallacious, a kind of ignoratio elenchi. The claim
has been persistently repeated and addressed in subsequent literature.38 According to
Sachs, Socrates argues only for the conclusion that someone with ‘platonic justice’
(namely the one-part-one-job feature in the soul) will be happy, but provides nothing
beyond mere assertion to establish that having that feature equates with being an
externally just person (‘vulgar justice’, which was what Thrasymachus and co. were
denigrating as incompatible with the good life);39 so proving that the first brings
happiness does not in itself prove that the latter does. Is Sachs right that there is no
argument or defence offered for why a conclusion about the former is a conclusion
36
On the shift from outward behaviour to inner dispositions, see Section IV.i.
37
David Sachs, ‘A fallacy in Plato’s Republic’, Philosophical Review, 72 (1963), 141–58.
38
The worry is taken up by Gregory Vlastos in a sequence of three successive attempts at refining a
response while retaining the assumption that the project is definition: Gregory Vlastos, ‘The argument in
the Republic that “justice pays” ’, The Journal of Philosophy, 65 (1968), 665–74; Vlastos, ‘Justice and psychic
harmony in the Republic’; and Vlastos, ‘Justice and happiness in the Republic’. A much more successful
response, closer to my own views, can be found in Kamtekar, ‘Ethics and politics in Socrates’ defense of
justice’, 67–72.
39
Sachs, ‘A fallacy in Plato’s Republic’, 154. Sachs attributes the problem and proposed solutions to Plato,
despite attributing the speeches to Socrates.
about the latter? I shall consider two responses, both of which seem to me to show that
Plato has made exactly the right connections.
IV.i That the shift to the inner disposition is already explained

in Adeimantus’s challenge in Book 2
In my view, Sachs has missed or misunderstood some important material in Republic 2,
where Adeimantus shows, with a legitimate argument, that the focus of the enquiry
should be on a person’s inner qualities, rather than their outward behaviour.40 Adeimantus
argues that the behaviour is not what is at issue, because it does not actually constitute
justice. Whatever the outwardly visible actions are, they have become irrelevant to
the question, because they turn out not, after all, to be diagnostic of the just person.
Although Sachs does mention those moves in Republic 2,41 he does not see their
relevance: he continues to insist that outer justice is the persistent topic of enquiry, not
recognizing that a defence of outer justice is, at that point, found to be irrelevant (so,
pace Sachs, it would be fallacious to continue with a defence of vulgar justice, once we
realize that such a defence would be no defence of the value of being a just person, but
only of behaving like one). Not seeing that move for what it was, Sachs continued to
look for some passage proving that inner justice was a necessary condition for outer
justice (since he still thought that Socrates was required to establish that outer justice
pays).42 Yet that is precisely what is denied in that passage, at 366d5–367a1, where
Adeimantus shows that to be a just person is to act so out of justice, and hence one must
investigate whether the inner disposition is worth having. Since outwardly just action
is neither necessary nor sufficient for being a just person, it follows that inner justice is
neither necessary nor sufficient for behaving justly, and it is no good looking at whether
just behaviour gives any advantages, when we want to know whether it is worthwhile
actually being just.
Thus Sachs constructs a problem because he does not see that Republic 2 offers a
valid argument for attending to the inner condition as the locus of value. There is no
equivocation or fallacy here. The vulgar conception has been refined, because outward
show is now seen to be no guarantee of just intent: that is, we precisely do learn, and are
right to learn, that being a just person or city is not a necessary condition for so-called
just behaviour. So the last thing we want is a proof that it is, as Sachs demanded.43
IV.ii Three ways to read the passage about temple-raiding in Republic 4,

of which the third is neither fallacious nor reductionist
Passage B from Republic 4 (quoted below in two pieces) is crucial for understanding
the structure of Plato’s argument. Sachs took this passage to be an unsuccessful attempt
40
Republic 366d5–367a1. See Kamtekar, ‘Ethics and politics in Socrates’ defense of justice’.
41
Sachs, ‘A fallacy in Plato’s Republic’, 147.
42
Sachs, ‘A fallacy in Plato’s Republic’, 152–4.
43
to link vulgar justice to Platonic justice, to save the argument. But he finds there only
assertions and no proof of any connection between the two, or at least nothing strong
enough to mend the deficiency he thought he had found.
In this passage Socrates reminds his companions that people with a just inner
disposition are less likely to be guilty of outward injustices and impieties. He gives a list
of typical immoral actions, such as stealing and robbing temples, and observes that a man
(or city) such as we have described would be unlikely to commit them. The interlocu-
tors agree. People with well-ordered souls would, typically, behave in a moral way.
IV.ii.i Passage B: Republic 442d–443b
Text 7.8
Okay, said I. I trust that we’re equally keen in the case of justice, and we don’t think
that justice is anything else in this case, than what we found it was in the city.
It doesn’t seem any different to me, said he.
Here’s a way that we can make it even more secure in every way, I went on, should
anything be still raising difficulties in our mind. We can bring forward some very
routine cases.
Such as what?
Suppose a person (or state) had suddenly invested some large deposit of money, and
it was a person or a state brought up in the way we’ve just described, would it be
likely, for someone like that, that they’d stolen it? Would anyone suppose that if it
was stolen goods, that was the man who did it, rather than someone else who was
not that kind of person?
No one, he said.
So temple-raiding, stealing, betraying his friends—all these things would be out of
the question for that person.
Quite.
Nor would he be untrustworthy either in matters on oath or in any other kind of
promises.
How could he be?
And no one would be less inclined to fornication, failing to care for his parents, or
lack of religious devotion?
No one at all.
. . .
So will you be looking for something else besides this capacity that delivers people
and cities of this kind to be justice?
Republic 442d–443b44
For the omitted lines, see Text 7.9.

44
It would be a mistake to suppose that the purpose of Text 7.8 is to justify the transfer
of attention to dispositions instead of behaviour, by asserting that virtuous behaviour
supervenes upon virtuous dispositions. As we just saw, the focus on dispositions instead
of behaviour was already established, and indeed required, in Republic 2; there is no
need to repeat it here. The point of Passage B relates to a specific connection, not between
dispositions in general and their outward expressions in behaviour, but between one
particular disposition and the behaviour of the just person. The point is, in other words,
to confirm that this particular organizational principle just identified in both city and
soul, namely ‘one man, one job’, is correctly identified as the justice disposition—that
we have found the soul’s justice and not one of its other virtues. How do we know
that this is the justice one? We know that, on the basis that this particular disposition
correlates in an explanatory way with those particular outward behaviours that count
as just ones, such as being honest and not robbing temples etc.45 The point is not to
show (as Sachs supposed) either a necessary or sufficient connection. Socrates does
not mean that it invariably leads to just behaviour, or that outwardly just behaviour is
invariably due to that disposition. All that is required is to show that in typical cases,
and in all probability, most people with this disposition will be the just ones in practice.
Why do we not need a stronger correlation? Because all we need is to know that we
have found the disposition that we were looking for, namely the one associated with
being just. It is commonly associated with just actions, and is explanatory of the
tendency to act justly in the paradigm case of a person who acts justly out of justice
and not out of pretence. That suffices to show that what they have found in the soul is
the soul’s justice.
So Sachs found the argument in Passage B inadequate because he wanted a proof
of a necessary connection between the inner and the outer justice. For that purpose
he found the general agreement that you would expect correlation rather inadequate,
because it was not a proof, and did not establish the entailment that he thought
was needed.46
Aryeh Kosman attempts to defend the argument in Passage B by reading it in a
different way.47 He suggests that Plato is offering a reductive move: he wants to reduce a
moral virtue (illustrated here by the list of moral attitudes and behaviours in Text 7.8)
to a non-moral structural condition of the soul/city. Kosman argues that this is a
relevant move, since by proving that the moral behaviours are associated with and
reducible to the given structural condition, one can prove that the moral condition is
valuable by proving that the non-moral condition is valuable—for though the moral
one is of no value in itself, it rides upon something worth having.
This does not seem to me to be a sound defence. Indeed it saddles Plato with
another bad argument. It suffers from the fault that besets all reductionist arguments,
45
On the ‘explanatory’ claim, see the discussion of Text 7.9.
46
47
Aryeh Kosman, ‘Justice and virtue: the Republic’s inquiry into proper difference’ in G.R.F. Ferrari
(ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Plato’s Republic (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 116–37,
addressing Sachs on pages 121 and 136.
of eliminating the thing that was to be identified (morality), in the process of reducing
it to something else that lacks the motivational and evaluative aspects that were at issue.
Socrates’ task was to look at the motivational and evaluative disposition, precisely
because of its motivational and evaluative role, and ask about its intrinsic value as a
moral outlook that seems to lead to self-sacrificial giving. Eliminating the thing that he
was looking for (the altruistic drive), or defending altruism on the grounds that it
comes as a neutral consequence, or even a damaging consequence, of something else
that has intrinsic value but is not altruism, is not to show that altruism has value in
itself. So there is no help in trying to avoid fallacy that way.
In my view, there is a third and better way to read Passage B, whereby the argument
comes out both appropriate and successful. In Text 7.8, I omitted one question and
answer, at 443b1 (marked by ellipsis). This bit (Text 7.9) is surely crucial to the conclusion
that Socrates is trying to draw:
Text 7.9
So isn’t the explanation (αἴτιον) of these things (sc. the tendency to just action)
the fact that each of the bits in him does its own thing, with respect to ruling and
being ruled?
443b1
Socrates is explaining the external behaviour by reference to the inner dispositions.
A just person’s tendency to engage consistently in other-regarding actions, such as a
caring for one’s parents, is due to the ordered relation in one’s soul-parts which is
constitutively the well-intentioned, altruistic soul. It is not just a brute fact that this
psychological disposition and that external action regularly occur together. The cor-
relation is explanatory. The psychological disposition (justice in the soul) is a causal
underpinning of manifestly just attitudes and behaviours because that is what it is
to be a well-intentioned, moral individual. So Socrates’ intention, in Passage B, is not to
prove that the internal relation of parts is the same thing as the outward moral behaviour,
or that outwardly altruistic behaviour is to be reduced to an inner non-moral condition
that is not altruistic in motivation, but is simply value-free, or even self-interested in
motivation. On the contrary, Socrates means that the inner condition is the moral one,
is a motivation to choose good actions, and is the topic of conversation: the question
is ‘Why would we want that inner disposition, since it generally leads to altruistic
and self-sacrificial action?’ The outer behaviour is just the typical, but defeasible,
marker for it.
What relation between the inner morality and the external activities would Socrates
have in mind? As we would expect, Socrates says that this ‘is the justice that we were
looking for’ (Republic 444a). He also says that justice is to be found in the inner self,
rather than, or instead of, in the outer praxis (443c9–d1), and that the inner disposition
of parts is the cause or explanation of the altruistic behaviour. It is not that there are
two kinds of justice, the vulgar and the Platonic, as Sachs supposed. It is that there are two
aspects to being just, the inner and the outer. It is in the outer behaviour that we perceive
altruism and good motivations, and we often speak as though that is what the person’s
justice consists in. But that works as an ostensive definition of justice, only because
most of our behaviour, when we behave like that, does spring from the disposition to
be just. Socrates then suggests that the inner orderliness of the soul is the psychological
underpinning of those virtuous choices. So the virtuous behaviour is not the same
thing as the internal order, but one is the manifest result of the other.
At the end of Passage B (in Text 7.8) Socrates implies that what they have found—
which is what they were looking for—is a ‘disposition’ or ‘capacity’ (dunamis) that
delivers people and cities of this type.48 Just as we might look for a psychological explan-
ation for our tendency to prefer round faces or regular features—not just an explanation
in terms of their aesthetic value—so too Socrates looks for a psychological account of
the virtue, that explains our tendency to behave in a certain way and value certain good
things. One could also explain those choices in terms of the inherent value of what one
is choosing—saying that we act justly because we see those actions as good and valuable.
But that would hardly suffice to resolve the initial problem, which was that the chosen
behaviour often appears to be damaging to one’s own wellbeing. So the choices cannot
be explained simply on the basis of rewards to the agent. Socrates is trying to explain
what would make a virtuous person see such things as good and desirable, while others
(who are not virtuous) see them as detrimental. That is why he shifts our attention
from the outward practice of justice to the inner state of the soul, since that is what
explains the difference between how things look to the virtuous person and how they
look to the vicious one.
So in Passage B Socrates is not addressing Sachs’s objection, that he has not answered
the original ‘does it pay?’ question, but is checking his own work, to confirm that he has
correctly answered the question ‘Which inner feature is the inner justice?’ If his answer
is correct, then the search for justice in the person and the state is complete. It follows
that Socrates does not commit the fallacy that Sachs identified, for two reasons. First,
his aim was not to define justice, but to examine a paradigm case, and locate what
aspect of it is properly called justice; so there is no fallacy of defining the wrong thing.
And if Socrates is right that someone whose soul was ordered thus would, by and large,
be likely to manifest moral choices and actions (as he argues in Passage B), and that this
would be because of this psychological condition, the case is made that the relevant
internal structure has been found, and they have not got the wrong virtue.
Can such an answer also address the original question, about whether it pays to be
moral? Having now located moral virtue as an inner state, Socrates clearly means to
suggest that this condition is something that one would choose for its own sake, even if
it brought no other rewards. Yet if this inherently desirable condition also unavoidably
disposes one to act in ways that are damaging to one’s own self-interest, it seems that
one would have reason to choose to be so disposed and also reason not to choose it. But
perhaps the shift to the disposition has also made us aware that the choices that such
48
443b5.
a soul makes are in fact good ones, and one is getting what is good for oneself, not only
because the disposition is desirable, but also because it enables us to see that the choices
made by the moral person are not damaging, but are chosen because they seem and are
indeed good. So by changing the focus to the condition in the soul, and the way in
which it enables the soul to discern what is truly worth doing, because the well-ordered
soul is not disrupted by inappropriate judgements of what is for its own good, we can
dispel the idea that the behaviour that it chooses is detrimental either to oneself or
anyone else. It turns out to be the best way of living with the best chance of perceiving
what is really worth doing. Certainly, we may still be puzzled about how the investigation
of a single exemplar can generate a sufficiently general grasp of ‘what justice is’ to draw
the conclusions about the value of a just soul. We shall return to that puzzle in Chapter 8.
But it is not related to the supposed fallacy that Sachs identified.
V. In Which We Consider the Accusation From

Bernard Williams That the Analogy Between Soul and
State Will Not Support Socrates’ Desired Conclusions
V.i That Williams is assuming (a) that the soul/state comparison is
an analogy and (b) that Plato is pursuing an essentialist agenda
Here we can dispose of another famous worry that continues to dominate discussion
of the Republic. In ‘The analogy of city and soul in Plato’s Republic’ Bernard Williams
found fault with the way that Socrates tries to infer truths about justice in the soul from
observing justice in the state.49 Williams understands Plato to mean that there is an
analogy between the two cases, and he thinks that, for the analogy to work, the two
must share a common characteristic. According to Williams, Plato evidently thinks ‘that
dikaios applies to both cities and men, and that it signifies one characteristic’.50 His support
for this claim is 435b (Text 7.10), which he takes to be a statement of essentialism. He
translates it as follows: ‘So the just man will not differ at all from the just city so far as
the character of justice is concerned, but will be like it’. Here he is using ‘character’ to
translate eidos (form) and ‘like’ is translating homoios (similar). The translation is not
faulty, but it encourages Williams to suppose that Socrates is claiming that both must
share some one characteristic that is not just somehow comparable but exactly alike,
if the city and the soul are both to be called just. He calls this ‘the analogy of meaning’
(by which he seems to mean that justice has an analogous meaning in the two cases,
because the same characteristic is found in both). But if we think of what they share as
being the form of justice, rather than a characteristic that is identical in both, and of the
relation as similarity, not identity, we no longer need to read this text in that essentialist
49
Williams, ‘The analogy of city and soul in Plato’s Republic’. The essay was originally published in 1973.
Page references here are to the reprint in the 2006 collection of essays.
50
Williams, ‘The analogy of city and soul in Plato’s Republic’, 108.
way. There is no implication that we shall find an identical characteristic, but rather
that both instantiate justice, and one is no less than the other a case of justice. We might
translate it thus:
Text 7.10
So the just man and the just city will not differ at all, in respect of the very form of
justice, but will be similar.
435b1–251
Later in his discussion, Williams supplements that essentialist interpretation with a
reductionist one. He seems to suppose that Plato is aiming to reduce the moral property
‘justice’ to a non-moral feature that is identical in both. We shall discuss both moves
in turn.
V.ii That Williams constructs a story of crisis, and attempted, but ineffective,
solution, which is of his own making
Let us start with the first issue, essentialism. Williams reads Plato as an essentialist, but
his objection is not to the essentialism—which he seems to accept—but to what he
takes to be Plato’s chosen answer to what the identical feature of both (or all?) cases of
justice is, which, he thinks, is incoherent. Since he takes Plato to mean that, in general,
all the city’s qualities stem from the qualities of its citizens, it follows that the city’s
justice must stem from having just citizens;52 but then, given the essentialist reading of
Text 7.10, exactly the same criterion would have to apply to the soul too. But that would
be otiose, he suggests, since the city’s quality depends on the quality possessed by indi-
viduals in the collective, so its presence in the individual is already assumed; and also
self-defeating or absurd, since the soul cannot have the feature that makes the state
just, if what makes the state just is the justice in its citizens’ souls. For, says Williams,
the city has just citizens, but the soul does not.
Did Plato ever say that the city was just because of its just citizens? Williams generates
the problem on the basis of 435d–e (Text 7.11).
Text 7.11
There is something we clearly must agree on, which is that we do have in ourselves
the same types and ways of life as there are in the city. The ones in the city couldn’t
have come from anywhere else, after all. For it’d be absurd if someone thought that
there’d be spirit (τὸ θυμοειδὲς) in the cities without it getting there from the individuals,
because they have the same thing that makes them spirited,—as with the population
of Thrace for example or Scythia . . .
Καὶ δίκαιος ἄρα ἀνὴρ δικαίας πόλεως κατ’ αὐτὸ τὸ τῆς δικαιοσύνης εἶδος οὐδὲν διοίσει, ἀλλ’ ὅμοιος ἔσται.
51
Williams, ‘The analogy of city and soul in Plato’s Republic’, 108, citing Republic 435e.
52
Here Socrates is saying that the national characteristics of states are due to the character
of their people. He concludes that Athens’s reputed love of learning reflects its citizens’
love of learning, and the Phoenicians’ reputation for love of money is similar. Williams
perversely infers that, for justice as for these other national characters, what accounts
for the quality in both the larger and the smaller components is always the characteristic
that explains it in the larger version (namely the having of that character in the parts).
Which is perverse, since that is self-evidently impossible, as Williams immediately
observes, because if what explains it in the larger one is its presence in the smaller, that
cannot be what the smaller one has.
It doesn’t seem that Williams realizes how perverse and uncalled-for that interpret-
ation of Text 7.11 is. He concedes far too little when he observes that ‘Plato does not
seem to think that every term which can be applied to both cities and men obeys the
rule of 435e’, citing a counter-example from 419a in Republic 4.53 He then concedes that
the text does not prove that this ‘rule’, that ‘A city is F iff its men are F’, would also apply
where ‘F’ is justice. But how can he even think that it could apply to some terms? The
idea is clearly nonsense. The fact that it would be incoherent, as Williams notes, seems
like a good reason to doubt that it was intended in this way. The claim about national
characteristics at 435e only starts to look like a rule for identifying what makes x and y
both count as F if you have first assumed that the explanatory characteristic for Fness
(where Fness is the same in both) is the same characteristic in both. By contrast, if you
suppose that two different characteristics in different things that are both F are respon-
sible for making each one F (while F means the same in both), then you will not deduce
the incoherent rule that Williams thought he had found in 435e. Certainly Socrates
means to say that for those national characteristics, the nation has them because the
citizens have them. But what the Athenian citizens have is what makes a citizen fond of
learning, and what Athens has is what makes a nation fond of learning, namely having
citizens who are fond of learning. There is no puzzle about the fact that what makes
each count as loving learning is different, or that the character that it gives to each is the
same. Equally, there is no reason to think that what Socrates is stating is a logical rule,
or that it requires that there is a single common feature that is identical in both. In fact,
clearly the feature is not common, but the one is explanatory of the other.
Clearly, then, Text 7.11 provides no textual warrant for the supposed ‘rule’ that
Williams finds there. Williams needs such a rule to generate a problem, so that he can
then explain Plato’s next move as a response to that problem. But there was no such
problem, and it does not help to think of Plato as responding to that imaginary problem.
Williams has created a Plato who wants the city to count as just if and only if its citizens
are just. I do not find this Plato in the texts cited by Williams, not even if we read Plato’s
Socrates as Plato.
Having created this supposed problem for Plato, Williams then responds on Plato’s
behalf. Plato could resolve the difficulty, he suggests, by replacing ‘justice is having just
53
Socrates’ response to Adeimantus’s worry that the Guardians will not be happy.
citizens’ with ‘justice is having just parts’. This is a characteristic that could consistently
belong to both the city and the soul; for the soul does have parts, such as reason, appetite,
and so on. Presumably Williams is thinking that it would be a kindness to Plato to find
a modification that could preserve Plato’s supposed rule (requiring the same explanatory
feature in both), while avoiding the nonsense of a soul made of citizens.54
However, this is no kindness. It just creates a new problem, which Williams proceeds
to ridicule as though Plato were committed to this unsatisfactory ‘solution’ that Williams
has so kindly provided. Now, Williams asks, if the soul too is just because its parts are
just, how are those parts just? Are they too just because their parts are just? Imagining
that Plato would accept this challenge, and want to avoid such a regress, Williams now
puts another reply into Plato’s mouth. He makes Plato abandon that first non-reductive
explanation, where justice in the whole is explained by the justice in the parts, and pro-
pose a different one, about each part doing its own job.55 Still he supposes that Plato
must retain the ‘rule’ that a city is F iff its citizens are F. So Williams offers Plato a new
‘solution’: that what makes them just, in both cases, is that ‘each of the elements does its
own job’ (where the elements are citizens or classes in one case and soul-parts in the
other). Presumably Williams is trying to reconstruct the process of reasoning that led
Plato to make a proposal like that.
Many things in Williams’s approach and exegesis strike me as cavalier and narrow-
minded. For one thing, the order of events in the Republic does not at all match that
sketched by Williams. Socrates identifies the city’s justice as its system for ‘minding
one’s own business’ before presenting what Williams calls ‘the analogy of meaning’, not
as a second resort, while 435e (Text 7.11), whence Williams extracts his ‘rule’, is a trivial
part of an argument about why it is worth looking in the soul to find emotions compar-
able to those in the city. 435e is not making theoretical statements about part–whole
relations.56 Besides, there is really no evidence that Plato ever wanted to say that the
city was just because its citizens were just. As we saw, Text 7.11 was about the character-
istics of ethnic groups, not structured cities. Williams finds it paradoxical that the just
city would not have many just people in it, by the account of psychic justice that Plato
gives; but I doubt that Plato would have been concerned were he to find that his account
delivered that result: arguably none of the citizens in Callipolis has a tripartite soul, so
no citizen in that imaginary state could be just in virtue of well-ordered internal parts.
But most likely, Williams is simply mistaken: I suspect that the epithumetic and
thumoeidic people in the just city are just, in compliance with the principle that reason
rules over other parts, because (like Aristotle’s natural slave) they are governed by an
extended mind, namely the rational class, the philosopher rulers.57 So any paradox
54
Williams, ‘The analogy of city and soul in Plato’s Republic’, 108.
55
Williams, ‘The analogy of city and soul in Plato’s Republic’, 109–10.
56
This part of Williams’s argument is addressed by G.R.F. Ferrari, City and Soul in Plato’s Republic
(Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
57
Justice as defined for a tripartite soul would not work for what appear to be one-part souls in the citizens
in Plato’s thought experiment, or for animals or gods: yet we should surely suppose that there is, for every
here is only skin deep, and the answer is not far to seek (providing you have not endorsed
some dogmatic commitment to essentialism, as Williams seems to have done).
In these considerations I see serious objections to Williams’s hostile reconstruction
of Plato’s project. But my present interest is not those faults in Williams’s exegesis, but
rather the assumptions he invokes in creating the supposed problem. Without these
assumptions the sequence he reconstructs—a sequence of insurmountable difficulties,
followed by failed solutions, leading to more difficulties again—would lack any plausi-
bility. It depends on assuming that Plato was committed to essentialism (the just-making
factor must be the same in both) and reductionism (the common property must be a
non-moral one, on pain of regress).
V.iii That a better interpretation is possible, if we avoid attributing

any essentialist or reductionist moves to Plato
Why should we suppose that Plato thought that there was a single non-moral property
common to all cases of justice? Normally Socrates’ point is just the reverse. How often
he shows, in connection with puzzling moral and aesthetic properties, that there
cannot be any single property that explains why all F things are F, or any property that
invariably counts as F regardless of circumstances. That is what he does in Book 1 of
the Republic, bringing up a counter-example as soon as you think you might have
found a generic property, such as ‘giving back what you owe’.58 Socrates repeatedly
draws attention to the fact that all the examples are incurably prone to contextual
variance. His argument for Forms often involves pointing to the variability and con-
textual relativity of particulars (which are always both F and not-F in some way, even
deserving both descriptions in virtue of just the same feature), whereas the constancy
of the non-sensible form (e.g. the Equal itself which is never both equal and unequal,
and so on) shows that it cannot be equated with any sensible feature.59 Yet Williams
seems to imagine that suddenly, quite out of character, the Socrates in the Republic is
assuming that justice is reducible to a single feature found in all cases, a feature which
invariably makes those things just, regardless of domain or context, and that knowing
what justice is involves finding such a feature. Clearly this will not do: it is highly
implausible as an account of Plato’s ideas about Forms and particulars.
Certainly Socrates does affirm that a city is just in virtue of the very same thing
(justice) as an individual (or soul) that is just. He means that ‘justice’ is univocal across
the two domains. They are not two different virtues misleadingly called by the same
name, but one virtue found unequivocally in both cities and souls. Williams does not
speak of univocity, but he does see that Socrates means to say that ‘justice’ is the same
soul, some way of being just. For a soul that lacked any rational part, justice would not be having your
rational part in autonomous control but might be having someone else give you advice (as with Aristotle’s
‘natural slave’).
58
331c, 331e; see also the counter-examples to ‘do good to friends and harm to enemies’ in the discussion
with Polemarchus (331e–336a).
59
See Phaedo 74b–c for the work on ‘Equality itself ’.
property in both. However, by way of the specious threat of regress that he constructs,
he persuades himself that Socrates means that they must share some other feature
besides their justice—some distinct feature that makes both just, though it is not itself
the form and is not even a moral feature. He therefore supposes that when Socrates
says ‘justice is the same thing in both cases’, he means ‘the very same undisputed non-
moral property occurs in both instances and is what makes that thing count as just’.
This leads him to ascribe to Plato the implausible view that a term such as ‘justice’ is
univocal across analogous cases if and only if the items qualify for the value term in
virtue of one and the same non-evaluative property.60 For myself, I doubt that Socrates
or Plato ever seriously wanted to say that.61
We do not need to read the Republic in that implausible way. It makes more sense if
Socrates means that we can understand how the term ‘justice’ is univocal across cases
only after examining the analogies between them in the right spirit. That justice can
actually be ‘the same form’ in both emerges more as a conclusion than a premise of the
argument.62 There is no reason to suppose that Plato, at this stage in his career, endorses
the quest for a reductive definition.63
Williams’s article has been immensely influential and much cited and anthologized.64
Since it appeared, Plato’s defenders have proffered a myriad responses to deflect the
charges, but their defence generally starts by implicitly accepting the conditions that
Williams imposed, which I have just questioned. So they first accept the essentialist
reductionist project, and then try to argue that it can work, because Plato can identify a
common property that applies in both cases and avoids the problems diagnosed by
Williams.65 My response, by contrast, is to reject the conditions and constraints that
Williams imposed on Plato. Was not Williams himself responsible for that? His com-
plaint cannot get off the ground, if Plato’s task was not the incoherent one that Williams
constructed from his selected sentences. Surely, when Socrates says, in Text 7.10, that it
is the same eidos of justice, he means that they display the same moral property, regardless
of whether it is embodied in exactly the same characteristics. So none of Williams’s
story, about Plato substituting a reductive analysis of justice, as minding one’s own
60
A comparable interpretation is found in Julia Annas, An Introduction to Plato’s Republic (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1981), 72 and 148, who thinks that Socrates assumes univocity across the two
cases, so she accuses him of begging the question.
61
There is a caricature Socrates who demands such an answer in the aporetic stages of some dialogues—
but only to show that there is no such answer.
62
See Kamtekar, ‘Ethics and politics in Socrates’ defense of justice’, 70, endorsing the idea that the list of
examples of justice comes first and guides the quest, and correctly challenging Myles Burnyeat, ‘Examples
in epistemology: Socrates, Theaetetus and G.E. Moore’, Philosophy, 52 (1977), 381–98, but still couching the
quest as aiming at a general definition. But see Kamtekar, ‘Ethics and politics in Socrates’ defense of justice’,
79 for recognition that what Socrates finds is not Justice itself but justice in a city, justice in a soul.
63
Arguably the reductive ambition is found in Glaucon, but not Socrates. Cf. a view like mine in Irwin,
Plato’s Ethics, 200–1, and see my discussion of the Meno in Chapter 4.
64
See Ferrari, City and Soul in Plato’s Republic, 55–7 for an analysis of its influence. Ferrari exposes a
range of errors generated by the widespread acceptance of Williams’s diagnosis, or elements of it, over the
last forty years.
65
See, for example, Kosman, ‘Justice and virtue: the Republic’s inquiry into proper difference’.
business, for a flawed attempt at a non-reductive analysis, in terms of just parts, is

supported by the text, or by reason. Socrates was looking for the justice in his city, and
comparing two examples of justice, noting what feature is associated with justice in
each case. He wanted to rub them together and make sparks fly. The idea that the
analogy serves no role unless there is a common feature, besides justice, has no basis in
the text at all.
Is it even helpful to think of the city–soul analogy as an analogy? Perhaps we should
just note what Socrates says about it: that we look at the justice in something large; we
look at the justice in something small. We hunt for the justice in the larger one. We put
it next to the smaller one. We hope that we can thereby discover what justice is. It
works. It would still work, I imagine, even if there were no very close resemblance
between the way that parts in the soul are disposed and the way that the parts in the city
are disposed, or, indeed, if one of the examples had no parts at all.
Williams was aware of the passage (Text 7.5) about rubbing the two examples
together to make sparks, but he took it as confirmation that Socrates was committed to
‘the analogy of meaning’.66 He read it as expressing confidence that such a procedure
would reveal a single common factor, and that you keep trying until you have found
one. Once again his reading is inhibited because he starts by assuming that the project
is an essentialist one, and that Plato is expecting that a universal finding could emerge
from just two examples. On my reading none of those dubious assumptions is needed,
because it involves a much looser idea of what counts as having the same form of justice,
and a much richer idea of what it means to grasp ‘what justice is’ from examining and
rubbing together these two cases.
VI. Conclusion
It seems that the Republic works better, and is philosophically far more convincing, if
we don’t foist upon Plato the essentialist assumptions that are tried and then abandoned
by his Socrates character in Republic 1. Instead, I claim, this text is displaying the
reasons why Plato rejects that project, and is exploring an alternative way to discover what
justice is, without reducing it to some single common factor, and without reducing the
moral to the non-moral. He thereby enables us to develop a rich understanding of how
a concept like justice can be variously instantiated across different domains, without
equivocation.
Plato’s method for discerning what justice is works by first investigating a particular
exemplar. In the Republic the main exemplar is an imaginary city, designed specifically
for the purpose of making its various virtues manifest.67 It is a mistake to treat the
exemplar, which is a just city, as though it were justice itself, or to conclude that its
brand of justice is justice itself, or that anything else that is just must have identical
See Section V.i.

66
I set aside for a future essay my demonstration of how this technique constitutes a ‘genealogical inquiry’.
67
characteristics to the example given. To treat some instance, or set of instances, of

justice as if they were ‘justice itself ’ is to repeat the mistake made by the ‘lovers of sights
and sounds’, who think that their expertise among the many beauties is a knowledge of
beauty.68 Let us not be similarly seduced by those ‘lovers of just cities’ who have written
about the Republic as though the just city is justice itself,69 or as though locating its justice
is discovering justice itself. Discovering what makes this city a just city for these people
in this place at this time is not discovering justice itself.
How sophisticated Plato’s method is by contrast, if it works by using the exemplar
like a diagram, so that consideration of a mere particular can generate an understanding
of the nature of justice itself, even though justice itself is different from the justice in
this city, and is not always instantiated in precisely that way. The reader becomes aware
of the difference between a single occurrence of justice and the generic type, but can
also move from the particular to a more theoretical understanding of the form. We know
full well that particular things can be just or unjust depending on the circumstances.
Socrates need not be denying that. Yet still, despite all that, Socrates is not wasting his
time when he imagines a strange and wonderful city with strange and wonderful citizens,
and considers what it is in that city that makes it a just city. His strange city and its
strange laws provide a model with which to think about justice as such. And hence
Plato’s profoundly perceptive and subtle ‘iconic method’ works.70
Republic 479d–480a. 69 On this thought see Chapter 6, note 8.

68
This chapter provides a response to Scott, Levels of Argument, 11–26.

70
8
Platonic Method
The Philosopher’s Route to Knowledge
in Plato’s Republic
In this chapter we shall gather and reflect upon the evidence from within the Republic
for how Plato may have thought that his iconic method could work. We begin with
Socrates’ remarks about better and worse methods of enquiry.
I. In Which We Juxtapose Socrates’ Comments About

Short Versus Long Routes and About Outlines Versus
Finished Drawings, to See Why Socrates Is Employing a
Method That Is Not the Best
I.i That Socrates identifies, and follows, a shortcut method of enquiry
that is not good enough for the Guardians, but is enough for now
Twice or three times in the Republic, Socrates distinguishes two alternative ‘roads’ that
one can take, to achieve different levels of understanding of some topic. One route is
longer and more difficult; the other is a shortcut.
Arguably, the first allusion to these alternatives appears at 369a, in Republic 2, when
Socrates first suggests creating an imaginary city as a method for discovering what
justice is. ‘It will be easier’, he says, to examine the larger case first. This implies that
some other way would be harder—such as looking at the smaller item first. Socrates
may also mean that looking at an example (the imaginary city) is easier than trying to
investigate justice as such, in the abstract. The method that Socrates proposed there,
which he then follows throughout the work, may be the same thing that he will later
call the ‘shortcut’.
Then, in Republic 4, two ways, one shorter, one longer, are explicitly mentioned at
435d. This is shortly after the discovery of the city’s justice (433a, Text 7.4), and the
attempt to locate an analogue in the soul (435a–b, Text 7.5).1 Now, Socrates asks
whether the soul might have three parts, like the city, and he then continues thus:
See Chapter 7 for discussion of these moves.

1
platonic method 143
Text 8.1
But let me point out, Glaucon, that—in my view—we shall never manage to grasp
this thing with accuracy, by the methods2 such as we are using now, in these discus-
sions. (For there’s another route, longer and fuller, that leads to that.) But perhaps we
can attain the same standards as our previous statements and earlier enquiries.
435c9–d5
The immediate context for Text 8.1 implies that ‘this thing’, which we shall not grasp
with accuracy, is the tripartition of soul. But by referring to ‘methods we are using now’
and to the standards of our ‘previous statements and earlier enquiries’, Socrates
suggests that the proposed method (call it the ‘shorter route’) is a method used
throughout the enquiry into justice. So we can infer that the less good method is being
used not only for psychology, but for the whole of the earlier discussion.3
Similarly, the next time that Socrates mentions two routes (Text 8.2, 504b, in
Republic 6), he refers not only to the work on the tripartite soul, for which they c ertainly
took the shorter route, as we saw in Text 8.1, but also to the enquiry into the virtues,
and into ‘Being As Such’, about which, Socrates says, the Guardians themselves will
need to have proper knowledge. The Guardians in the ideal state need to take the
longer road, to achieve accurate and complete knowledge, as we shall see.4 Socrates
and his companions, however, require something less demanding for their enquiry:
Text 8.2
We said at some point that to get the finest view of these things would be another
longer and more circuitous route. They’d become totally clear to someone who went
round by that way. But we could still provide expositions of them that accord with
our previous statements. And you said that would suffice. The things we said then
lack somewhat in accuracy, it seems to me. But you’d be in a position to say whether
they were pleasing to you.
504b1–6
So Socrates evidently means that the shortcut is available for all their enquiries, and
that everything so far, and everything they have yet to do, will be done that way.5
I.ii That Socrates never embarks upon the longer way

As the last sentence of Text 8.1 confirms,6 Socrates and Glaucon are not immediately
going to take the longer route that leads to ‘accuracy’ (ἀκριβεία). In fact, every time
2
Etymologically the word μέθοδος (used to mean both ‘method’ and ‘route’ by Socrates in this sentence)
means going along a road.
3
See Chapter 6, note 4. 4 504c–d.
5
A similar conclusion has now been defended by Scott, Levels of Argument, 44–5.
6
435d. Text 8.2 (504b1) references the last sentence of Text 8.1 and confirms this implicature.
Socrates mentions a harder way, it is because he is about to settle for the route that will
not achieve such results.7
There is just one place, in Republic 4, where it is not wholly clear that Socrates is
opting for the shorter way:
Text 8.3
But this other thing it’s definitely hard to know: whether we do the various things
with the very same [bit] or—there being three bits—we do different things with dif-
ferent bits—so we learn with one bit and we get excited with another of the bits in us,
and with some third bit we feel desire for the pleasures relating to nourishment
and reproduction and whatever else is akin to those—or do we do each of those
several things with the whole of the soul, whenever we’re motivated? These will
be the things that are difficult to determine in a way that would meet reason’s
expectations.
436a8–b5
At 436b4–5, Socrates claims that it will be hard to decide (in a way that would meet
reason’s expectations) whether we do things with the whole soul or parts of it. The
wording echoes Text 8.1, a page earlier in the dialogue, which, as we saw, was a prelude
to settling for what is less good. So does Socrates now try to do this difficult thing?
Or does he abandon the attempt? His next move is to say (436b6), ‘Let’s attempt an
answer as follows . . .’ and he then develops his famous proof, using the law of
non-contradiction, that it is impossible to perform two opposed actions in the same
part of oneself simultaneously in relation to the same thing. Here it might initially
seem that Socrates identifies something that is very hard, and then proceeds to attempt
it nonetheless. So is this a case where he does not settle for the second-best method, but
goes for the best? If so, this would be the only place where he does that. But equally,
there is an alternative and plausible reading of Text 8.3 according to which Socrates is
not talking about harder and easier methods, but about harder and easier questions; so
on that reading, he means to answer a harder question, not to take a harder route for
answering it.
We should return to the cases where Socrates clearly settles for the less good method.
In Text 8.2, at 504b, Socrates reminded his interlocutors that, by taking the shorter
road, they had achieved something imperfect. Clearly he himself is not satisfied.
Indeed he rather despises anyone who is content to settle for less than perfection,
including Glaucon and Adeimantus, as is clear from what he says at 504c. But he surely
does not mean that he and they could have taken the longer route, to attain the perfect
and complete result, had they been more aspirational. Their problem is not just a lack
of desire, but a lack of readiness. Glaucon and Adeimantus are clearly not ready for

7
platonic method 145
such a journey. Socrates himself is not prepared: he is not yet where you need to be to
begin the longer road, given what he says about the many components in the prelim
inary training that is required for the Guardians before they begin on serious dialectic.
And evidently, Plato’s readership is quite unprepared for any such expedition.8 This
includes us.
So the longer route is not one that Socrates should take, to do the Republic conversa-
tion properly. It is the one that rulers in the ideal state have to follow. Neither Socrates
nor any of the rest of us is currently trying to be one of those rulers. We are the found-
ers of the city, and for that we only need to know what knowledge is required, and how
it must be acquired, so as to prescribe a suitable education system, but we do not need
the knowledge that they will acquire. The shortcut, which is available to the founders,
is not an option for the Guardians themselves.
I.iii That Socrates takes a route that is third best, in the Sun analogy
If I am right, neither Socrates, nor his interlocutors, nor his listeners when he reports
the conversation, nor Plato’s readers, nor Plato himself as far as we can see: none of
these ever actually takes the long road that the rulers must take, to attain knowledge
of the Good.9 In fact, in Republic 6 and 7 Socrates does not even take the second-best
way, as he had in the earlier enquiry into the city’s virtues. In Text 8.4 Glaucon,
speaking on behalf of himself and Adeimantus, says (sentence ii) that something like
the earlier treatment of justice and sophrosyne would satisfy them, but Socrates
replies (sentence iii) that even that is beyond him.
Text 8.4
(i) Do you want to look at ugly, blind, twisted stuff, when you could hear lucid and
fine things from others?
(ii) Zeus! Don’t give up when we’re almost at the climax, Socrates, said Glaucon. It
will do for us if you deal with the good in the same way as you dealt with justice and
sobriety and the rest.
(iii) That would suit me too, very well. But I won’t be up to it, I’m going to look
stupid if I try, I’ll be a laughing stock. Sorry. But look here, my lucky lads . . . let’s leave
what the Good itself is for now.
(iv) Even getting as far as what seems to me is beyond the scope of the present
expedition, it appears to me. (v) But I do want to talk about what appears to be the
offspring of the Good . . .
506c11–e4
8
Pace Miller, ‘Beginning the “longer way” ’, 310–11, and Rowe, Plato and the Art of Philosophical Writing,
chapter 5 (who thinks that the audience of the Phaedo is treated to it).
9
See G.R.F. Ferrari, ‘The three-part soul’ in G.R.F. Ferrari (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Plato’s
Republic (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 165–201, 166–7.
Obviously the real Guardians would not settle for how the Good merely seems, but
must discover what it is. Socrates envisages in sentence (iv) an inferior level of achieve-
ment, were he to perhaps discover what seems to him about the good, but now he says
that he cannot even do that. So the next moves are not second but third, at best.
Although Socrates speaks as though the second-best method would lead to mere
doxa about how it seems, rather than knowledge of what it is, we should probably be
more optimistic about its achievements. Its inferiority is more in the method whereby
it achieves what it achieves: there clearly is also some sketchiness in what it achieves,
but it evidently does lead to knowledge of ‘justice, what it is’, and not just opinion about
just things. To be sure, it starts from the things that seem to be just, such as sensible
particulars. In the Republic, it starts from a particular city. But that was the start of an
enquiry directed ultimately at a grasp of what justice is in itself.10
In Text 8.4, however, Socrates is denying that he can take even that second route, to
investigate the Good. Instead he says that he will turn to its offspring.11 Presumably he
means to start even further down a scale of epistemic conditions than in the earlier
enquiry into the virtues. But still, Socrates does not imply that by taking this lowly
method we shall fail to attain knowledge in the end, or that we shall reach merely doxa
(like the lovers of sights and sounds).12 As earlier, on the second-best route, so here too
the third route does lead to a kind of knowledge of what it is, despite starting from an
examination not of the Good itself but of its offspring, the Sun.
This is the first of three famous illustrations (Sun, Divided Line, and the Cave). They
provide (we understand) a third-best methodology, because they use images: images
that are more familiar to us, but less direct in conveying the truths of which they are
images. Yet, for all that, they are a useful and effective way to access the truth.
I.iv That the Republic aims at no more detail than is required for
the target question, and that this is what is meant by contrasting
outlines with finished works
Between Texts 8.2 and 8.4, Socrates introduces (in Text 8.5) a contrast between using a
line-drawing and providing a finished work:
Text 8.5
Is there another subject, asked Glaucon, more important than justice and the things
we discussed?
Indeed there is a greater, I said. And actually, even for those, it’s essential [sc. for the
student guardians] not just to stare at line-drawings as now. They mustn’t stop short
of finishing the completed work.
504d4–8
10
See Chapter 7.
11
Socrates is abandoning (for now) ‘the good itself, what it is’ (αὐτὸ μὲν, τί ποτ’ ἐστὶ τἀγαθόν). Even
saying what ‘seems to him’ is impossible. The first locution is like those knowing the F, what it is expressions
that we examined in the Meno (Chapter 4), and is a marker of episteme, as opposed to doxa.
12
Cf. the comments on blind doxa without knowledge at 506c, just before Text 8.4.
platonic method 147
How this contrast, between the sketch and the finished work, relates to the previous
contrast between longer and shorter routes is not immediately clear.13 What is certain
is that Plato means that for his readers, and for the conversation in the Republic, it is not
necessary to finish the picture of justice. To find out whether justice pays, which is a
‘what kind of thing’ (poion esti) question,14 they do not need to secure a complete
answer to the ‘what it is’ question about justice. In marked contrast to the start of this
dialogue, and many other dialogues, Socrates demands only that they discover enough
about justice to ground their answer to the question about its value.15 For now Socrates
recommends just a sketch, good enough for the current enquiry but not for ruling
in practice.
The proposed method for this seems to be the iconic method: that is, describe a city,
look for its justice, rub it together with an individual soul, and abracadabra, you gener-
ate an idea of what justice is in the abstract.16 This will be good enough to generate a
rough outline of what justice is. By using their exemplars iconically, Socrates and his
companions will be getting information about the form and not just about the particu-
lar, and hence they will achieve episteme, albeit somewhat sketchy, and not merely
doxa.17 Nevertheless, there is still an important difference in quality, though not in the
object known, between the knowledge required for ruling and the sketchy knowledge
that is enough for now; but since the object grasped—whether sketchily or com-
pletely—is of the same logical and ontological order, Socrates need not refuse the title
episteme to the sketchy kind. In his Divided Line, Socrates does draw two sections
within what we normally call episteme.18 At one point he seems inclined to withhold
the term episteme from the lower kind (Level 3 of the Line).19 That is in the passage
where he objects to the practice of calling the natural and exact sciences epistemai
(‘sciences’). He withdraws that accolade because of their methodological inferiority to
dialectic, especially their use of visible icons and unconfirmed hypotheses.20 Neverthe
less, I would argue, what they grasp is still the intelligible object, and so similarly when
Socrates uses the imaginary city as an icon of justice, he is using it to grasp truths about
an intelligible object, namely justice itself. And similarly his image of the Sun is to be
used as an icon for grasping truths about the Form of the Good: though in that case the
13
See Sedley, ‘Philosophy, the forms, and the art of ruling’, 269 and Christopher Rowe, ‘The place of the
Republic in Plato’s political thought’ in G.R.F. Ferrari (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Plato’s Republic
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 27–54, 52, arguing that the completed work involves
understanding how the virtues fall under the Good, which is similar to my account (below) of what the
longer road achieves.
14
See Chapter 3, Section IV and Chapter 7, Section I.
15
As we have noted, Socrates is repeatedly forced to abandon the demand for a conclusive answer to
‘what it is’. Cf. the use of the hypothetical method for settling the ‘what is it?’ enquiry in the Meno. See
Chapters 3 and 7.
16
Republic 435a. See Chapter 7.
17
That is, episteme as contrasted with doxa grasps the form (justice, what it is), not a particular that par-
takes of the form, or a proposition about which things are just, what other predicates apply to justice,
whether justice is a virtue, whether it pays etc.
18
511d. Glaucon initially proposes to name these dianoia and nous, and this is endorsed by Socrates at
511d8.
19
533d. 20 See further Section V.
relation between the icon and what it conveys is not one of instantiation, as it was for
justice—it is not by being an instance of goodness that the sun illustrates the Good—
but rather it works by picturing something that plays a comparable role to the Form of
the Good, but in another sphere. When Socrates calls it an offspring (508b12), we
should probably think of how one can deduce what the parent is like from attending to
the manners or features of the child.
II. In Which We Consider the Implications of

505a–506d, Where Socrates Rejects Two Candidate
Definitions of the Good, Indicating a General Problem
for the Definitional Project
After Text 8.5, Socrates introduces a popular dispute about defining the good: the
many, he says, think that pleasure is the good, while the more educated (kompsoteroi)
think that the good is knowledge.
Text 8.6
(i) Socrates: You know, I’m sure, that to the many it’s pleasure that seems to be the
good, and to the more sophisticated, it’s knowledge (phronesis).21
Adeimantus: Certainly.
(ii) Socrates: And that people who think the latter can’t explain what knowledge it
is. Ultimately they’re forced to say that it’s the knowledge of the good!
Adeimantus: Which is absurd.
(iii) Socrates: It certainly is, if while complaining that we didn’t know the good they
then speak as if to people who do know. For they say that it’s knowledge of good, as
though we understood what they’re saying whenever they utter the word ‘good’.
Adeimantus: Too true.
(iv) Socrates: But what about the ones who define good as pleasure? Aren’t they
embroiled in error no less than the others? Aren’t this lot forced to admit that pleas-
ures are evil?
Adeimantus: Extremely!
(v) Socrates: So I think they end up agreeing that goods and evils are the same
things.
505b5–c11
21
The term phronesis has a broad semantic range that overlaps with other knowledge words, including
episteme. It is unclear why Socrates speaks of phronesis rather than episteme or gnosis here. Perhaps the
formula echoes some existing philosophical tradition (Presocratic, Sophists, or contemporary with Plato)
that the reader would recognize.
platonic method 149
This interlude advances the conversation in several ways, but my interest for now is in
the implication that all attempts to define the good end in failure. Socrates inspects
only two definitions, and treats them very briefly, but the faults that he finds are
familiar from the elenchus in other dialogues. The elenchus here is much sketchier
and there is no one to respond on behalf of the proposed definition, but the procedure
is familiar: first, in response to someone who claims that the good is knowledge, you
then ask ‘knowledge of what’, and they say ‘knowledge of the good’,22 so their defin-
ition incorporates the definiendum.23 This is useless, says Socrates, because the defin-
ition was supposed to enlighten people who don’t know what ‘good’ means. And then,
second, the idea that the good is pleasure breaks down, because the many ‘are forced
to agree that pleasures are evil’.24 Socrates does not bother to supply the argument:
presumably he is alluding to a familiar refutation of hedonism. Hence the many ‘agree
that the same things are good and bad’.25 So their definition fares no better than the
knowledge one.
Although this sketchy refutation of two definitions does not show properly that all
definitions must fail, nevertheless we can see a familiar pattern: Socrates looks for a
definition, and swiftly abandons the search as fruitless.
What follows, in the Sun, Line, and Cave, is evidently intended as a substitute, a way
to discover what the Good is without a definition. As we saw, it was identified as merely
a second- or third-best route to knowledge of the Good.26 Certainly it does not provide
a definition, but we should not then infer that the best route would lead to a definition.
Socrates gives no grounds in this passage for thinking that there could be a successful
definition of the Good, in terms of other concepts that are already known and immune
to the problems posed for the two that he considers. On the contrary, the faults that he
finds in those two are systematic: they are symptomatic of a flaw in the definitional
project as such. For instance, the refutation of ‘the good is pleasure’ is based on finding
that pleasure can be both good and bad, probably according to circumstances, context,
cost etc.—but this merely illustrates a general truth, that you cannot reduce a value,
such as good, to something value-neutral—e.g. to pleasure, where pleasure is value-
neutral in itself, and is made good by context or circumstance—for ‘good’ will coin-
cide only with such pleasures as are good—but then the value of those good pleasures
must be explained in terms of their goodness, which it was supposed to explain. More
generally, then, we might conclude that you cannot equate what is valuable in itself
(the good) with anything that derives its value from the value of what it relates to, as
knowledge derives its value from the value of what is known, or pleasure from the
value of what brings the pleasure. This is a conclusion that can be generalized to all
such reductive definitions. There will be no way to reduce the good to any other com-
modity or explain it in value-neutral terms, without importing the unexplained notion
of value at some stage. The examples, sketchy though they are, illustrate a general
505b8, Text 8.6, ii and iii. 23 Text 8.6, iii. Compare Theaetetus 146d–147b.
22
505c8; Text 8.6, iv. 25 505c10; Text 8.6, v. 26 See Section I.iii.
24
problem for defining the good, it seems, due to the irreducibility of the normative to
the descriptive, and the fact that value concepts cannot be explained in terms of any
value-neutral commodities to which they are subjectively or contextually applied. And
besides, it seems patently absurd to think that the trainee philosopher kings might
come to know what the Good is by learning to define it in terms of some other inferior
concepts. Yet defining it in terms of some equally exalted but unknown concept (e.g.
‘The One’) would be equally useless as a way to get to know what it is. Clearly the longer
route would not be designed to deliver a definition of that kind.27
Text 8.6 thus reinforces a message that is becoming familiar, which recurs through-
out Plato’s work. We were surely mistaken if we ever thought that knowledge took
the form of a definition, either for us or for the philosopher kings. The Guardians’
knowledge of the Good cannot take the form of a definition, defining the good in terms
of other things, for there are no other things that could helpfully define it. Instead, it
seems that the best illustration we shall ever get of what that knowledge will be like is
provided in the Sun, Line, and Cave. In those exercises, Socrates shows how iconic
reasoning provides a route to knowledge, by revealing truths about the originals of
which experience shows us mere shadows. As readers of Plato’s Republic, we cannot
take the long route that is prescribed for those intending to become philosopher kings,
but we are doing the short and easy bit that starts us off in that direction. We are taking
a delightful trip into the movie-cave with Socrates, to find out about the Good from
images and shadows. Can that be of any use? Why, yes. For, I suggest, despite what
many have supposed, the Divided Line is set up precisely to show why images lead to
understanding.28
III. In Which We Consider the Role of Icons

in the Divided Line
III.i That the Line is set up to explain why shadows are epistemically
valuable, and informative, for philosophical enquiry
Many commentators assume that the Divided Line is designed to show that reflec-
tions, shadows, paintings, or stories are useless as philosophical tools, or positively
dangerous.29 It seems to me that Plato means exactly the reverse: he is revealing not the
27
See Section V.
28
Since I wrote this, Scott, Levels of Argument, 87–98 has reached a similar conclusion about where
the shorter route fits in the Cave and Line, but without seeing the significance of iterated methods at
successive levels.
29
Exactly what commentators think is not always obvious, since many treat the bottom part of the Line
as barely relevant except as a parallel for the interesting parts at the top of the Line. But see R.C. Cross and
A.D. Woozley, Plato’s Republic: a philosophical commentary (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1964),
222 and J.H. Lesher, ‘The meaning of ‘saphêneia’ in Plato’s Divided Line’ in Mark L. McPherran (ed.), Plato’s
Republic: a critical guide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 171–87, 174.
platonic method 151
poverty of information in shadows and icons, but their value, to explain how they
contribute to effective enquiry into things that are far removed from them in logical
space. It is the continuity of the Line, and the systematic iconic relations between the
successive levels, that enable the lower levels to be informative about the higher ones.
In his exposition of the line, Socrates carefully explains these iconic relations: shadows
serve as icons of the originals, and those originals stand as icons of the Forms that they
instantiate. Each level is endowed with what Plato calls ‘clarity’30 to the extent that it
conveys information about what is next above it.
This principle is explained in Text 8.7.
Text 8.7
You can use the sections to stand for degrees of clarity and unclarity, so that first, in
the section that’s seen, one section will be icons. By icons I mean, firstly, shadows;
then reflections in water and in things that are made out of stuff that is fine grained
and polished and shiny, and all that kind of thing, if you get my meaning.
Republic 509d9–510a3
Many readers think that when Socrates speaks of ‘degrees of clarity and unclarity’, in
Text 8.7, he is claiming that shadows and reflections in shiny materials lack clarity, and
are therefore useless for understanding intelligible forms. These are typically readers
who think that Plato disapproved of imitation and artistic reproductions, and was
inclined to denigrate the sensible world.31 Certainly, Socrates does mean that there is
less clarity at the lower levels than in the higher ones. But that does not count against
supposing that the purpose of the diagram is to recognize that even the shadows have
some clarity, albeit less than the originals.32
Notice how the reflections are described in Text 8.7: the highly polished surfaces,
the smooth water. We know such images well: they shine vividly, displaying the appear-
ance of the items they are reflecting with great clarity. Such reflections are not mislead-
ing, except when the division between the lake and its bank is impossible to see. Mirror
images and shadows can serve as a reliable source of information about real situations:
we can use a periscope or a photograph to acquire information about things not seen
directly, or a shadow to measure a tall pole.33 As long as we are aware which is a reflec-
tion and which is the real thing, we can use shadows and images to acquire good infor-
mation about what they reflect. It is true that the Divided Line does not distinguish the
situation where one mistakes the shadow for real (as in the Cave) from the situation
where one uses it knowingly as an icon. Since the Line diagram makes best sense if its
30
σαφηνεία, Republic 509d9. On the meaning of this term see note 35.
31
See Catherine Osborne, ‘Perceiving particulars and recollecting the Forms in the Phaedo’, Proceedings
of the Aristotelian Society, 95 (1995), 211–33 and Chapter 11, especially Section IV.i.
32
In Republic 7, 533e–534d, Socrates is concerned to prove the inferiority of the icon-users, compared
with dialectic (see Section V). But this need not be the point in Republic 6.
33
Cf. measuring the height of the pyramids by their shadow, attributed to Thales: Diogenes Laertius
1.27, DK11A1.
bottom rung represents the latter kind of cognition, that is the view that I shall defend,
with the consequence that the bottom level of the Cave has no parallel on the Line
(as I suggest below).
At Level 2 of the Divided Line, next up from the shadows, Socrates mentions the
things to which the shadows stand in iconic relation.
Text 8.8
Now let the other part [of the lower section] be what the first one is a likeness of: the
creatures living in our realm, and our plants and all our artefacts.
I’ve done that.
Republic 510a5–7
In making this division, Socrates’ point is clearly to focus on the iconic relation
between the reflections, at Level 1, and the originals, seen directly in Level 2. It is surely
no accident that Socrates listed natural images in his description of Level 1 in Text 8.7.
For these images, intentionality plays no role, and the causal relation facilitates infer-
ences from the shadows to the originals. Text 8.8 (describing Level 2) lists both natural
and artificial objects capable of casting shadows and reflections given the right condi-
tions. These are the objects about which we learn (at one remove) when we use shadows
as informative icons.
Evidently, then, their capacity to convey some degree of clarity about the higher
objects means that such shadows are sometimes worthy of serious attention, at a
certain stage in a person’s philosophical career, or in certain circumstances when a
more direct approach is impossible. This explains why Socrates and his interlocu-
tors, seeking a second- or third-best method for grasping the Good, can turn to these
natural images of it, in the Republic. Socrates turns to the ‘offspring’ of the Good, and
a line drawn in the sand, as visual aids, because he knows that such things are per-
fectly good to think with, for beginners. They work because they are icons of what is
next above.34
So let us read the Line as a chart of clarity, not lack of clarity. Clarity is the directness
and accuracy of the information conveyed. Since the objects at each level stand as icons
to the one next above, even the shadows at the bottom deliver some vicarious clarity
about what is next-but-one above, in the upper part of the Line.
34
Cf. the term εἴκως as a term of approval in Timaeus. On which see Catherine Osborne, ‘Space, time,
shape and direction: creative discourse in the Timaeus’ in Christopher Gill and M.M. McCabe (eds.),
Form and Argument in Late Plato (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 179–212, 186 and n. 20, and the
later, much-cited, Myles Burnyeat, ‘Εἰκὼς Μῦθος’, Rhizai, 2 (2005), 7–29 (reprinted in C. Partenie (ed.),
Plato’s Myths (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009, 167–86)) in which Burnyeat makes the same
point, though he is less clear on how icons provide a route to truth. Also relevant is Jenny Bryan, Likeness
and Likelihood in the Presocratics and Plato (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), and, on
reflections, Sarah Broadie, Nature and Divinity in Plato’s Timaeus (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2012), 63–6.
platonic method 153
III.ii That the same relation, of icon to original, characterizes

the higher levels of the Divided Line, and this explains how the
method in the Republic is supposed to work
The same thing happens, clearly, at each level of the Divided Line. The item which was
previously the reflected original now stands as icon to something else higher up. So just
as we use reflections to learn about sensible objects, so also we can use sensible
objects—real cities or real people, for instance—to learn about abstract things such as
Justice itself. This resembles the way that geometers use visible diagrams, on the basis
that truths apparent in the diagrams are truths about the abstract entities that they
illustrate. The same happens in harmonics where one can test harmonic theories on
instruments that emit audible sounds. These routes to understanding depend upon the
relation between what we see and hear, on the one hand, and the abstractions about
which we are trying to theorize, on the other.
III.iii That we can solve some puzzles about the ratios on the Divided Line,
once we see that the degree of clarity is measured by how direct is the access
to truth provided by that kind of investigation
If the Divided Line explains how valuable images and sensible particulars are for
inquiry, several well-known puzzles about the structure of the Line can be dissolved.
On some conventional readings, the point of the whole passage seems to be to confine
all truth, and all sources of genuine knowledge, to the top section. But then what would
be the point of all the elaborate work that Socrates does, at 534a1–5, on the relative
proportions of the several sections? Socrates hints that yet more could be said on that
(534a8), but evidently all of it, including what he does express, would be pointless if the
lower sections were uniformly devoid of value or clarity. Plainly they do have clarity, in
some degree—in fact, each in their own degree.
But what degree of clarity does each section have? The proportions have generated
some puzzles, such as the fact that the two middle sections turn out equal. Scholars
also wonder what objects feature at Level 3 (dianoia), given that there are four levels on
the Line, but apparently only three kinds of object (Forms, sensible particulars, and
shadows). Is there some fourth kind of object at Level 3 (something intelligible, such
as mathematicals perhaps, that is not the Forms but interesting to geometers)? Or is
Level 3 concerned with one of the existing three kinds of objects, but using them in a
different way?
I think that we can resolve these puzzles, and conclude that no fourth kind of object
is required, once we see that when Socrates speaks of degrees of clarity (sapheneia) he
is referring to how directly the agent is in contact with the relevant Form that is the
original and source of a sequence of iconic reflections all the way down to Level 1.
Socrates’ diagram maps how directly or indirectly we are accessing the truth when we
engage in various types of enquiry, using various types of illustration. Our grasp of
justice, goodness, or whatever is clearer if we are attending to justice itself or goodness
itself directly, and less clear if we rely on whatever inklings of it we can gather from its
distant iconic exemplars.35
Ultimately, the philosopher aims for direct encounter, not the indirect approach via
some shadows. Socrates supposes that direct access is possible, for perfect philosoph
ical minds. But one can, in the absence of that, approximate that clarity by using the
best available icons from lower levels of the Line, because although the sensible exem-
plar is not Justice itself (say), it does manifest justice, albeit with less ‘clarity’. The term
‘truth’ (aletheia) also functions in a rather similar way to ‘clarity’: in each case the Form
has maximum truth and clarity by being the thing itself,36 whereas sensible examples
bear the name derivatively, are not what justice is, are not ‘true justice’. Yet they can be
used as icons to think about justice as such.
Because the clarity in lower sections of the Line depends partly on how far removed
the shadow is from the original, and partly on whether the agent uses it correctly, we
can now understand why the line has four sections, but only three kinds of objects
figure there, and at the same time, we shall understand why the two central sections
are intentionally equal. This equality is not an unwelcome consequence of the pro-
portions, but appropriately marks the fact that we attend to the very same objects at
Levels 2 and 3, and that those objects have equal clarity—because they are at the
same remove from the Form and convey the same degree of truth.37
Let me explain. In the two lower levels of the Divided Line, Socrates distinguishes
between icons, and the originals of which they are icons.38 Let us call the first set ‘shad-
ows’, and the second ‘things’ (of which the shadows are shadows). At Level 1 of the Line
we attend to shadows (using them, as I shall suggest below, as icons for thinking about
things). At Level 2 we attend to things, but just for themselves, without using them as
icons. At Level 3 the soul uses those things, which were originals last time, but now
using them as icons.39 Icons of what, he does not say; but obviously it will be as icons of
that to which they stand as icons, so that we thereby come to think about abstract
entities and forms. So the Line charts a sequence of ascent, from Level 1 where we con-
sider shadows as icons for things, to Level 2 where we consider things as the sensible
objects they are, to Level 3 where we consider things as icons for intelligible objects,
and then Level 4 where we consider intelligible objects in themselves.
Socrates’ listeners initially find all this hard to understand and Socrates has to go
back to clarify Level 3, which he does by referring to the way that geometers use visible
diagrams to investigate the abstractions for which they serve as icon.40 This need not be
the only example that Socrates could have offered. He is surely making a more general
35
For this idea of σαφηνεία (clarity) as ‘directness of encounter’ see Lesher, ‘The meaning of ‘saphêneia’
in Plato’s Divided Line’ (esp. pp. 174, 184).
36
On the idea of truth as primarily a property of things, namely the originals from which representa-
tions and descriptions convey, in an inferior way, some of the truth, see Chapter 2.
37
This is well explained by Danielle S. Allen, Why Plato Wrote (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010),
chapter 3.
38
Republic 510a (Texts 8.7 and 8.8). 39 Republic 510b4 (Text 8.9).
40
510d; Text 8.11.
platonic method 155
point about how, in philosophy and other enquiries, we can use examples to illustrate
abstract ideas, and when we do so, we are treating the things as icons in the way that is
characteristic of Level 3, to think about an object of thought by using an object of the
senses. It is not just in mathematics or science that particulars serve an iconic role.
Socrates implies that we can do this with any and every visible item from Level 2, to
investigate any and every corresponding intelligible idea. Perhaps there are some
Forms that have only incorporeal particulars, but all sensible particulars evidently
exemplify some among the intelligible forms, with the result that all of them can
be so used.
Are we attending to sensible objects or intelligible ones, when we engage in this
iconic thinking at Level 3? As we can now see, that question is ill-conceived. For, evi-
dently, we are thinking about both the sensible object, which serves as icon, and the
intelligible object, to which it stands as icon. Once we see how this works, we can see
that it is explaining Plato’s own methodology. Geometry is but one example; the
Republic itself is another, in its use of the city as a model of justice. So evidently, Level 3
does not add a further set of objects, such as ‘mathematicals’, aside from the threefold
ontology of Forms, things, and shadows. What it adds is not more objects but a differ-
ent way of thinking about sensible objects, which can serve to model the intelligibles,
where intelligibles includes both mathematical entities and other forms.41 We think
with sensible particulars, about abstract forms.42
III.iv That there is a missing section at the bottom of the Divided Line
Iconic thinking also occurs at the bottom of the line, since (as we saw) we use mirrors
to discover things we can’t see.43 Probably we should translate eikasia (the term that
Socrates applies to Level 1) as ‘illustration’ or ‘dealing in likenesses’ to capture the idea
that, when it is done in full awareness, this can yield knowledge of what the shadows
illustrate.44 But there is also a non-iconic way of looking at shadows, treating them as if
they were real. Arguably Socrates should have added a further section to the Line,
below the one we have called Level 1. At Level 0, people attend to mere shadows and
take them for real—as if they were not cast by something else but were reality, as it is.
The first stage of the Cave, where the prisoners take the shadows for real, suggests that
41
Thus we can concede that the intelligible world includes mathematical objects (and that those may
have some special characteristics that differ from other Forms). But Socrates need not be meaning to say
anything about that issue here.
42
I have focused on the route upwards, when icons are used to discover things about the form (cf.
Phaedo 74b). Republic 511b (Text 8.12) indicates that they are also used on the way down to explain one’s
results—and on this see Section V and Hugh Benson, ‘Plato’s philosophical method in the Republic: the
Divided Line (510b–511d)’ in Mark L. McPherran (ed.), Plato’s Republic: A Critical Guide (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2010), 188–208, 196. See also Broadie, Nature and Divinity in Plato’s Timaeus,
ch. 3 for insightful remarks on the use of intelligible paradigms to explain the sensible cosmos.
43
See Section III.i.
44
On the meaning of eikos words see note 34. Oddly, Annas, An Introduction to Plato’s Republic, 248,
250 suggests that we normally make no use of images and shadows in serious enquiry and this section of
the Line is vacuous.
such an attitude is not just possible but normal (e.g. in those in thrall to the media
and rhetoric).
So a complete list of the stages on the Line, if it included that lowest grade, would
comprise: (a) taking shadows for real; (b) using shadows to discover the truth about
the things which cast them; (c) taking the things for real; (d) using the things to dis-
cover the truth about the ideas that they illustrate; and (e) investigating those ideas in
themselves, taken as what is real. There are two stages at which iconic thinking is
clearly used: in treating shadows as the means for discovering things (stage b), and in
treating things as the means for discovering forms and ideas (stage d). In each of the
other three stages, the mind investigates just what it encounters, and does not try to
infer anything about an original to which it stands as icon, though we shall have reason
to consider a possible correction to this scheme shortly, if the Forms can serve as icons
for something higher, in Level 4.45
So the two sections in the middle of the Divided Line should indeed be equal to indi-
cate that they use objects with the same degree of clarity. Yet someone attending to those
objects at Level 2 is in a very different epistemic state from someone attending to them
at Level 3. At Level 2 one has pistis, which presumably means trusting that it is as it
seems to be. At Level 3 one has dianoia, because one sees the beautiful thing (say) as
pointing beyond itself, to something else, namely beauty itself, which is the step that
(in Republic 5, 476d–480a) the lovers of sights and sounds are unable to make. They are
the ones who are stuck with pistis, not realizing that these beautiful things are not the
Beautiful itself. By contrast, reflective thinkers should be able to move beyond mere doxa
to the iconic thinking of Level 3, and the best will rise beyond using sensible icons at all.
IV. In Which We Consider What Is Meant by

the Talk of ‘Hypotheses’ in the Divided Line
IV.i That the hypotheses (or ‘posits’) are entities, not axioms
There is another reason why Level 3 is inferior to Level 4 besides the use of visible
icons, namely that thinkers at Level 3 are obliged to use ‘hypotheses’, and they treat
their hypotheses in a different way from the way that philosophers at Level 4 use
them.46 What are these ‘hypotheses’? And what do they do with them at Levels 3 and 4
respectively? These questions have exercised many scholars, partly because they
matter for understanding the Republic itself, and partly because Socrates mentions
hypotheses in other dialogues (particularly Meno and Phaedo),47 and there is an
issue as to whether all these references belong to a single coherent theory. My view is
that although Socrates is always alluding to practices in geometry when he talks of
hypotheses, there are, nevertheless, two different kinds of item that can be posited, and
these ones in the Republic are not propositional.
45
See Section IV.iv. 510b–c.
46
On the Meno, see Chapter 4.
47
platonic method 157
Let us look first at Republic 510b2–9:

Text 8.9
Now consider the section of the intelligible, how that’s to be cut.
How?
This way: in one part of it the soul is obliged to use as icons the things that in the earl-
ier section were the originals, and to make its enquiry from posits, proceeding not to
the source but to the conclusion; in the other part, by contrast, by proceeding from
the posit to the unposited source,48 and without the icons that the other method
used,49 it makes its progress (methodos) with the forms—just the forms in and
through themselves.
I haven’t adequately got my head round what you’re saying there, he said.
510b2–9
I translate hupothesis in Text 8.9 as ‘posit’, because it seems to me that what is posited
here is an abstract type such as the odd, the even, three kinds of angle, the square, the
diagonal, and so on.50 Here is the relevant text (510c–d):
Text 8.10
Socrates: For I think you know that people who get involved in geometry and arith-
metic and other such things posit the odd and the even and the shapes and three
kinds of angles and other related things in respect of each mathematical discipline,
and these they first make into posits for themselves, on the basis that they know
them even though they do not think it worthwhile to give any justification for them
either to themselves or to others, on the basis that they are evident to all. But starting
from these posits, and working through the remaining steps without further ado,
they end up by consensus at what they set out to investigate.51
510c2–d3
In Text 8.10, Socrates says that the geometers ‘posit’ these abstractions. Then (in Text
8.11) he notes that these are what they work on, when they do their calculations:
Text 8.11
Socrates: Well you know also that they make use of the type of things that are seen,
and they make their calculations about those, though they are not thinking about
48
Text Slings, but with comma after ἰοῦσα not εἰκόνων.
49
Reading ἄνευ ὧνπερ ἐκεῖνο εἰκόνων (without the images that that earlier one …); see Adam, Republic
ad loc.
50
Contrast Meno 86e, where the hypothesis was a propositional claim, ‘that virtue is a kind of know-
ledge’. See Chapter 4.
51
I have translated ὁμολογουμένως ‘by consensus’, but ‘by coherence’ may be better, if Plato means that
results are adopted where they cohere, not that researchers conspire to settle on arbitrary shared beliefs.
An even more innocuous alternative is ‘arguably’, to indicate general acceptance that this is what they do,
but this seems less plausible in the light of Text 8.14 where Socrates says (533c) that geometry and other
‘sciences’ work as if in a dream, since all they have is ‘agreement’ (ὁμολογία) and are unable to give a logos.
these but about those other ones of which these are icons. It’s for the sake of the
square as such and its diagonal that they are making their calculations, not for the
sake of this one that they’ve drawn—and the other things similarly: these things that
they make and draw, which are things which have shadows and reflections in water,
these are what they use as icons, trying to see the other things one cannot see but
by the intellect.
True, he said.
Now, I was saying that this type of thing is “intelligible”,52 but the soul is obliged to
use posits in relation to the investigation of it, not going to the source, due to the fact
that it cannot get out above its posits, but using as icons those things that are them-
selves iconed by what is in the lower section, and which are relatively highly regarded
and honoured relative to them, as being plain to see.
510d5–511a9
These posits are clearly not propositions or axioms composed of propositions. They
are the items to which axioms would refer (e.g. a certain square, or the right-angled
triangle ABC, or perhaps quadrangles in general, right-angled triangles as such).
Geometers use diagrams to draw conclusions about these abstractions. Their con-
clusions might be propositions about lines on their diagram (that this line is twice as
long as that line, for instance), but the posits—what they are actually thinking
about—are the abstract objects that those lines and angles on the diagram stand
for. Because those are lines and angles, not propositions, I call them ‘posits’, not
‘hypotheses’.
Yet there are also posits in the upper section:
Text 8.12
Socrates: Well now you’re to get the idea that I’m saying that the other section of the
intelligible is that which reason itself gets hold of, by the power of dialectic, when it
makes its posits not into sources but really things that are set down below, like rungs
and steps, so that by proceeding right as far as the source of everything, and getting
hold of it, and then grasping the things that depend upon that, in this way it climbs
down to the concluding point, making no use of anything perceptible at all, but by
the Forms themselves, through themselves, towards themselves, it also ends up
at Forms.
I’m not understanding this sufficiently, he said. For you seem to me to be talking of a
marathon task. What I have understood is that you want to mark off what is seen in
the dialectical science of intelligible reality as being clearer than what is seen in the
so-called arts, in which posits serve as sources, and where the scientists don’t seem
to you to achieve discernment of them, even though they are forced to look at them
The reference is probably to 510b4–6.

52
platonic method 159
with the intellect, not the senses, because they investigate from posits without going
up to the source—although they are intelligible and they have a source.
511b2–d253
At Level 4, as described in Text 8.12, using posits is not a fault. Indeed the recom-
mended procedure precisely involves using posits as posits.54 Presumably these are the
same posits as at Level 3. At both Levels we must have once posited these by iconic
thinking, by starting from a sensible particular and positing an intelligible entity as the
archetype of the relevant property, as in Socrates’ own deployment of the iconic
method in the Republic, which encourages us to flip from looking at the particularity
of an imaginary city with its particular kind of justice, to thinking about justice itself.
So ‘justice itself ’ when it occurs in this enquiry is a posit, I suggest. We have been working
all this time at Level 3 of the Divided Line.
IV.ii What it means to treat the posits as sources, at Level 3 of the Line
If we operate merely at Level 3, however, we are constrained at this point, because all
we end up with is consistency, as we saw in Text 8.10. Similarly, if Socrates and his
friends merely posit an idea of justice, using the iconic method,55 all they can do is take
that posit for granted, and use it to answer their question. There may be nothing wrong
with it. Perhaps they are indeed thinking of justice itself, as the geometer is thinking
about triangles as such. In that case the conclusions about whether justice pays will be
well founded and true, because their idea of justice is obtained from a good icon. When
Socrates says that people at Level 3 treat the posit as a source (arche), he probably
means that the posit serves as the source of authority for the answers. It is what you
would bring someone else to see, if you wanted to explain your reasons. At Level 3, the
iconic method enables us to posit an archetype for each type of thing or property: we
see what justice is or what equality is, and we can use that to justify our answers; but
we cannot ask any further question to confirm the basis on which our answers are
founded. We can test for consistency with our other commitments, but that is it.
IV.iii What happens at Level 4 of the Line, when we no longer

appeal to posits as sources
What, then, does dialectic do? Apparently, according to Text 8.12, it changes the
posits from being the final source to serving as steps and rungs.56 What this means is
notoriously fraught,57 and aggravated by a change in tone in Republic 7, which is more
53
Slings brackets the last clause. I have translated it as factual, but it could be counter-factual (if they had
the source, not just posits, these would be properly grasped).
54
511b4. 55 See Republic 443c4.
56
Alternatively, ‘encroachments and forays’, 511b5 (quoted in context in Text 8.12).
57
The classic treatment in Robinson, Plato’s Earlier Dialectic has hardly been rivalled, let alone bettered,
in the succeeding seventy years. See also Cross and Woozley, Plato’s Republic, chapter 10; C.D.C. Reeve,
dismissive of the use of posits than Republic 6 had been.58 Besides, Socrates cannot
explain precisely what dialectic does, since the whole of Level 4 and its methods lie
beyond his experience.59 He knows that there must be further work to do, that one
must access a genuine source of authority, not just something that we treat as though it
were one; and that in moving to Level 4, philosophers will do something to change the
status of their posits—something which was described in Text 8.12 as ‘using them as
rungs or steps’, but is now described in Text 8.13 (from Republic 7), as ‘lifting’ or
removing the posits:
Text 8.13
So dialectic is the only method, I said, that proceeds by lifting the posits, all the way
up to the source, so as to secure them, and it verily drags the eye of the soul out of the
barbaric bog into which it was well dug …
533c8–d2
Whereas Text 8.12 had suggested that in dialectic we give up treating our posits as
sources (archai), and treat them instead as mere posits, standing in need of explanation
or justification, Text 8.13 suggests either that we remove them, as if taking up the step-
ping stones after going over them, or else that we lift each step before mounting it, to
check its foundations and make it fit to walk on. If the point is to discard them, then the
procedure is reminiscent of discarding the things you once loved, on the Symposium’s
ladder of love—at least on one rather uncharitable reading of that;60 but the other idea,
of shoring up the rungs so that the ascent is more secure, would belong with the idea
that the posits must be duly confirmed as truths, and thereby cease to be mere posits.
Either way, the Line describes a hierarchy of epistemic and explanatory dependence.
At Level 3, while the posits serve as archai, they are the final support for any claims we
make about particular triangles, cases of justice, or whatever. But at Level 4, those
posits are not the ultimate source of authority, but are themselves explicable, in the
light of something else. At Level 4, the dialectician may still cite the Forms of justice,
equal, right angle etc. to justify some claim, but that is not the end of it. She must now
also explain the very things that were formerly the end of her explanations.
IV.iv That even at Level 4, the dialectician may use an iconic method
Do icons still play any role at Level 4 of the Divided Line? Two answers seem plausible:
‘yes’ and ‘no’.
Let us take ‘no’ first. If icons are by definition visible or sensible examples, then the
dialectician at Level 4, who deals wholly with forms and uses nothing perceptible,61 no
longer uses icons.
Philosopher-Kings: the argument of Plato’s Republic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Universty Press, 1988) and
many others.
See Texts 8.13 and 8.14.
58
See 533a. 60 Plato Symposium 210a–d.
59
511c1–2 (in Text 8.12).

61
platonic method 161
But perhaps the answer should be ‘yes’ instead. Perhaps the dialectician can use
intelligible things as icons, such as the types, forms, and mathematical concepts
that were posits in the previous round, and thereby step up to a higher level of
explanation.
This second answer is clearly better than the ‘no’ answer. For instead of leaving us in
the dark about how anyone can go on beyond Level 3, it simply applies the same
method over again. At each stage, including Level 4, the investigator uses what she now
sees (or, in this case, knows) as a prompt to think about the next ontological layer,
enjoying the ever greater clarity of the icons (where clarity, as we saw, is a measure of
how directly and perspicuously the item illustrates what it illustrates, with the culmin-
ating standard set by actually being the object in question).62
Surely a key pattern in the Divided Line is the way that each Level uses the results
of the previous one to move up iconically to something yet clearer. It makes good
sense, then, that Level 4 does the same again. Just as real trees would explain a reflec-
tion of trees, so the forms explain our impressions of justice or equality, and then
those very forms turn out to be shadows of some further original. That further ori-
ginal should eventually supply the explanation for why the forms are as they are, and
thereby ground the truths we found all the way up the ladder, from the first time that
we saw shadows and thought about what was casting them. For even the shadows,
distant though they are, do derive such truth as they have from the unbroken succes-
sion of iconic relations that stand between them and the very top, the genuine ori-
ginal, where reality is grounded. The continuous Line from bottom to top implies a
continuous cascade of clarity and truth. Even the prisoners discussing the shadows
in the Cave, who think that their words refer to what they see, can’t help but refer to
the Forms.63 Much of what they say will actually be true, about the forms to which
they are (despite everything) alluding.64 The iconic relation of the shadows to things,
and things to forms, ensures that these folk, nattering away in their ignorance, are
actually saying true things about realities whose very existence they would vehe-
mently deny.
So the ‘yes’ answer makes satisfying sense of the iconic ladder in the Divided Line.
It is also confirmed in the third famous image of the Cave. This story also illustrates the
philosopher’s progress towards insight, and again its theme is the iconic relation
between successive stages of the ascent out of the Cave. Shadow displays on the cave
wall are iconic of puppets, which are themselves iconic of items in the world outside
the cave. In the world outside, shadows and reflections are iconic of the things that
cast the shadows. And the fire in the cave stands to those shadows and puppets as the
sun in the outside world stands to what it illuminates, casting shadows for the newly
escaped prisoner to test his bedazzled intellectual eye upon. The sequence of icon upon
62
Compare Heidegger’s notion of truth as ‘unconcealment’, briefly discussed in Chapter 2.
63
Republic 515b5. I thank Tony Gash for impressing upon me the significance of this claim.
64
515c2.
icon is hardly accidental. And yet even outside the cave, within the world discerned by
the intellect, there is clearly an iconic relation between the reflections and shadows,
and the originals seen directly under the sun.
One thing seems clear. According to the Cave, even in the intelligible world we pro-
gress from shadows that are easier to see to things that are both brighter and more dif-
ficult to see. The iconic relation between these prompts us to realize that the other
exists, and to gather courage, to turn the eye upwards. Eventually, we realize that there
could be no shadows at all if there were not some analogue of light—namely truth and
being—to cast them, leading us to posit the existence of an ultimate source of truth.
This explains at least what inspires us to investigate that ultimate source, but perhaps it
also explains how we come to understand it, by working from shadows to the real
things and from real things to the light that is their cause.
IV.v That the content of knowledge at all levels of the Line is perceptual
or quasi-visual and conceptual, and never propositional
I would suggest, therefore, that Level 4 of the Line probably operates with icons, though
they are no longer perceptible or concrete particulars; they are intelligibles, which in
turn illustrate further intelligibles. Icons need not be visual; they can also be concep-
tual. At no stage are these icons replaced by linguistic or propositional claims. The
grasp of ‘equality as such’ cannot be a grasp of a proposition, since it is an inexhaustible
source of explanation, which enables us to form an indefinite range of true proposi-
tions about equal things, no finite set of which would ever give a complete account of it.
Our ability to offer some indefinite number of true propositions based on our grasp of
‘equality’ gives evidence of a rich grasp of what equality is that outstrips any list of pro-
positions or propositional science.65
We can safely conclude, I think, that Socrates no longer thinks of ‘knowing’ as
the ability to give a definition, in these central books of the Republic, nor is he
supposing that what one knows is a logos or definition in words. That was the view
that was on display in Republic 1, but it is now replaced with a vision of the world
as imbued all the way down with successively more shadowy conceptual content,
mediated in all the lower levels by perceptible icons. As a result, pointing to ordinary
perceptibles, which was once dismissed as a useless way to answer the ‘what is
Fness?’ question, has now become a perfectly legitimate route—in fact the route—
to acquiring a genuine knowledge of the forms, all the way up to the Form of
the Good.
65
Here I disagree with Fine, ‘Knowledge and logos in the Theaetetus’, 225–6 who (despite granting that
Plato is concerned with knowledge of things, not knowing ‘that p is true’) holds that ‘knowledge of things,
for Plato, is description-dependent, not description-independent’. Fine holds that knowing something like
justice is knowing certain specific propositions to be true of it, and specifically an exact logos that defines
it. See further Section V on the idea of giving a logos.
platonic method 163
V. In Which We Consider Whether Socrates

Still Thinks That a Person Who Knows Must
Be Able to Give a Logos of What She Knows
V.i That the effect of knowledge is to make a person capable of
giving an explanation, even if the knowledge does not consist of
propositions or definitions
I have argued that the knowledge illustrated by the Divided Line does not consist of a
definition, proposition, or logos. Is this compatible with what Socrates says in Republic 7?
In Text 8.14, for example, Socrates claims that the geometers and scientists at Level 3
of the line are unable to give an account (logos) of their agreed posits. This is a fault,
it seems.
Text 8.14
But the rest [sc. of the sciences] which we said get hold of something of reality—
geometry and others that go by that route—we see that they are dreaming about
reality and are unable to see it with open eyes, so long as they are using posits and
leaving these as immovable, not being able to give an account of them (λόγον
διδόναι). Where one’s beginning is something one does not know, and one’s end
point and the things between are woven of stuff one does not know, what wizardry
could ever turn that kind of agreement into knowledge?
533b5–c3
In this text, Gail Fine finds support for the principle that she calls ‘KL’ (‘knowledge
requires a logos’), a principle which she holds is implicit in Republic 5, and explicit in
Books 6 to 7.66 She supports this idea by assimilating the remarks in Text 8.14 to the
idea found in the Meno that knowledge is secured by aitias logismos.67 However, we
should notice that Text 8.14 never says that one acquires knowledge by acquiring a
logos, or that what is known is a logos. It says that once one knows something one can
give a logos of it, whereas previously, when it was a mere posit used as if it were an arche,
one could not give a logos. For sure, operating at Level 3 correlates with being unable to
give a logos, while operating at Level 4 correlates with being able to do so, but it does
not say what causes this correlation. The ability to give a logos could arise because you
are at Level 4, without being the reason why you are at Level 4. The text gives no justifi-
cation for thinking that what you know, at Level 4, is a logos, or that to know is to know
the logos that (qua knower) you are able to give. If what you know serves as a resource,
66
Gail Fine, ‘Knowledge and belief in Republic V–VII’ in Stephen Everson (ed.), Epistemology (Companions
to Ancient Thought vol. 1; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 85–115; Fine, ‘Introduction’, 13;
Fine, ‘Knowledge and logos in the Theaetetus’, 228. For discussion of the fate of this idea in the Theaetetus
see Part IV.
67
Meno 98a (Text 5.7). In Chapter 5, Sections III.v and III.vi, I argued that the known item is something
else, not the item for which an explanation is given.
upon which one must draw to derive explanations and verbal descriptions of what is
known, then we should not identify the logos with the knowledge but treat it as deriva-
tive, dependent upon knowledge. In which case it would be incorrect to infer that
thinkers at Level 4 can give a logos because what they know is a logos, or that coming
to know the F consists in learning to present a logos for the F. Some such causal
connections seem to be presupposed by Gail Fine, who concludes that knowledge
(knowledge that p) is based on knowledge (knowledge of the justification, q).68 In
my view, the dependence should be the other way: the dialectician can give a logos
of F because she knows the F, but not vice versa. Knowing what beauty is provides the
resource (arche) from which we draw all our explanations about beautiful things: an
explanation for why this poem counts as beautiful, or why one would choose a beautiful
poem over an ugly one, would be one that draws upon what I know about beauty.
Fine’s assumptions about the explanatory order of knowing and giving a logos seem
back to front, if she really means that knowing depends upon having an account,
rather than the reverse.
V.ii A counter-argument and my response

On the other hand, Fine might respond that it is clear from the context that Socrates
means that certain things were formerly mere posits and then become genuinely
known, or known in a superior way, by being grounded on something else, which pro-
vides a justification for what had formerly been held without justification. This encour-
ages Fine to posit the explanatory priority of the logos, assuming that the required
grounding must be a logos. She therefore attributes to Plato the view that S counts as
knowing that p when S knows q, where q is the logos that justifies p, all of these items
being propositions.69
In response, let us grant that Socrates is interested in how the epistemic status of
items is transformed from posited, but unexplained, at Level 3, to justified at Level 4.
Plato thinks that this transformation comes when we realize that our posits stand in
need of justification, and redirect our attention to what can provide that. What we need
then is (ideally) an unposited source or original, an ultimate arche, which would
explain all the items below.
An example might help. Remember the lovers of sights and sounds of Republic 5.
They seem to be stuck at Level 2, since they take the things they see—poems, plays, and
spectacles—to be what beauty is.70 They treat the plays and the beautiful features in
them not as icons but as originals. Once we rise to Level 3, with Socrates and his
friends, we find this inadequate. Now we posit ‘Beauty itself ’ to be the original of
which the poet’s well-turned phrase or rousing metre are icons; we say that the poetry
68
Fine, ‘Introduction’. See Section V.ii.
69
My exposition in terms of p and q is intended to do justice to Fine: I do not myself think that any of
the known items are propositions. See Chapter 1.
70
Republic 475d–476b.
platonic method 165
is beautiful because it partakes of Beauty. We appeal to the Beautiful in our account of

the beautiful things, but we give no explanation for Beauty itself.71
Now, says Socrates, Level 3 is not enough. It must be possible to reach beyond the
Beautiful itself and discover the source of its truth and being. Now our question is not
about beautiful things, but about Beauty as such, and we search for something that
stands to it as it stands to the many beautiful things. That further thing will be our new
stopping point for explanation. What needs explanation seems to be its intelligibility,
its goodness, its reality or truth, to judge by what Socrates says in comparing the Good
to the sun.72 Such things must be explained by reference to something that could be a
source of such things; but the Beautiful is not itself the source of its own goodness and
intelligibility. To give an account of it we have to discover what makes it intelligible,
real, and true, which means that we must discover the true source of being.
It follows that, in giving an account, we explain something (beauty, say, or a beauti-
ful thing) by reference to the source or original to which it stands in iconic relation. We
do not explain the original, but we refer to the original to explain the icon. A dialect
ician at Level 4 does not give an account of the explanatory source but of what it
explains. Perhaps there is no account to be given of the ultimate source of all truth, but
an account can be given of what derives truth from that source, by reference to that
source.73 So it seems fair to conclude with some confidence that when we can give an
account of what we know, what we know is the item explained by our account, and the
account (which appeals to something else beyond that is the arche) gives evidence that
we know the icon and can explain it by reference to the original.
To explain something that is merely an icon, we must come to understand it in rela-
tion to the original of which it is a shadow. This provides a better grasp of its status as
icon and of how good an exemplar it is, and an account of why it bears the other’s name
derivatively. At each Level, we have greater clarity about the item once we have dis
covered its immediately prior original and are not seduced into thinking that we have
reached the real thing when we have only a token or exemplar. The Divided Line
explains why we can always use the token cases as icons to generate a preliminary grasp
of the archetype; and it implies, or so I have argued, that this relation holds even for the
Forms, so that a particular Form (justice or beauty) can also become a token or icon
with which to think about what makes all such forms good, true, or intelligible. It is an
article of faith for Plato that this technique will eventually lead us to one ultimate
source that need not be understood in relation to an original beyond it.
71
Compare the ‘simple-minded explanations’ of Phaedo 100d.
72
See Chapter 2 on the idea that truth is a property of things.
73
Compare the worry in Socrates’ dream in the Theaetetus. But here it is not a worry, I think. The
demand that the knower be in a position to give a logos is for a logos of things that are dependent upon
some other source, which cannot be known (in the way required at Level 4) unless their relation to the
source is understood in such a way that one could give such an account. This would suggest that knowledge
of the ultimate source does not require giving a logos of that thing itself, since such a logos would need to
appeal to some higher explanation, but it will facilitate accounts of other things that are derivative from it.
VI. Conclusion: That the Ideal City Serves Not to

Provide a Definition but as an Icon of Justice, From
Which We Can Ascend to a Grasp of Justice Itself
When Socrates decides to found an imaginary city in the Republic, he is trying to
discover the essential nature of justice itself, to answer a fairly practical question—one
that bothers ordinary people involved in daily decision-making—about whether
justice benefits the practitioner. Like a geometer, Socrates draws a diagram of a par-
ticular city (not an entirely perfect city, but—as with any diagram—one that displays
both justice and injustice). Using that icon he then generates a more abstract idea of
what justice is. At this stage (Level 3), Socrates cannot give any further account or
explanation of that posit (Justice itself), but he can use it to answer the original question,
about whether justice benefits the practitioner.
It must now seem surprising, surely, that, for years, interpreters have tried to find in
this picture of an imaginary city either the form of ‘Justice itself ’ (as though we might
take the diagram of a right angle to be the right angle itself),74 or an account or definition
of justice (as though describing a particular token of justice would count as a definition
of justice). Evidently the situation is quite the reverse. Socrates is saying that one cannot
give an account of what justice is, unless one has taken the longer road, and reached
not just an awareness of Justice itself but also some further original to which to appeal
in explaining it.75 So he cannot mean that he is giving an account of justice, though he
may be using justice itself as a basis for explaining why just dealings benefit the agent,
since that is a case of explaining the lower by reference to the next original above it.
Using the clues in the Divided Line, we now see another way of understanding the
imaginary city: not as an ideal (or Form), or as defining what justice is for city and soul,
but as a diagram to assist iconic thinking. The Divided Line diagram provides a visual
exposition of Plato’s method: explaining how we can use the pretend city as a diagram
or icon, and remain lucidly aware that what we are looking at is not the original but its
icon. So the Line both is a diagram and it shows how we can use a diagram—indeed,
have used a diagram—because the city, serving as an icon for justice, can be the key for
discerning what is not directly visible but is accessible to the mind, once we learn how
to flip from the particular to the abstract Form that it instantiates.
We should not any longer be tempted to think that we want a definition. Nor should
we any longer be like the sight-lovers, who confuse the icon with what it is meant
to illustrate.76
74
75
NB, this will not be a definition of Justice, but explaining it by reference to the good.
76
See Chapter 7, Section VI.
PA RT I V
Plato’s Theaetetus
9
for Part IV: Plato’s Theaetetus
In the Republic, as we saw in Chapter 8, Socrates designs a methodology, which I have

called the iconic method, whereby ordinary things can serve as icons or diagrams, to
facilitate attention to abstract conceptual features that they illustrate. Socrates often
describes the understanding that one achieves by this method in visual terms, and he
explicitly compares the role of ‘truth’ in cognition with the role of light in successful
vision.1 I argued against trying to align Plato’s idea of knowledge with the propositional
knowledge favoured in contemporary philosophy, because the iconic method makes
better sense if we understand the focus to be conceptual knowledge, such as knowing
‘what justice is’.
If I am right, Plato does not think that such knowledge consists of propositions,
nor can it be captured in definitions, by necessary and sufficient conditions, or single-
common-factor-type essences, as he shows in many dialogues.2 Certainly Socrates
sometimes suggests that anyone who ‘knows’ should be able to give an account of what
they know; but as I argued in Chapter 8, giving an account is a symptom of knowledge,
rather than the content of it, and it involves being able to explain an item in terms
of what is next above in the hierarchy of explanatory entities (explaining the icon by
reference to the original), not giving a definition of what the icon itself is like. So if one
is unable to define what one knows, this is not because one does not know it, but
because one has not yet got to a knowledge of the next level, which is the original to
which the item stands as icon. So one can be in a position of knowing what justice is,
and yet unable to define it (in the way Socrates thought you should define it) and also
still unable as yet to explain it in terms of those higher principles for which it is iconic
but to which one has not yet got access.
This is why, in the dialogues, Plato’s iconic method succeeds where Socrates’ search
for definitions failed. This is particularly so for the difficult concepts that interest both
philosophers. One of these is actually the concept of knowledge itself (i.e. conceptual
knowledge, episteme), which is the special focus of the Theaetetus. Although episteme
is usually translated ‘knowledge’, it is not all of what we mean by knowledge. Because
1
Republic 506e–509c. 2 See Chapter 1.
the focus of this dialogue is partly on what counts as a science, or what counts as the
scientific understanding that a true scientist has of his subject (to the end that science
is to be identified as the conceptual understanding of the types and classes that belong
to that science, not the particular facts that a scientist might discover), I shall use the
term ‘science’ as a translation for episteme in this part of my work (and I shall also often
leave the word untranslated). I shall argue that Plato’s thoughts about science here are
in line with his discussions of the difference between episteme (of types, forms, con-
cepts) and doxa (of tokens, particulars, facts) in the Meno and the Republic. As in the
Republic, we find that the so-called sciences (geometry, the natural sciences) display an
inadequate approach, seek the wrong kind of definitions, and have a limited grasp of
what a true science is. However, the Theaetetus is less positive in its results than the
Meno or Republic. All its attempts to define episteme fail, and no new model of how to
proceed is on offer. In fact, its model of analysis (a kind of chemical-composition
approach) is new, but does not bear fruit.3
There are three misguided assumptions driving Theaetetus’s failed proposals: (i) that
episteme is reducible to some other cognitive condition, (ii) that it is a composite to be
analysed into elements, and (iii) that some brand of perception or doxa is its main
component. This third assumption generates a further misguided thought, (iv) that
the kind of being that episteme must grasp is a kind found among the particular objects
of perception and doxa, and not one that is exclusive to types or abstract concepts. This
focuses the discussion on the wrong kind of cognition of the wrong kind of beings, as
I show in Chapter 11.
Nearly ten Stephanus pages of preliminary dialogue (142a–151c) precede Theaetetus’s
first serious attempt at a definition of science. First the ‘frame dialogue’ is a conversation
set several years after Socrates death. Then the ‘narrated conversation’ is a flashback,
recalling an occasion shortly before Socrates’ trial, when Socrates had met Theaetetus, a
young pupil of Theodorus. Both the frame dialogue and the narrated conversation are
rich with references to geometry, which provides a significant link to the Republic.4 Even
without the stylistic studies, we can readily see that dating the Theaetetus alongside the
Republic makes perfect sense.5 Reading these dialogues side by side prompts us to see
that Theaetetus precisely exemplifies the limited capacities of students at Level 3 of the
Divided Line. I explore the geometry allusions in Chapter 10, where I discuss Theaetetus’s
initial responses to Socrates.
3
See Chapter 10, Section II. 4 See Chapter 8.
5
Many scholars, both unitarians and developmentalists, treat the Theaetetus as late, sometimes using
ingenious arguments to reject the stylistics (e.g. Ryle, Plato’s Progress, 295–300; Bostock, Theaetetus, 13–14).
By contrast, Sedley, The Midwife of Platonism, 2–13 argues that Plato invites the reader to certain unspoken
Platonic conclusions, appealing (pp. 9–10) as I have, to the parallel features of the Meno and Republic.
Gareth B. Matthews, Socratic Perplexity and the Nature of Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1999), 95 anticipates Sedley’s idea that Socrates plays midwife to Plato’s ideas.
Introduction and Summary for Part IV 171
I. On the Post-Natal Role of Socrates as Midwife,

and the Exposure of Theaetetus’s First Brainchild
I.i That the midwife has a twofold role
Before eliciting Theaetetus’s first response, Socrates compares his own role in the
discussion to that of a midwife at the birth of a baby (149a–151d). It involves three
processes: first encouraging the parent to give birth to something, then manufacturing
auxiliary devices to assist the infant idea towards survival, and then testing it to see whether,
with those aids in place, it is viable. To understand the structure of the Theaetetus it
is imperative to understand this pattern of alternating constructive and destructive
argument.6 Each time Theaetetus brings a new theory to birth, the midwife initially
comes to its rescue, attempting to keep it alive for a bit, using whatever mechanisms he
can devise to assist it. But each time, when the supporting mechanisms turn out to be
impossible or ineffective, the ailing child has to be destroyed: shown up as hopeless,
and then abandoned. For each proposal, the philosophical costs of keeping it alive and
raising it as a viable thesis are examined and weighed. Unluckily for Theaetetus, none
of his ideas turns out viable even with the best available assistance. In each case the
midwife concludes, after assessing the proposed adjustments, that they are too costly,
or even self-defeating.
I.ii That Theaetetus’s first brainchild is consigned to the discard pile,

once its auxiliary theories have been found too extreme to survive
The first baby is brought to birth at 151e, when Theaetetus suggests that science equates
to perception:
EA: episteme is aisthesis.7
Socrates immediately embarks on his midwifery in accordance with the two-stage
constructive/destructive process we have just described. From 151e to 160e he devises
a suitable support package for EA. The birth of EA is then said to be complete at 160e.
After that the amphidromia can begin, but only if the child is healthy. (The amphidromia
is the ritual acceptance of a viable child that is considered fit to be reared.) What comes
after 160e is designed to show that in fact, even with all that support, it is not actually
viable and must be abandoned.
In the constructive phase, Socrates first tries to find a plausible notion of ‘truth’
and ‘reality’ that could ensure that perceiving something, or having an appearance of
something, always counts as knowing what’s true about reality. To this end he invokes
assistance from two existing philosophical positions, namely the Protagorean theory
6
I shall note these reversals in practice at various points in Chapters 10 to 12.
7
See further Chapter 10, Section III.
that ‘Man is the Measure of all things’ (MM), which is a form of relativism about truth,
and a Heraclitean theory of ontological flux (FLUX). Although the adjustments are given
authority by attributing them to famous thinkers of the past, they actually lead to very
strange results. Socrates tries to make things seem less peculiar by having the imaginary
Protagoras speak on behalf of his own theory, so as to provide more sophisticated
interpretations of his theory.8 Nevertheless, despite all that, the complex assemblage of
survival aids eventually becomes incoherent, and has to be dismantled.
Socrates raises a wide range of difficulties at various stages of the discussion, without
clearly stating which of them are truly unanswerable. He offers answers to some of
them, on Protagoras’s behalf, either at once or later. Even during the constructive stage
of the midwifery, the viability of the proposed solutions is repeatedly challenged and
improved in response to criticisms; similarly, some of the best arguments in defence of
MM and FLUX are presented during the destructive stage (after 160e), where Socrates
is bringing critical objections against those theories. As a good midwife, Socrates always
brings the best arguments he can find, in support of the failing theories, to ensure that
the dialectical challenges are met wherever they can be met.
It is for us to judge, then, where exactly, and why exactly, the structure starts to fail,
instead of growing more immune to challenge. Socrates seems to offer acceptable
solutions on Protagoras’s behalf to some challenges, including those about memory,
madness, and dreaming and about Protagoras’s right to teach others.9 Protagoras can
also answer some of the initial challenges about expertise, by invoking the idea that ‘truth’
is pragmatic convenience, and that expertise is about improving a person’s outlook.10
By contrast, the self-refutation argument looks problematic: although Socrates says, in
a self-deprecating way, at 171c–d, that Protagoras would probably convict him of faulty
reasoning, were he to pop up and answer for himself, nevertheless this unanswered
argument seems to lead Socrates to withdraw from global relativism to relativism just
about values.11 When Theodorus lists the points for which he thinks that Protagoras
has no answer, he includes the self-refutation argument,12 and also the point about
future predictions, which undermines even values-only Protagoreanism.13
Socrates also demolishes the Heraclitean part of the support package. If FLUX were
true, he suggests, one would be unable to state it or mean it, since it would make reference
impossible and we could neither say nor mean one thing rather than another with
8
162c–163a; 164c–165e. See further in Catherine Rowett, ‘Relativism in Plato’s Protagoras’ in Melissa
Lane and Verity Harte (eds.), Politeia in Greek and Roman Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2013), 191–211.
9
157e, 161c, 166a. No good answer is given to the challenges about foreign languages and illiterate
people seeing letters, at 163b. Socrates seems to imply (163c) that a better answer could be given, and that
the problem is not insurmountable.
10
166d. 11 171d9.
12
179b6–9. I am not passing judgement on whether the self-refutation argument is sound, but only on
whether Plato offers any response, or leaves the reader thinking that it is sound. Much has been written
on it (see especially Luca Castagnoli, ‘Protagoras refuted: how clever is Socrates’ “most clever” argument at
Theaetetus 171a–c?’, Topoi, 23/1 (2004), 3–32).
13
See Rowett, ‘Relativism in Plato’s Protagoras’, 204–7.
respect to science or any other subject.14 In effect, no claims could be made at all: nothing
could be said, either correct or incorrect; there would be no stable concepts and no
possibility of intelligent thought or language (182a–183a).15 The very conversation
itself is at risk.
The failure of EA and of its support mechanisms is deliberate, of course. I take it that
Plato agrees that it does and should fail. Socrates exposes genuine problems in the EA
thesis, which is too disabled to survive, even with help from MM and FLUX.
In my view, Text 9.1 is where EA is declared non-viable, and left to die. It is here that
Socrates concludes that the proposed support package has failed:
Text 9.1
So, Theodorus, we are rid of your friend, and we’re no longer going to concede that
every man is the measure of all things, even if he’s not wise. And also we shan’t concede
that episteme is perception, or not on the basis of the ‘everything flows’ route, anyway
(κατά γε τὴν τοῦ πάντα κινεῖσθαι μέθοδον); unless Theaetetus here has anything else
to say perhaps ([ἢ] εἰ μή[τί] πως ἄλλως Θεαίτητος ὅδε λέγει).
Theaetetus 183b7–c3
In Text 9.1 Socrates rejects MM. This eliminates one of the two props for EA. He then
says that we shall not accept EA either—or not on the basis of FLUX, anyway. FLUX
was the other prop helping EA to survive. As a result, EA has no remaining props to
sustain it.
There are two ways of taking the expression ‘or not on the basis of the “everything
flows” route anyway’ in Text 9.1. Recent discussions take Socrates to mean that refuting
MM and FLUX did not directly challenge the viability of EA. Taking ‘anyway’ (γε) as
concessive, scholars conclude that Socrates here admits that another direct refutation
of EA itself is still needed.16
It seems to me that this is to misunderstand the relation that I have just explained,
between EA and its two disability supports (MM and FLUX). It depends on supposing
that EA might still be viable on its own, without those major adjustments to reality and
truth. But surely what Socrates means is that both of its support mechanisms have
failed, no further account is on offer to save it, and it cannot survive without assistance,
so it is doomed. What Socrates now says is that we cannot keep EA, or—anyway (γε)—
we cannot keep it unless Theaetetus can think of some other support besides MM and
FLUX that could rescue it.
Certainly on this interpretation, the expression ‘anyway’ (γε) is still concessive.
Socrates is making momentary space for some other salvation for EA. But that space
need only be what is explicitly mentioned in the sentence itself, namely a space for
Theaetetus to suggest another prop, if he can: ‘unless Theaetetus here has anything else
to say perhaps’ (183c3). But it immediately turns out that Theaetetus cannot offer any
182e–183a. 15 Cf. Parmenides 135b–c.

14
For references, see note 22.

16
such thing—in fact, he is only interested in hearing more history of philosophy from
Socrates (183d1).
On this reading, no further refutation of EA is needed or offered. In the absence of
any alternative props, EA is not viable. It is abandoned in Text 9.1, at 183c: end of story.
I.iii That Theaetetus’s second proposal, that science is true discernment, is also
supported with elaborate survival aids and then rejected as non-viable by the
midwife
Following an interlude (Theaetetus 184a–187b), which I shall explore in Chapter 11, in
which Socrates helps Theaetetus to distinguish sensory perception (SP) from non-
sensory discernment, or doxa (D),17 Theaetetus gives birth to his second idea:
ETD: Episteme is true doxa.
The midwife now proceeds as before. First Socrates notes where ETD has difficulties
(in this case, problems with false doxa) and then devises some aids to supplement
immediate impressions, which cannot by themselves be right or wrong, by providing a
second source of mental content, supplied from memories stamped on wax, or stored
in groups in cages, to facilitate true and false identity claims.18 Socrates first supplies
the equipment (wax blocks or cages) and then investigates to see whether ETD could
survive with that assistance. In each case the prop is discarded when it proves inadequate:
the aviary is probably intended as a superior replacement for the wax, but neither is
sufficient to overcome the disabilities of the child, so ETD is abandoned too.19
I.iv That the third brainchild also proves too sick to save
For his third proposal (201c–d), Theaetetus tries equating science with cases of true
discernment where one can also give an account (logos):
TDL: Episteme is true doxa plus a logos.20
Again the midwife starts by seeking support mechanisms to make TDL viable,
examining possible senses of the term logos in search of one that might do; but again
all the mechanisms fail, and TDL must be discarded, like its siblings. Therewith dies
the whole scientific project, the search for a reductionist compositional analysis
for episteme.
Socrates never explains what is making ETD or TDL so sickly. Several times he comes
close to a diagnosis, insofar as he shows repeatedly that one can only make mistakes
(and conversely, one can only achieve truth) about particulars, if one has a resource of
formal knowledge to apply or misapply; and that one can only formulate a logos using
17
On the choice of discernment as the translation for doxa see Chapter 11, Section I.
18
On these models and their purpose, see Chapter 12 and Rowett, ‘On making mistakes’.
19
Theaetetus does not immediately abandon ETD at 200c, but reasserts it at 200e. See Section II.iii, and
Chapter 12, Section III.
20
See further Chapter 12, Section IV.
terms of which one has formal knowledge, plus a grasp of why the account is explanatory.
It is possible to deduce, on the basis of the aids that he offers and the reasons why they
fail, that Socrates is aware that every particular cognition, identifying or classifying
something in the environment, is necessarily parasitic on the conceptual resources (kinds,
types, forms) with which we articulate the world. Surely what Theaetetus needed was
to propose that generic science of types as the candidate for episteme; but he never
sees it. There is no space for it in the restricted range of doxastic cognition that Theaetetus
considers. It was for this absence that Socrates was trying to make amends, with his
technical aids for ETD—though without success.21
II. On the Search for a Science of Ousia

There is a passage, which I shall call ‘the Interlude’, which comes between Theaetetus’s
first and second proposals (EA, ETD). This passage, in which Socrates draws a distinction
between doxa (D) and sensory perception (SP), has acquired considerable prominence
in modern scholarship. My reading of it (in Chapter 11) is deflationary in three ways:
first I deny that it is intended as a refutation of EA, as most scholars suggest,22 since on
my view EA was already abandoned at 183c. Instead, I suggest, it provides new tools for
formulating the next proposal. Second, I argue that, in the Interlude, Socrates subdivides
what was earlier (in EA) called ‘perception’ (aisthesis), to distinguish between sensory
and non-sensory kinds of perception (SP and D respectively), so that the new definition
(ETD) does not replace the first definition so much as refine it. Finally, the distinction it
makes between sensible features and non-sensible ones is a red herring that does nothing
to improve Theaetetus’s chances of discovering what episteme is, since the objects of doxa
are no nearer to being objects of knowledge than are the objects of SP.
II.i That the Interlude redefines aisthesis as a technical term

for sensory perception, as distinct from doxa
During the discussion of EA Socrates clearly used the term ‘aisthesis’ to cover all kinds
of impressions: not just seeing and hearing, but also all the beliefs and opinions that
were covered by Protagoras’s ‘Man is the Measure’ theory. Socrates tested EA against
21
For details, see Rowett, ‘On making mistakes’.
22
Many if not all previous interpreters have assumed that the Interlude is the proper refutation of
EA. For example: Gösta Grönroos, ‘Two kinds of belief in Plato’, Journal of the History of Philosophy,
51 (2013), 1–19, 14; John M. Cooper, ‘Plato on sense-perception and knowledge (Theaetetus 184–6)’,
Phronesis (1970), 123–46, 123; Sedley, The Midwife of Platonism, ch. 4, esp. 114; Chappell, Reading Plato’s
Theaetetus, 141–9; Bostock, Theaetetus, 110–45; McDowell, Theaetetus, 185; Allan Silverman, ‘Plato on
perception and “commons” ’, Classical Quarterly, 40 (1990), 148–75, 165; Catherine Osborne, ‘Knowledge
is perception: a defence of Theaetetus’ in Wolfgang Detel, Alexander Becker, and Peter Scholtz (eds.), Ideal
and Culture of Knowledge in Plato (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2003), 133–58, 154; Cornford, Plato’s
Theory of Knowledge; I.M. Crombie, Plato, The Midwife’s Apprentice (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1964). Burnyeat’s Reading A and Reading B differ on whether EA has already been refuted, but both take
184–6 to be a first or (Reading B) second refutation (Burnyeat, Theaetetus, 52–3). Readings A and B are
what I have been calling the Metaphysical Reading and Rylean Reading respectively: see Chapter 1.
examples like thinking that the patient will catch a fever (178c), or that a law will be
beneficial (179a), as well as more directly sensible experiences.23 The example of the
dice (154c) includes perceptions of ‘more’, ‘less’, ‘half as many’, ‘larger’.24 Verbs such as
phainetai (it appears) or dokei (it seems) are used interchangeably with aisthanesthai
throughout.25 I am reserving the abbreviation ‘A’ for this broad notion of perception
that figures in EA. It includes what will later be called doxa.26
In the Interlude, Socrates first draws attention to the need for a single unitary
perceiver, and then notes, at 184e–185d, that this one soul receives more than one
kind of input, some via bodily organs, some not. At 185e Socrates commends
Theaetetus warmly for recognizing that the soul makes some observations by itself,
without sense organs:
Text 9.2
Socrates: Why, you are handsome, Theaetetus, and not, as Theodorus said, ugly; for
one who speaks handsomely is handsome and good. But besides being handsome,
you’ve done me a favour by relieving me of a very long discussion,27 if it appears to
you that the soul surveys (i) some [features] by itself and (ii) others via the bodily
capacities; for that’s how it seemed to me,28 and I wanted it to seem so to you too.29
Theaetetus 185e3–9
Having made this distinction between perceptions with organs and those without,
Theaetetus must label them. For perception with organs, he re-uses the earlier term
aisthanesthai, which previously meant perception in general:
Text 9.3
(i)—Well, are you going to call that one and this one by the same name, when their
differences are of such significance?
(ii)—That would not be fair.
(iii)—So what name will you give to that one, to seeing, hearing, smelling, feeling
cool, feeling warm?
(iv)—I’d say “perceiving” (αἰσθάνεσθαι). Well, what else could I call it?
23
E.g. what will sound tuneful, which wine will taste sweet, Theaetetus 178c–d. Sensory perception, not
memory, seems to be paradigmatic at 163d.
24
154c; 155e.
25
Theaetetus 166d (phainesthai); 167a–b (doxazein); 167c (dokein); 178c (doxa); 178e (dokein).
26
See Frede, ‘Observations on perception’, 3–4.
27
Socrates cuts a long story short because Theaetetus has understood correctly. In suggesting that
Socrates means the opposite, Hendrik Lorenz, The Brute Within: Appetitive Desire in Plato and Aristotle
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 80 produces a travesty.
28
Socrates intimates that Theaetetus is proposing something to which Socrates was already committed,
but it is Theaetetus who chooses to call the activity ‘doxa’.
29
This sentence uses phainetai for the first ‘seems’, and dokein (deploying the new doxa terminology) for
the second. The latter is no more an assertion of a theory than the former, pace Sedley, The Midwife of
Platonism, 108–9. It is certainly not a knowledge claim.
(v)—The whole of that you call “perception”? (Σύμπαν ἄρ' αὐτὸ καλεῖς αἴσθησιν)
(vi)—Unavoidably.
186d7–e3
In sentence (iv) Theaetetus constrains aisthanesthai to a narrower usage, covering
sensory perception alone (not perception more broadly, as in EA).30 In sentence (v) my
translation assumes that Socrates is checking whether all the senses (sight, hearing etc.)
belong under one term, but the sentence could also mean ‘Is that the whole of what
you call perception?’—to check that nothing else needs adding. Either way, Socrates is
confirming that aisthesis, in its new usage, includes all and only perceptions that
employ one or more of the five senses. However, we must not assume that Plato himself
is proposing this as an accurate definition of aisthesis. Theaetetus and Socrates are
stipulating terms to address the immediate needs of their conversation, but this
technical usage need not affect other ordinary uses of the term in other contexts.
In any case, this new use of aisthesis to mean SP alone is not the important move
in the Interlude. For instance, it does not tell us anything significant about Plato’s
views on perception, or about whether sensory perception makes judgements, applies
concepts, or whatever; for in every respect other than the use of organs, SP and D display
identical structures and content, as we shall see. Text 9.3 does not even define the two
classes of perception by their objects, let alone by the structure of their judgements; it
simply offers a list of paradigm activities, using verbs alone. The point is to discard just
part of A, viz. sensory perception (SP), in preparation for the next definition, which
will focus on the non-sensory kind (D).
II.ii That Socrates and Theaetetus are mistakenly looking among the
cognitive contents of doxa for what they need, namely a grasp of ousia
The key point in the Interlude, as I understand it, is the claim, at 186c–d, that science
is a faculty that grasps being (ousia). In Chapter 11 I argue that this is correct up to a
point. It would be fine if ‘being’ were denoting what I have called the ‘is’ of conceptual
competence, as in ‘knowing justice, what it is’.31 That would be consistent with the
understanding of episteme in earlier dialogues, as a science of types, not tokens, and of
intelligible objects, not sensible ones. However, things do not go well in the Theaetetus,
because neither Socrates nor Theaetetus seem clearly to grasp the distinction between
that kind of being and some other kinds of ‘being’ that can properly be said about
tokens and particulars, as when one compares two sensory features and observes that
they ‘both are’, to use Socrates’ expression.32
The fact that Theaetetus is temporarily wowed by the idea that science is a kind of
doxa is no reason to think that Plato means it to be the right answer. On the contrary, in
30
See Frede, ‘Observations on perception’, 3–4. McDowell, Theaetetus, 118 supposes that the narrower
meaning was Plato’s official view throughout, but was suppressed to make EA temporarily plausible.
31
See Chapter 1, and Chapter 3, Section IV. 32 185a9. See Text 11.5.
narrating Theaetetus’s failure, Plato reveals the weaknesses that cause the theories to be
unfit for survival. The criteria that Socrates invokes, such as the distinction between D
and SP, the lack of bodily organs, the common features, and so on, all turn out to be
red herrings: none is diagnostic of the relevant kind of ‘truth’ or ‘being’ required for
episteme. So there are failures on the part of the characters: young Theaetetus fails,
Socrates, as midwife, either knows no better or refuses to help; but these are not due to
authorial confusion. Plato, I take it, is the one who is showing us what is wrong.
This turn of events is only mildly new to us. In other works, we saw Plato supply
Socrates with a new method, after the Socratic approach failed. This time, Plato leaves
him barren,33 and the dialogue ends aporetically. In this case, Socrates does not even
propose a more productive method, though arguably the tools from which the reader
might make progress are supplied.
II.iii That Theaetetus is too young and inexperienced in dialectic

to understand why his second thesis has failed
In principle, the discussion of ETD shows, even before we begin on TDL, that search-
ing for the truths of science among the cognitive contents of doxa will never work. But
despite the complex work on the problem of false doxa in the central part of the dialogue,
Theaetetus struggles to understand that ETD is not viable and why. He relinquishes that
second brainchild only after Socrates has presented a second, less theoretical refutation,
by way of a counter-example—here a jury whose correct verdict is not due to knowledge—
which shows that knowledge and correct doxa can come apart.34
The ‘ignorant jury’ example is quick and effective, but theoretically underdetermined.
There are many possible explanations of what the jury lacks, any of which would suffice
for the claim that they ‘did not know’. Although Theaetetus finds this intuitive method
of refutation clearer, more familiar, and more convincing than the technical moves made
in the passage about false doxa, in reality the jury example does not help the dialectical
enquiry, because it is vague. It relies on the unexamined intuition that the jury could get a
right answer while lacking some knowledge that someone else might have had. It does
not diagnose precisely what knowledge is missing or what it was needed for.35
II.iv That perception and doxa, whether true or false, presuppose another
kind of knowledge, namely knowing ‘what it is’ about the type
As we saw in Chapter 1, there are two classic ways of reading the Theaetetus.36 The first,
which we called the ‘Metaphysical Reading’, suggests that Plato has an answer to the
question ‘what is knowledge?’ (namely, ‘Knowledge is of Forms’), but is not presenting
it clearly in the dialogue. The Theaetetus fails to define knowledge, then, due to leaving
33
Theaetetus 150c–d.
34
Here providing the inverse case (true doxa without episteme) to what emerged in the passage on false
doxa (false doxa with episteme). See Rowett, ‘On making mistakes’, 165.
35
See my discussion in Chapter 12. 36 Chapter 1, Section II.
the Forms out, and attempting to find knowledge in ‘acquaintance with individual
sensible things’.37 Cornford concludes, ‘The Platonist will draw the necessary inference.
True knowledge has for its object things of a different order—not sensible things, but
intelligible Forms and truths about them.’ He observes that it is because these things
are unique and unchanging that we can know eternal truths about them.38
The other classic reading we called the Rylean Reading, according to which Plato
needs to resolve some earlier ‘confusion’ that makes it hard to explain falsity, or to
pinpoint how knowledge differs from true belief. In the Theaetetus, according to the
Rylean Reading, Plato came close to realizing that knowledge is propositional, and
a species of belief, so that what he really needed (and almost found) was an idea of
justification, which would indeed turn true belief into knowledge, more or less. On
this reading, the Theaetetus fails because of some remaining confusion: because Plato
had not yet mastered the correct analysis of false propositions, and because he omitted
the crucial kind of logos (namely, the explanation or justification).39
Like several recent interpretations (e.g. those of Sedley and Chappell), my reading
is much closer to Cornford’s than to the Rylean Reading.40 However, there are many
aspects of Cornford’s reading that I find unhelpful: he thinks that Forms are meta-
physical objects, known ‘by acquaintance’, and he thinks of their ‘being’ as existential
or predicative. If their special mode of ‘being’ is logical and conceptual (as I suggest),
there is no need to posit a special metaphysical realm for them to exist.41 Nor should
we imagine that the Forms belong to an esoteric or controversial theory. I do not believe,
as Cornford does, that Plato means the reader to bring an esoteric solution that they
already know from elsewhere. In my view, what Plato reveals is a logical point that
every reader must concede, once they have thought through the issues, under Plato’s
guidance, because what is required for true recognition of particulars (doxa) is a
grasp of something that is logically distinct (a descriptor) that is to be applied in the
particular case.
In my view, when Plato shows that we draw on the Forms in making our particular
judgements about what we perceive around us, he is invoking nothing more abstruse
than the familiar logical distinction between concept and object, or signifier and signi-
fied, or descriptor and what is described. There has to be a distinction between, on the
one hand, the semantic tools and ideas, in terms of which we see what we see as objects,
as falling under types, as having some identity; and on the other hand, the particular
extensional objects which have the properties that they have independently of our ability
to see them as anything. Plato is reminding us that episteme is the preferred term for
the grasp of the types and semantic tools, and this should not be confused with the
correct deployment of those tools in labelling particulars, for which he prefers to use
the terms aisthesis and doxa. He does this by showing that we cannot achieve any kind
37
Fine, ‘Knowledge and logos in the Theaetetus’, 249.
38
Cornford, Plato’s Theory of Knowledge, 162. 39 See Chapter 12, Section IV.iv.
40
Chappell, Reading Plato’s Theaetetus; Sedley, The Midwife of Platonism.
41
See Chapter 2.
of doxa, successful or mistaken, without some conceptual resources, and that confusion
results if we commandeer the term episteme for cognition of the particular, leaving no
suitable term for the conceptual resources on which it draws.
If this is what Plato means, then he is not confused, and we are not talking about
something peculiar or deeply metaphysical. There is something else that we know, besides
the tokens that we meet in experience, and knowing that stuff is what episteme is. We
do not need to speculate on what that other range of objects is, where they exist, or
even how we acquire our knowledge of them (though there are some rather good
arguments presented here against the idea that we get them from experience of tokens
of the type).42
I conclude, therefore, that Plato still holds that episteme is the soul’s capacity to
operate, itself by itself, among the Forms, just as it was in the so-called Middle-Period
works. Indeed there is no reason to date the Theaetetus anywhere else than the Middle
Period and there is no reason to think that Plato is trying to make any revisions in his
epistemology or in the logic of types and tokens (or Forms and particulars).
See Chappell, Reading Plato’s Theaetetus, for a reading on these lines.

42
10
Geometry and the Scientific
Project
Theaetetus 142a–184b
I. In Which We Discover the Significance

of Theaetetus’s Aptitude for Geometry and
of His Premature Death
I.i That the search for a definition of episteme must fail, and this is partly
because Theaetetus is too young
In the Republic, geometry was Plato’s favourite example of a science that uses an iconic
method.1 The geometer posits points, lines, angles, lengths, and areas, and then uses
diagrams to investigate the relations between them. True answers in geometry refer to
the abstract lines and angles, not the imprecise ones on the diagram. When the geom-
eter says ‘Let AB be a straight line’, AB is a straight line, no matter how well or badly the
line has been drawn. Any geometer who has mastered this approach can distinguish
between the drawing and what it illustrates, and knows that one cannot obtain answers
directly from the diagram (by measuring its lines, say). Yet for all that, answers are
plainly apparent in a correctly constructed diagram. Socrates’ work with Meno’s slave
illustrated how a diagram can deliver answers without using any mathematical tools
that are not spatial and visual. The conviction that the answer is right comes entirely
from seeing the idealized spatial structure represented in the visible illustration.2 For
imagine that neither Socrates nor the boy knew before beginning the enquiry how the
side and diagonal were related: by doing what Socrates does in the Meno, they would
be able to discover that they bore a commensurable relation in square, and what that
relation was. They would see this visually, as a number of similar triangles composing
squares of equal area.
1
See Chapter 8.
2
On the relevant part of the Meno see Chapter 5, Section IV. In the Theaetetus the boys can literally see
that the squares on incommensurable lengths are commensurable with the unit area. They can see the pat-
tern in things whose common properties are literally visible. It is therefore correct to say that in ancient
geometry the truths were literally known by seeing. Modern geometry using algebra appeals to a different
kind of reasoning (not directly visual), but its proofs still appeal to equivalences visible on the diagram.
In the Republic, geometry is one of the ‘so-called sciences’, recommended for its
ability to turn the student’s mind towards abstract knowledge.3 The state’s trainee
guardians must spend many years studying arithmetic, plane geometry, solid geometry,
rotational geometry, and harmonics, because these sciences develop a way of thinking
about abstract things that will lead them towards philosophy.4 In another passage,
Socrates says that mathematical studies ‘turn the eye of the soul’.5 Later, from the age of
thirty, those who are fit to become rulers can move on to a training in dialectic.6
When we turn to the Theaetetus, geometry is there again.7 First, in the frame dialogue
(142b–d), set about eight years after Socrates’ death, two Socratic disciples, Euclid and
Terpsion,8 talk about Theaetetus’s achievements as a mathematician and as a citizen.
They comment on his exemplary conduct in the recent battle, they recall Socrates’ earl-
ier admiration for his nature when he was younger, they remember Socrates predicting
that he was bound to become famous if he reached his prime (εἴπερ εἰς ἡλικίαν ἔλθοι),9
and they recall the conversation with Theaetetus that Socrates had in 399,10 when
Theaetetus was a youth.11
Clearly Socrates had identified Theaetetus as potential philosopher material.
According to the Republic, he would be ready for dialectic around the age of thirty. Yet
the reader knows by now, from the frame dialogue, that Theaetetus is about to die of
dysentery at the age of twenty-six.12 Clearly we should understand that Theaetetus
never did ‘reach his prime’, never was ready for philosophy—not that he died too young
to achieve excellence in geometry: probably he did do great things in mathematics,
3
Republic 533d. See Chapter 8, Section III.ii.
4
Republic 7, 523b–c; 524b3–5; 524d1–4. See Myles Burnyeat, ‘Plato on why mathematics is good for the
soul’ in Timothy Smiley (ed.), Mathematics and Necessity: essays in the history of philosophy (Proceedings
of the British Academy, vol. 103; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 1–83. For other reasons, see
525a–531d.
5
Republic 518c. 6 Republic 537d.
7
The idea that mathematics is key to understanding the drama is explored thoroughly by Glenn R.
Morrow, ‘Plato and the mathematicians: an interpretation of Socrates’ dream in the Theaetetus (201e–206c)’,
Philosophical Review, 79 (1970), 309–33, and sketchily by Neil Cooper, ‘Plato’s Theaetetus reappraised’,
Apeiron, 33 (2000), 25–52. Both assume (i) that Plato recommends the mathematical model, (ii) that the
dialogue is on the verge of getting the correct answer, and (iii) that it would succeed by applying the recom-
mended mathematical approach. I deny all these assumptions.
8
Both are friends of Socrates, present at his death in Phaedo 59c. Euclid went on to found the Megarian
School and write Socratic dialogues (not to be confused with Euclid of Alexandria, author of the Elements,
active about one hundred years later).
9
Theaetetus 142d.
10
‘Shortly before’ Socrates’ death, Theaetetus 142c5. The trial was already on the horizon (210d). Euclid
then took notes to compose the narrative, during his visits to Socrates in prison (143a3).
11
μειράκιον(142c5), i.e. a lad of eighteen or nineteen, called a ‘Stripling’ by James Davidson, The Greeks
and Greek Love (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2007), 69. If he was eighteen in 399, Theaetetus would
be twenty-six in 391 (see note 12).
12
See note 11. The date is almost certainly 391 bc as Debra Nails, The People of Plato: a prosopography
of Plato and other Socratics (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2002) convincingly argues. Theaetetus has con-
tracted dysentery in the camp at Corinth. Only in the late 390s did the Athenians have a camp at Corinth,
so the wording at 142a7 precludes the later dating fashionable in recent decades (see note 13). I thank
Robin Osborne for assistance on the dates.
geometry and the scientific project 183
as the historians suggest, even before his untimely death13—but that is all irrelevant, as
we shall see. What matters is that he died too young to have gone beyond mathematics
to philosophy. The earlier and better-attested date for his death must be right, on pain
of ruining the significance of this dialogue.
Geometry is a prominent theme in the opening pages of the narrated conversation.
Theodorus, a visiting mathematics teacher from Cyrene, introduces Theaetetus as the
most promising young mathematician he has found in Athens. Socrates then quizzes
Theaetetus about how far he has got with his studies:
Text 10.1
Socrates: Tell me, are you learning some geometry from Theodorus?
Theaetetus: I am.
Socrates: And about astronomy, and harmonics and calculations?
Theaetetus: I’d be keen to do that.
Socrates: Me too, my boy …
Theaetetus 145d1–5
This exchange pinpoints the stage that Theaetetus has reached on the Republic’s schedule
of studies.14 Beyond plane geometry, he has already started solid geometry, as we
discover at 148b2, which is the second stage in the Republic. But he is still looking for-
ward to beginning on astronomy (i.e. rotational geometry) and harmonics. So he is not
far into the preliminary mathematical studies. He is at the stage where scientists use
posits of which they cannot give a logos.15 Evidently, then, Theaetetus cannot be ready
for Socrates’ notoriously difficult question, about what science is. At 148c7–8 Socrates
explicitly places the ‘what is science?’ question among the most difficult in philosophy.
He and Theaetetus both agree that the topic is much too hard—is one of the highest
peaks—and that Theaetetus, though good at geometry, will not be able to compete at
dialectics with a grown man.16 Given the stage he has reached, his grasp of what would
count as a true science of abstract forms and types must be almost non-existent.
13
Some strive to place his death later to allow him more time for the mathematics (e.g. Bostock,
Theaetetus, 1, Paul Stern, Knowledge and Politics in Plato’s Theaetetus (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2008), chapter 2, note 3). There is also a widespread desire to place the date of composition at the date
of his death (which surely misconstrues what Plato is doing here). For brief reflections on why it might matter,
see Chappell, Reading Plato’s Theaetetus, 30. On Theaetetus’s mathematical achievements see Myles Burnyeat,
‘The philosophical sense of Theaetetus’ mathematics’, Isis, 69 (1978), 489–513 and David Fowler, The
Mathematics of Plato’s Academy: a new reconstruction (2nd edn; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
14
Republic 527c–531d. See Chapter 9. As Sedley, The Midwife of Platonism, 27 notes, this connection
was observed in antiquity. Polansky, Philosophy and Knowledge: a commentary on Plato’s Theaetetus, 39 notices
the parallel but dismisses it, supposing (like many, I think) that Theaetetus is nonetheless supposed to be
already engaging in dialectic (pp. 39, 46). Matthews, Socratic Perplexity and the Nature of Philosophy, 93–5
argues that Socrates has gone back to thinking that boys can do philosophy (citing Theodorus’s view at
146b2—on which see below, note 18—as if it were endorsed by Socrates).
15
See Chapter 8. 16 148c1–8.
Socrates agrees with Theodorus that the new work that Theaetetus had been doing
on geometry is impressive.17 But promise at geometry is no evidence that he is already
capable of working at the higher reaches of philosophy to which Socrates is now drag-
ging Theaetetus. So we are primed to expect that Theaetetus will fail, in just the way
that a young geometer trying to do philosophy too soon would fail. He will not be able
to give a logos when asked to do so. He will not even know what a logos would be.
Theodorus, though much older, is certainly no better at philosophy. When Socrates
turns to Theodorus and asks him to respond (146a5), Theodorus refuses, on the
grounds that he is too old to start on philosophy now, and that it is more suitable for the
young.18 Evidently he has not progressed from the preliminary studies: he admits at
165a that he stuck with geometry all his life to avoid progressing to study philosophy
with Protagoras. Notwithstanding Socrates’ ironic claim that Theaetetus will surely
respect Theodorus’s wisdom and do as he says, Theodorus is clearly no better than
Theaetetus at philosophical enquiry, but rather a good deal worse.
At 147c–148b, Theaetetus describes what he and his companions had done in their
geometry lesson earlier that day:
Text 10.2
Theaetetus: Those lines which form an equilateral plane figure when squared we
defined as ‘lengths’, and those which made plane figures with unequal sides we
defined as ‘powers’, on the grounds that they are not commensurate with the others
in length, but they are commensurate in the plane figures which they have the power
to produce. And a similar thing in relation to the solid figures.
Socrates: Great stuff! It doesn’t look as though Theodorus will be had up for false
testimony.
Theaetetus 148a6–b4
The procedure described in Text 10.2 is a classic example of the hypothetical work that
marks the limit of the geometer’s ambition.19 The boys had identified a class of equilat-
eral plane figures whose area is a whole number, but which can’t be depicted using a
unit length for their sides, because they are the squares of irrational roots.20 Theodorus
had presented oblong numbers one by one for them to work on. The boys, by contrast,
had discerned a pattern that enabled them to predict which figures would fall into this
class, classified them into two kinds, and identified criteria for each. They had also
realized that a similar set of entities would be needed in solid geometry. Thus the boys
were engaged in positing and naming certain entities and classes of entities to use as
17
148b3.
18
146b2. Theodorus repeats his view at 162b, and 168c–169e. Compare Callicles at Gorgias 484c.
19
See Chapter 8. Like Bostock, Theaetetus, 35 I take the powers example to be a poor analogue for what
Socrates wants, but whereas Bostock supposes that Plato mistook it for a good analogue, in my view Plato
is accurately portraying Theaetetus’s limited understanding, with plentiful hints to that effect in 148c1–8.
20
As in the Meno, irrational roots force one to transcend the diagram. Unlike Meno’s slave (see Chapter 4),
Theaetetus discerns the generic idea (‘surds’), and offers a technical term (‘powers’).
tools in geometry.21 These would serve as sources to which they could appeal in
explaining their results and in proving theorems. However, useful though such classifi-
cation procedures are in geometry, they are not going to serve well for addressing
Socrates’ task, since that requires the boy to identify criteria that define an existing
class (in this case, ‘science’). Theaetetus must explain a type, not posit it, and it already
has a name. The puzzle is what criteria might serve to define it, so as to explain which
things qualify as sciences.
II. In Which We Consider Whether Listing Examples

Could Be a Good Answer, and Discover Why Socrates’
Analysis of Clay Is an Unhelpful Model
II.i That mentioning examples is part of the iconic method, and that
Socrates’ objections to the examples, and his recommended kind of
analysis, are not the usual ones, but are nonetheless misguided
In Chapter 4 we saw that Socrates’ ‘What is F?’ questions are not about ‘things’ (at Level 2
of the Divided Line), but about types (forms) in the intelligible section of the Line.22
We have encountered several such questions: ‘What is a virtue?’, in the Meno; ‘What is
justice?’ in Republic I; and a brief discussion of what the good is in Republic VI.23 Types
and Forms belong to the intelligible world because they are conceptual classificatory
terms in which we think about things, while the sensible world comprises the exten-
sional tokens or tropes that instantiate these types. In everyday life we use types and
descriptors for classifying tokens, without asking directly about the type. We treat the
types as sources without further explanations. Now, as dialecticians, we must think
about the type itself and give a logos.
One way to explain a type is by sketching its extension. Since a complete list of all the
tokens might be impossible, we standardly mention selected instances or subsets, so as
to illustrate the extension with key examples. Sometimes just one example will do: for
instance, in the Republic Socrates investigates the concept of justice by considering one
city.24 Plato is intrigued, I suggest, by the fact that both laymen and philosophers can
come to understand an intelligible type on the basis of a single exemplar in this way.25
So, if I am right about this, mentioning a few clear examples should be a good method for
answering the question ‘what is science?’—perhaps even the recommended method.26
21
On positing see Chapter 8. Pace Burnyeat, ‘The philosophical sense of Theaetetus’ mathematics’, what
Theaetetus reports is neither an analysis nor a definition of surds.
22
See Chapter 4, Sections I and IV. On the Divided Line see Chapter 8.
23
See Chapters 3, 7, and 8, Section II. 24 See Chapter 8.
25
Cf. Phaedo 75a6, where token cases of equality (sticks and stones) bring to mind the equal itself
(73d6). Comments in Osborne, ‘Perceiving particulars’.
26
This is also a method in geometry, on which see Chapter 8, Section IV. Compare also the procedure
that Theaetetus described at 148a–b (Text 10.2), though that was a process of devising and naming a new
concept rather than explaining or describing an existing one.
Theaetetus’s first shot at an answer is of that kind. At 146c he lists some iconic tokens
of the type ‘science’:
Text 10.3
Theaetetus: Well it seems to me that the things one would learn from Theodorus
are sciences—geometry and the things you just listed; and also cobbling and the
other craftsmen’s arts. All of these collectively, and each of them severally, seem to
me to be none other than science.
Socrates: Nobly and generously, my friend, you’ve given many when you were
asked for one, and a variety in place of one simple thing.
Theaetetus 146c7–d4
Theaetetus mentions one paradigm case (geometry and cobbling) for each of two
informal classes of episteme (sciences and crafts), and asks the listener to generalize
from an etcetera (‘the things you just listed’; ‘the other craftsmen’s arts’).27 He reckons
that the term ‘science’ applies to all of these collectively (πασαί τε), and to each of them
individually (καὶ ἑκάστη), despite their differences.28 Each is a knowledge or science as
much as another. Episteme is both a collective or mass noun (‘science’) and the count
noun for each individual case (‘a science’).
This would be a good answer if one were explaining what a science is to someone
who had encountered some of these practices, but had not yet grasped the generic
notion of a science. So why does Socrates reject it? Most scholars find nothing surpris-
ing here.29 They typically compare this passage to Meno 72a6, where Socrates com-
pared Meno’s swarm of virtues to a swarm of bees.30 It is easy to slip into thinking that
this is like the earlier cases where Socrates objects to a list of examples and insists on
finding a single common factor instead. In fact there is something different here. In
this case, Socrates does not ask for a single common factor. Furthermore, whereas in
the Meno and Republic (from Republic II onwards), Socrates eventually replaced the
search for the common factor with a different method, here Theaetetus is already using
the more fruitful method, positing generalities on the basis of examples, in the manner
of a geometer. By contrast with Meno, Theaetetus needs no lessons in how to think
like a geometer.
On the other hand, Socrates is being strange: he is not asking for a ‘single com-
mon factor’ or necessary and sufficient conditions, nor will he accept any iconic
token or paradigm, but instead he requests an analysis or decomposition of the tar-
get item, breaking it down into component parts. This is new, not something he asks
for elsewhere. We shall consider the significance of this shortly, but first let us consider
why Socrates rejects the list of examples, and whether he is justified in rejecting
them. I shall argue that he is not.
27
146c8, 146d1. 28 146d2.
29
See Sedley, The Midwife of Platonism, 1–15, 19–27; Burnyeat, ‘Examples in epistemology’.
30
Burnyeat, ‘Examples in epistemology’, 381; Chappell, Reading Plato’s Theaetetus, 35.
Socrates complains that the list of examples answers the wrong questions:
Text 10.4
Socrates: But the question, Theaetetus, wasn’t ‘what things is science of?’, nor ‘how
many sciences are there?’; we weren’t looking to enumerate the sciences, but to know
science, what it is. Or am I talking nonsense?
Socrates complains that the answer would be useless to ‘one ignorant of science’.31
It would be like explaining what clay is by listing the types of clay according to its
uses—e.g. potters’ clay, builder’s clay, and so on.32 It would be a fair answer only to a
different question.
The first complaint is surprising, since Socrates was not asking Theaetetus to
explain what ‘science’ means to someone unfamiliar with the term. His task was to
explain a familiar concept, one that he and Socrates already use. As we saw in
Chapter 1, philosophical enquiry and definition is not a method for teaching people
new vocabulary.33 Socrates would not normally insist that definitions deploy terms
familiar to the interlocutor.34 And besides, Theaetetus’s examples would actually work
just fine for teaching someone the word ‘science’: the interlocutor would not need to
know the word already, since it is not used in Theaetetus’s formulation.35 Telling
someone that things she knows under another description (‘geometry’ or ‘cobbling’)
are sciences could well help her to grasp what ‘science’ means. That is exactly what we
typically do, as Wittgenstein famously observes.36 Evidently, then, unless Socrates is
being pointlessly naughty, his objection cannot be that examples are no way to learn
the word ‘science’. He must be looking for some more sophisticated explanation, for
which it is not sufficient to give examples—even though that might suffice for teaching
someone how to use the word.37
Theaetetus’s list of examples would have served fine for the kind of work done in the
Republic, where Socrates and his friends took a shortcut to investigating justice by
31
147b7, ὃς ἂν ἐπιστήμην ἀγνοῇ. Compare the expression at Meno 71b4–7 (someone who does not
know Meno). See Chapter 3.
32
147a1–b3. 33 See Chapter 1, Section III.i.
34
See my discussion of Meno 75c in Chapter 1, Section III.iii.
35
Does Socrates illicitly substitute in an opaque context? Burnyeat, ‘Examples in epistemology’,
390 thought so, taking it as a forgivable fault on Plato’s part. But (i) if Socrates commits a fallacy, it does not
follow that Plato is confused; and (ii) the passage works better, and is not fallacious, if it is not supposed to
be about learning a new descriptor (as Burnyeat supposed). In fact, Plato is clearly competent with issues
about misidentifying something, using the wrong descriptor, etc., since these are addressed professionally
later in the dialogue. Against Burnyeat’s diagnosis of faults here, see Alexander Nehamas, ‘Episteme and
logos in Plato’s later thought’, Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, 66 (1984), 11–36, 15.
36
Wittgenstein, PI, §69.
37
A point made by Burnyeat, ‘Examples in epistemology’, 387, who thinks that a successful definition is
wanted. I agree that Socrates is portrayed as demanding a kind of definition—actually, a compositional
analysis—but neither we nor Plato must endorse that ambition, I reckon.
examining examples in a city and a soul.38 Here, however, Socrates complains that
using examples would be no shortcut, but a longer and more complicated route:
Text 10.5
Socrates: And then, even though one is able to answer crudely and briefly, instead
one goes round by an interminable route. As in the question about clay, it is crude
and simple to say that earth kneaded with moisture is clay, and leave out the matter
of whose clay it is.
Theaetetus 147c3–6
Instead of that long route, with lists of kinds, he recommends a ‘quick and dirty’
approach, such as analysing clay as ‘earth kneaded with moisture’.
Most modern scholars seem to assume that this is intended to be a good model of
how to define knowledge,39 but Aristotle thought it methodologically erroneous,40 and
indeed it turns out to be deeply unhelpful, insofar as it contributes to the dialogue’s
unsatisfactory outcome. It fares no better than the ‘single common factor’ that Socrates
usually requests. Arguably, a compositional account can sometimes be useful in natural
science.41 Analysing water as H2O can be helpful in chemistry, for instance, because it
indicates what elements or compounds one can extract from it and what other com-
pounds can be produced using its components. But the H2O analysis is not at all useful
for practical purposes, like cookery or gardening, since those practices need water that
contains many crucial minerals and salts. Which solutions and salts they need varies
widely, while none are mentioned in the H2O formula. Besides, for practical purposes,
what matters about water is often its properties and behaviour (its wetness, boiling
point, ability to dissolve or wash away dirt etc.) and/or its nutritional role in diet or
agriculture. For such purposes, a good account of water would be one that explained
that it is a zero-calorie clear liquid that is effective at hydrating living organisms, clean-
ing water-soluble stains, vel. sim. This would roughly explain what we mean by ‘water’
for a specified purpose. But no single definition could explain what it must have in it
for each and every purpose for which water is required.
In a chemistry textbook, one might invent a stipulative definition for clay, so as to
render the non-technical term useful for some scientific purpose.42 That would not
help much with clarifying the ordinary concept of clay, since the constraints for
what counts as clay probably differ across fields. For making pots or bricks the important
thing will be its behaviour when fired, while for geologists or gardeners the compound’s
viscosity, or its ability to retain water, matters above all. For these purposes it hardly
matters whether it is wetter or drier on the day on which it is tested.
38
See Chapter 8. 39 E.g. Burnyeat, ‘Examples in epistemology’, 388.
40
Top. 127a3–19. See (on Aristotle and the Anon. Theaetetus commentator) David Sedley, ‘A platonist
reading of Theaetetus 145–7’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume, 94 (1994), 125–49,
146–7.
41
Compare Empedocles’ account of the composition of bone, say, at Aetius 5.22.1.
42
See Chapter 1, Section III.
Producing a stipulative formula to deliver a technical usage of the term ‘clay’ does
not thereby explain why those things that conform to the formula are clay, except in
some superficial way that is hardly explanatory, but rather descriptive. In fact, the
stipulative definition has no ambition to explain why such things are clay, but only to
declare that they are clay, and to limit what can be so called. The same would apply, a
fortiori, to a compositional analysis of something like ‘science’, which is not a chemical
compound at all. So the project that Socrates has outlined seems to be—at best—a
merely descriptive task, a pointless search for a precise scientific analysis of science.
This seems surprising. We know that young Theaetetus has been set up to fail at dia-
lectic, because he is too young, and only just doing geometry. But why is Socrates offering
a bad role model borrowed from the natural sciences too? Well, there is a possible answer
in the text. At 145d1–5, Socrates makes out—ironically, one supposes—that he too is
inclined to look to the exact sciences for wisdom (Text 10.1). His misplaced ambition for
this scientific style of definition fits with that persona—a persona that seems like his
younger self, as described in the Phaedo, where he says that he was once enthused by the
natural sciences. Yet in the Phaedo he has become wiser in old age: he complains that
such compositional formulae lack explanatory value,43 whereas in the Theaetetus even
the aged Socrates still maintains that such formulae are just what he wants (or at least
he pretends to).
Perhaps Socrates too has lost his way in the early stages of scientific training, then.
That need not mean, however, that Plato the author was gripped by that scientistic
ambition. The author displays the failure of the exact and natural sciences, in this nar-
rative. He shows that natural science does not know even how to ask whether it delivers
episteme, let alone answer that question.
We can conclude, then, that neither Theaetetus (when he described positing and
naming the class of surds) nor Socrates (when he analysed the composition of clay)
was offering a helpful way forward; and that Socrates’ approval of these models was a
source of error, not of progress.
II.ii That Theaetetus’s three definitions of episteme are all designed to

follow the model of a simple compositional analysis, which is a faulty
model and leads to failure
The project, now, is to find the compositional analysis of science: to name some stuff,
or some combination of stuffs, out of which science is composed, and with which (in
the specified combination) it is co-extensive. If clay is a certain emulsion composed of
earth and water, so science is some stuff, or stuffs combined in a certain way. Perhaps it
is composed of perception or perception mixed with something else—truth, say, or an
account. In the rest of the dialogue, Theaetetus and Socrates try to identify what one,
two, or more things might, in some combination, make science. The first suggestion is
43
Phaedo 98b–99b: such analyses offer no explanation or aition of the things they analyse, but only give
the conditions under which such things occur.
that science is just perception, which is like saying that clay is just earth. It proposes that
the target kind, science, is co-extensive with just one ingredient, perception, and that
no further ingredients or constraints need be mentioned (since it is not a compound).
As I indicated, I think that Plato means us to see that this project is unsound, scien-
tistic. It is symptomatic of the methods and ambitions of natural science. Socrates is
trying to reduce episteme to some other kinds of cognition, an ambition that is probably
at best useless, and at worst nonsense.
In any case, I doubt that Socrates, or Plato, means these analyses to be examples of a
genus, species, differentiae model of definition. Throughout the Theaetetus, Socrates
seems to be thinking of breaking compounds into component parts and listing the
parts. He does this for the clay, and later he does that for the letters and syllables in the
dream theory, and for the wagon.44 Although someone could, in principle, argue that
listing the species that fall under a genus is a kind of analysis or decomposition, the text
explicitly excludes the possibility that Socrates could mean anything like that. For Socrates
explicitly rejects Theaetetus’s first analysis, which was a list of types of knowledge, and
equally dismisses any attempt to explain clay by listing the types of clay, by their uses
for instance. He seems not to realize that the type to be analysed might be generic or
abstract, with species that are types or subsets. All his illustrations of analysis involve
listing components or the ingredients of a particular wagon, compound, etc. Nor,
perhaps, would a genus/species analysis of episteme be helpful. For if episteme is con-
ceptual knowledge, as I think Plato means it to be, it surely cannot usefully be explained
as a species of anything else, unless we invent some generic class of ‘cognition’, of which
conceptual knowledge is one kind. Nor does anything else seem to be a species of it,
unless the grasp of each different concept is a species of episteme. But since the proper
content of episteme should be the entire tree of concepts, with all their interrelations
and intersections, then science itself, being also somewhere on that tree as a species of
cognition, with species of its own, will be both the grasp of all the concepts and one
of the concepts that it grasps, thereby generating a species of knowledge that is the
knowledge of what knowledge is. That is fine, in its way, but to place it on the tree,
we must already know what it is, and how it fits.
II.iii That there is nothing wrong with using the term that is
to be defined, and that Socrates is confused on that score
Socrates and Theaetetus are investigating an existing concept, one that both parties can
evidently use and understand, so they do not have to posit or stipulate new theoretical
tools. In practice, their method involves testing proposed definitions against their
existing practical knowledge of the extension of the term ‘science’. Their normal usage
provides the standard of correctness, because they know what they are talking about,
as well as anyone can.
44
210d; 207a–d.
However, at 196e Socrates claims that this procedure is logically suspect, because
they have been using concepts without ‘knowing them’:
Text 10.6
Socrates: And secondly, don’t you think that it’s shocking to say what knowing is
like while not knowing knowledge? But look, for ages now our dialectical procedure’s
been shoddy, Theaetetus: we’ve said ‘we know’ and ‘we don’t know’ and ‘we grasp’ and
‘we don’t grasp’ a myriad times, as if we understood something in a discussion where
we still don’t actually know knowledge. Right now in this very sentence, you see, we’re
using ‘not know’ and ‘understand’ again, as though it were okay to use those terms
even when we’re deprived of knowledge.
Theaetetus 196d10–e7
Burnyeat takes this to be a complaint about using examples in the enquiry.45 Alternatively
one might think that Socrates is objecting to using a word or concept that they cannot
define, or that he means that they are begging the question by using the word that is to
be explained. However, a closer look at Text 10.6 reveals something more subtle. Socrates
does not complain that they have used the term that they are trying to define (i.e. epis-
teme) but that they have been using verbs of knowing and not knowing in the first-person
plural (‘γιγνώσκομεν’ καὶ ‘οὐ γιγνώσκομεν,’ καὶ ‘ἐπιστάμεθα’ καὶ ‘οὐκ ἐπιστάμεθα’)—
while not knowing the substantive episteme. They have repeatedly spoken of them-
selves knowing or not knowing things.
There is a particular paradox in asking, about ourselves, whether we ‘know knowl-
edge’, if asking and answering that question requires knowing what knowing is. The
enquiry is ‘sullied’ because the very question (do we know?) requires us to know
the answer before we can ask it. Socrates does not mean that any enquiry is impure if
the concept up for discussion is mentioned in the question, but only that the enquiry
into knowledge is impure if the investigator already attributes knowledge to herself,
thereby presupposing that she already knows what knowledge is.
In fact, however, this purity ideal is still nonsense. No enquiry is possible unless the
participants know how to use the term ‘knowledge’ about their own epistemic states as
well as those of others. They are able to embark on the enquiry precisely because they
can already distinguish between knowing and not knowing for a range of cases, includ-
ing their own, so as to provide paradigm cases against which to test the definitions.
Meno’s paradox raises its head again, and must be answered by observing that Socrates
and Theaetetus do appeal to paradigm examples, and that this does imply that they
already have a good grasp of what they are investigating, though not as a definition.
They do ‘know knowledge’, so it is fine to say so.
Text 10.6 also contrasts saying ‘what knowing is like’ (ἀποφαίνεσθαι τὸ ἐπίστασθαι
οἷόν ἐστιν) with knowing—or rather not knowing—science itself (μὴ εἰδότας
45
Burnyeat, ‘Examples in epistemology’, 384, 387.
ἐπιστήμην),46 which is reminiscent of the Meno’s contrast between a poion question,

such as whether virtue can be taught, and knowing what it is (Meno 71a, 86c–d).
I argued, in Chapter 4, that Plato does not himself endorse the position that Socrates
presents in the Meno. Here too in the Theaetetus Socrates is similarly purist, with the
only difference being that the form prescribed for saying ‘what it is’ is now a chemical
formula (‘clay is earth kneaded with water’, Theaetetus 147c). And here too Plato shows
how this purist attitude will cause problems.
In sum, then, all of the constraints that Socrates imposes on Theaetetus seem
destined to make his efforts a failure, on top of the fact that he is in any case too
young and still in his geometry class. It seems that the problems that the project
encounters are to be attributed to a faulty model of what scientific discoveries and
definitions should look like; from which one might draw the conclusion that Socrates
only half knows what science is, since he too, like Theaetetus, is rather too ready to
impose a model of enquiry that belongs to a different discourse, and to seek for a kind
of knowledge that will not qualify as episteme in the end. There was, after all, nothing
wrong with starting from examples, and there is no reason to think that knowledge
will turn out to be a compound capable of analysis into parts or reduction to some other
cognitive condition.
III. In Which We Briefly Consider Theaetetus’s

Proposal That Science Is ‘Perception’: Whether
It Is a Good Suggestion and Why It Fails to Thrive
III.i That Theaetetus conceives his proposed definitions by the iconic method,
generalizing from his experience of geometry as a science, and that his first
proposal has some merits, since knowledge of concepts is a bit like perception
After Socrates has explained his role as intellectual midwife (discussed in Chapter 9),
Theaetetus offers his first attempt at a suitable analysis of episteme. ‘One who knows
something perceives that thing which he knows’, he says (151e1–2).
EA: Episteme is aisthesis.47
That is, science (episteme) is co-extensive with and reducible to perception (aisthesis).48
It seems reasonable to suppose that Theaetetus must conceive his idea by the iconic
method, by using a familiar case as a paradigm from which to examine the type to
which it belongs.49 He might think thus: ‘What is a science? Geometry is a science.
46
196d12. 47 See Chapter 9, Section I.ii.
48
At 151e1–2, ὁ ἐπιστάμενός τι αἰσθάνεσθαι τοῦτο ὃ ἐπίσταται . . . implies that all knowers are perceiving.
Theaetetus then reformulates as ‘science is nothing else but perception’ (151e2–3). Socrates understands him
to mean that E and A are co-extensive and substitutable in both directions.
49
See Chapter 7.
What is it to know something in geometry? It is to perceive it (in a diagram, say).

So knowing something is perceiving it.’50 The proposal is, in many respects, a promising
one. The grammar of the verb ‘perceive’ correctly mirrors the grammar of the verb
‘know’ as used by Socrates in this discussion. The paradigm of knowing, in this discus-
sion, is correctly identifying attributes or features in the world, such as feeling what
is cold as cold, tasting what is sweet as sweet, and so on. The items recognized are
instances of properties (that is, tropes in the language of contemporary metaphysics).51
Perception similarly is taken to be perception of tropes. Theaetetus is not talking
about propositional perception, such as perceiving ‘that this or that is cold’, but rather
of perceiving an instance of coldness or heat etc. Regardless of whether we would say
(in describing the situation from a third-person perspective) that the feature is a fea-
ture of some thing, or that it is in something or belongs to something, those are not what
the perceiver perceives or knows by using aisthesis.52 On this model of aisthesis, we
never perceive ‘that x is F’. Aisthesis does not place the perceived features in objects or
locations.53 It follows that when the perceptions are true, this is not because they are
true propositions, or they make true predications. They count as true just if the exter-
nal world contains the feature as observed.54
Hence Theaetetus’s idea, that episteme is successful perception of this kind, is a
promising idea. Given that aisthesis is a faculty for detecting sensible features in the
environment, and if science is targeting a correct discernment of those features, as
Theaetetus may well suppose, then successful perception will amount to science. This
seems to be what Theaetetus has in mind at the start. Even when Socrates adds further
kinds of knowledge, such as successful predictions, memories, and so on, still the
range of features grasped remains the same. The discussion is about cognition of sen-
sory features, always non-propositional. For instance, Socrates talks not of predicting
‘that it will be sweet’, but of ‘expecting sweetness’,55 and invariably the things perceived
or expected are tokens and instances of forms (tropes), rather than types and forms: he
talks about predicting a case of sweetness, not sweetness as such. Just as all sensory
experience is of the particular, so the predictions and memories are of particular sensory
instances of some feature.
The potential of EA is not fully clear until Socrates has engaged in his midwifery
(as described in Chapter 9, Section I) and worked out the ‘support package’ that will
50
On seeing geometrical truths, see Section I.i and note 2.
51
See Simons, ‘Particulars in particular clothing: three trope theories of substance’. Tropes are typically
assumed to be located in substances (concrete particulars), either dependent on a substratum, or as the
integral components of substances in bundle theories. It seems to me that the Heraclitean theory, and Plato
generally, assumes that tropes are stand-alone components of the sensible world, or at least that they are
epistemically self-standing.
52
Plato’s account seems better at capturing the non-propositional nature of this cognition than the
‘feature-placing language’ envisaged by Bertrand Russell, An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth (London:
Allen and Unwin, 1940), 97, which still imports a subject-predicate structure.
53
The predicate term (here ‘its Fness’, e.g. the coldness) is not a proper name (it is not the name of the
property type ‘coldness’ but a generic term identifying the perceived feature as an instance of coldness).
54
See Osborne, ‘Knowledge is perception’, 145–50. 55 178c–e.
give it a fair chance of survival—after which it can be put to the test. In developing its
support package, Socrates introduces a Protagorean epistemology (MM), whereby all
perceptions of simple properties are true and count as knowledge, and a Heraclitean
ontology (FLUX)—an ontology of transitory tropes, such that any perception that is
true (as all of them are) is true only momentarily, of a trope that is only momentarily
there, in the world-as-perceived (a world momentarily created in the interaction of
perceiver and world and dissolved when that interaction is over). These developments
in the support package, which we examined in Chapter 9, did not presuppose any material
substrates or subjects for the tropes to reside in, nor did they make any propositional
claims about them. The world, and the world-as-perceived, were merely a flow of fea-
tures or qualities (tropes) existing outside the mind, to which perception gave trans-
parent access, so that the mind always perceives them as just the tropes that they are.
It seems, then, that John McDowell is wrong in multiple ways when he comments
that whereas, for us, perception can be either of things or of propositions, for Plato,
perception—unlike doxa—is of things, and hence cannot be a candidate for truth, or,
therefore, for knowledge.56 Setting aside, for the sake of argument, his implicit assump-
tion that Plato is presenting his own theory—which is extremely doubtful—we should
challenge McDowell on the following points: (i) perception is not of things but of fea-
tures; (ii) it is incorrect to say that ‘for us’ perception is of either things or propositions,
since we too, like Plato, can speak of perceiving tropes; and (iii) truth is not confined to
propositions, since all perceptions, including simple perceptions of tropes, are truth-
apt in virtue of their intentional representational content, their portrayal of the world.
Wrong too, it seems to me, is Myles Burnyeat, who takes aisthesis in EA to be
propositional, such as perceiving ‘that x is F’.57 Like McDowell, Burnyeat took it that
aisthesis must be propositional if it is to be truth-apt, so he tried to accommodate that
on Plato’s behalf, importing not only an inappropriate notion of propositional truth,
but also a grammar for the words ‘know’ and ‘perceive’ that did not fit with the Greek
text in this section of the dialogue. Throughout the discussion of EA, Plato consistently
places a direct object after the verb ‘know’. He is not talking about knowing that such
and such is the case, but about observing something (e.g. cold or sweet). ‘Someone who
knows something, perceives what he knows’, says Theaetetus (151d–e).
III.ii That Socrates respects the standard constraints on what can

count as science, in developing his support package for EA
EA is Theaetetus’s first attempt at a compositional analysis on the model of the clay
example offered by Socrates. It is simple, since it lists just one component, aisthesis.
However, that component is rather broad and inclusive. Besides extending to non-
sensory perception (doxa-type observations), as discussed above,58 the term aisthesis
56
McDowell, Theaetetus, 118. 57 Burnyeat, Theaetetus, 11.
58
See Chapter 9, Section II.i. A narrower sense of aisthesis, meaning sensory perception, is proposed in
the Interlude (see Chapter 11).
and the corresponding verb aisthanesthai (to perceive) are evidently not confined to
accurate perceptions, in normal usage. Apparently one can speak also of ‘perceiving’
something when one is misperceiving, such as in distorted tastes and poor vision.
Theaetetus is attempting to equate a fallible grasp (perception, including mispercep-
tion) with an infallible one (science, being a correct grasp of the world as it is).59
Socrates’ task as midwife is to try to make the child viable despite this initial problem.
He must look for simple adjustments that could solve this misfit between fallible per-
ceptions and infallible science. In theory, one might seek to make adjustments either in
‘episteme’, by extending it to include false or illusory beliefs, or in aisthesis, so as to make
it infallible. Socrates does the latter, but he adjusts it not by excluding the distorted per-
ceptions or denying that they are perceptions, but rather by denying that they are ever
false. If all perceptions, including what seemed like false ones, are actually true, then the
misfit is resolved. This is what is achieved in the section that imports the relativist epis-
temology from Protagoras (MM), and the FLUX ontology from Heraclitus.
Thus, for a moment, Theaetetus’s suggestion looks viable. This is achieved without
discarding the existing constraints on what science is—that science infallibly grasps
truth, how things are, about an external objective reality, not just a subjective experi-
ence. None of these standard constraints is discarded. But perception is made to seem
as though it can do just that.
IV. Conclusion: That Geometry Invites the

Thought That We Perceive the Intelligible
Types in the Diagram, and That No Other
Scientific Knowledge Is Presupposed
In the end EA fails, so does this mean that it was not such a good proposal after all?
If, as I suggest, episteme is cognition of the type or form, not the recognition of instances
of the property, two alternative interpretations of this section are available. On the
less interesting interpretation, Theaetetus has hastily assumed that the tropes that he
sees in his diagrams are the abstract types and forms that they instantiate, and infers
that scientific knowledge (of types and forms) is identical with perceiving those
particular features.
The second, more generous, interpretation would reckon that Theaetetus already
understands that his scientific knowledge is a grasp of abstractions and generalities,
and that those are separate from the sensible features in the diagram, but because the
iconic method employed in geometry is so familiar, he hardly sees any difference
between perceiving the feature in the diagram and thinking of the abstract form
it represents—so that he imagines that he literally sees ‘the parallel itself ’ in seeing
59
We should not, therefore, be tempted to say that Socrates distorted EA from the start by including
misperceptions, as I did in Osborne, ‘Knowledge is perception’, 151–3.
arallels on his diagram, and ‘the equal itself ’ in seeing equals. Understood in this way,
p
EA is the work of a promising student. Theaetetus notices that we get our knowledge of
abstract types via the visible tokens—that we see the types in the tokens. Iconic think-
ing is indeed a kind of perception, for we see not just lines on a page; we see them as a
picture of the forms that they portray.60
60
It is unclear whether we should say that we perceive the type directly in a case of seeing as or whether
it is somehow indirect or inferential. It is also unclear to what Theaetetus is committed in this matter.
11
The Division Between Sense
Perception and Non-Sensory
Doxa in the Interlude
Theaetetus 184a–187b
In this chapter, I examine the famous passage that forms a transition between Theaetetus’s
first proposed definition (EA) and his second.1 I call this section the Interlude. In
Chapter 9, I argued that the refutation of EA was already complete by 183c3, at which
point EA itself gets discarded, not just its support packages.2 So the Interlude is not
(as many suppose) the final refutation of EA, but rather its role is to provoke the next
pregnancy (ETD) which is brought to birth at 187b6.
I shall take as read my earlier conclusions about the structure of this and the preceding
part of the dialogue (Chapter 9) and about Socrates’ faulty model of compositional
analysis (Chapter 10). In Section I of this chapter I investigate the terms doxa and
doxazein which are such key terms in the Interlude and in Theaetetus’s next two
proposals. In Section II I review and reject some classic and more recent accounts of
the Interlude. In Section III I explain what I take it to be doing instead. In Section IV
I argue that the Interlude makes more sense once we understand the special kind of
being and truth which Socrates is trying to locate.
I. In Which We Clarify the Meaning of Doxa and

Doxazein in the Rest of the Dialogue
I.i That ‘believe’ or ‘judge’ are not good translations for D, and why not
As we saw in Chapter 9, the Interlude distinguishes two kinds of observation, one
using bodily senses, and the other done by the soul ‘itself by itself ’. Theaetetus is asked
to label the two kinds of perception (186d7–187a8; see Text 9.3). At 187a8, Theaetetus
proposes to call the second kind doxazein:
1
On the overall structure of the dialogue and its three main parts, see Chapter 9.
2
See Chapter 9, Section I.ii.
Text 11.1
(i)—So we have now got to the stage where we won’t look for science in perception at
all, but in that name, whatever name the soul has, whenever it bothers itself all by
itself about the things that are (onta).
(ii)—But this is called ‘doxazein’, Socrates, as I understand it.
187a3–8
Sentence (i) speaks not of different faculties in the soul but of the soul having different
names when it engages in different activities. Theaetetus is asked to name the soul’s
activity, and he names it with a verb in the infinitive (doxazein), exactly as, in Text 9.3,
he gave the verb ‘aisthanesthai’ as the technical term for SP (186e1). There Socrates
glossed the verb with the active verbal noun aisthesis (‘perceiving’) at 186e2, while for
doxazein the noun equivalent is doxa (offered by Theaetetus, without hesitation, at
187b4). Our shorthand for this second activity of the soul is D.
The verb doxazein is impossible to translate, because in this dialogue it takes a direct
object, whereas none of the usual translations, such as ‘believe’, ‘judge’, ‘think’, or ‘opine’,
can do that. Plato makes the grammar of doxazein (D) identical to that of aisthanesthai
(A) in the EA definition, and aisthanesthai (SP) in the examples in the Interlude. All of
these take a direct object, so the soul perceives blacks, whites, hots, and hards by
SP (184d–e); and it discerns being, sameness, difference, one, and other numbers about
some sensed features by D (185c–d).3
Arguably Plato himself has deliberately changed the grammar of doxazein for this
purpose. For although the verb is not newly invented, the way that Plato uses it in the
Theaetetus is peculiar. In other texts outside Plato’s corpus the verb doxazein normally
takes the accusative and infinitive (with propositional content),4 whereas Plato uses it
here with a simple accusative object.5 This suggests that Plato is deliberately stretching
the language to describe something that does not have a regular name in common
usage: a kind of mental perception that takes particular features as its objects, in a way
that is formally and grammatically parallel to sensory awareness of perceptible features.
The construction with a direct object, then, is not an accidental feature of the normal
grammar of doxa in Greek. It is Plato choosing to conceive of doxa as a relation between
a mind and a single discernible feature (not a proposition). So it cannot be correct to
ignore this, as most interpreters do, and re-express all the doxastic judgements as
formulae of the ‘x is f ’ type. John McDowell, for example, claims that Plato thought of
a propositional judgement (‘that x is F’) as ‘touching or handling’ a number of things
or ‘terms’, so that any singular judgement is cognizant of three ‘terms’, namely ‘x’, ‘is’,
3
For the repeated use of the direct object construction see e.g. 189a6–b5.
4
Aeschylus Agamemnon 673; Euripides Suppliants 1043; Troades 347; Orestes 314 etc. Some occurrences
use a participle instead of an infinitive, but very few are constructed without a verb at all as here.
5
The accusative objects are of two kinds: (a) the feature discerned (truth, being, sameness etc.), (b) the
truth value (e.g. to ‘think falsehoods’), particularly in the discussion of false doxa.
The Division Between Sense Perception and Non-Sensory Doxa 199
and ‘F’.6 There is no textual warrant for that. So, for all his care in noting how Plato
speaks of ‘knowing things’, here and frequently throughout the dialogue,7 McDowell
misses the significance of the very clue that he has so carefully tracked. He takes the
strange talk of ‘discerning something’s Fness’, or ‘discerning the F’ (in something), as
shorthand for ‘discerning that something is F’.8 Obviously McDowell is not alone in
this, but we might have expected otherwise, given how carefully he observes the
direct-object expressions.
Most recent interpreters have so keenly devoted their efforts to finding propositional
content in doxa that they miss what Socrates actually says about how SP differs from D.
As a result, they require extraordinary exegetical contortions to make sense of what
Socrates says, and how he says it, in line with what they want to find there. Some of
these readings are discussed below in Section II. By contrast my claim is that, once we
take Plato’s grammar seriously, we find that Socrates is drawing a simple distinction,
involving none of the difficulties created in the current literature. We should dismiss
the idea that D differs from SP in having propositional content, which is pure fantasy.
In fact, we should not think in propositional terms at all, either for D or SP, or indeed
for episteme (should we actually discover any cases of episteme).
To avoid confusion, then, we should try to respect Plato’s strange use of doxazein in
our translation. We need a verb with a direct-object construction, so ‘believe’ or ‘judge’
will not do.9 Many scholars choose those verbs and are happy to add ‘that’ clauses in the
translation, where Plato avoids them, because they suppose that Plato is trying (haltingly)
to say that doxa is propositional, and that translating it propositionally is a virtue.10
In my view, this is deeply unhelpful.
I shall insist, then, that what the soul perceives or discerns is, for both SP and D,
simply an instance of a property. For sure, this property could belong to something—
for example, extensionally the sweetness that I perceive might be the sweetness of
6
McDowell, Theaetetus, 188.
7
See McDowell’s notes on 147b4–5, 148c6–7, 151d–e, 163b1–7, 163b8–c3, 186c7–e12, 187e–188c,
188c9–d6, 195b–196c, 197a8–e7, 201d8–202b7, 206e4–207d2.
8
McDowell, Theaetetus, 115, 188–90, 192–3. In parts of his commentary McDowell connects this
direct-object grammar with knowing/perceiving objects, and with the idea that ousia might be the ‘what it
is’ of earlier dialogues (McDowell, Theaetetus, 115, 192–3, 194–5), which would align him with the ‘C-reading’
(see note 21). But sometimes he suggests that Plato muddles that sense of ousia with one that indicates prop-
ositional content (e.g. McDowell, Theaetetus, 118, 192–3); and he assumes that knowing ‘what something is’
answers an indirect question, and should be a proposition (McDowell, Theaetetus, 115).
9
McDowell, Sedley, Bostock, and Burnyeat use ‘judge’ and ‘judgement’. Frede, Chappell, Fine, Silverman,
Lott, and many others use ‘belief ’ and ‘believing’ or ‘forming a belief ’. Both of these choices give the impression
that D has propositional content.
10
Those who think that propositions enter the discussion here include Frede, Burnyeat, and Bostock
and (sometimes) McDowell. Also more recently Lorenz, The Brute Within, chapter 6. These interpretations
are discussed in Section II below. But note that Myles Burnyeat does not retain propositional structures
into the last part of the dialogue: he recognizes (against Gilbert Ryle, ‘Plato’s Parmenides’, Mind, 48 (1939),
129–51, 302–25 (reprinted in R.E. Allen, ed., Studies in Plato’s Metaphysics 1965, 97–147) and Gilbert Ryle,
‘Logical atomism in Plato’s Theaetetus’, Phronesis, 35 (1990), 21–46) that the propositional reading of the
Dream argument, though tempting, cannot be sustained (see Burnyeat, Theaetetus, 129–32, 157).
the tea; and ditto for any case of doxa.11 But that fact is not what I perceive by SP or D.
All that I perceive or discern is the property (e.g. sweetness or unity).12 No good trans-
lation is available for this. In many cases it is best not to translate at all, but to use doxa
or D instead. But where I do translate doxazein, I have chosen to use ‘discern’, because
it can take a direct object, and it can be non-sensory. Unfortunately it tends to imply
success, whereas doxa can be mistaken, so I shall use ‘discern’ in a slightly odd way
such that false discerning is possible. This oddity seems easier than trying to make
‘believe’ or ‘judge’ work with an object.
I.ii That when Socrates lists ‘being’ as (hypothetically) one of the features
accessible to D but not SP, he does not mean propositional form
Between Text 9.3 (where Theaetetus chose a technical term for SP) and Text 11.1 (where
he chooses a technical term for D) comes Text 11.2 (in which Socrates claims that truth
is inaccessible to SP, which entails that SP cannot be science).
Text 11.2
Socrates: Touching on truth (ἀληθείας ἅψασθαι), we said, is not something to
which that one (sc. aisthesis) is party.13 Nor on being (οὐσίας), that’s why.
Theaetetus: No.
Socrates: Nor science (ἐπιστήμης), then.
Theaetetus: No.
Socrates: So sensory perception and science would never be the same thing.
186e4–10
Because SP cannot get at being, it cannot get at truth. So it cannot attain knowledge.14
So says Socrates, and Theaetetus immediately infers (fallaciously, of course) that if
anything does get at being and truth it must be doxa—though to be fair, that idea
had already been encouraged by Socrates when he included ‘being’ in a list of the features
accessed by doxa (see Text 11.4 and Text 11.6 below).
11
Some readers will doubtless insist that the content of D is propositional just in virtue of classifying
the feature that is discerned as an instance of a generic kind. My response would be that, if so, the same is
true for SP. But Plato envisages not a classification task but an observation task: in any case of SP or D there
are two items, the soul (observer) and the feature (observed).
12
Some scholars assimilate this to knowing a person or thing which leads them to speak of knowledge
by ‘acquaintance’, or a notion of ‘grasping/touching’. See e.g. R.S. Bluck, ‘Knowledge by acquaintance in
Plato’s Theaetetus’, Mind, 72 (1963), 259–63; Gail Fine, ‘False belief in the Theaetetus’, Phronesis, 24 (1979),
70–80 (reprinted in Plato on Knowledge and the Forms, chapter 9); David Barton, ‘The Theaetetus on how
we think’, Phronesis, 44 (1999), 163–80. In my view, Plato is not talking about things, but tropes.
13
The back reference is to 186c7 (see Text 11.7 below).
14
The requirement that knowledge must be of the truth has been present throughout, including the
discussion of EA, which required perceptions to satisfy the truth requirement, and did not question the truth
requirement. The truth requirement is never questioned in the Theaetetus. It is stated at 152c5–6 (legitimately
as far as I can see, but see F.C. White, ‘῾Ως ἐπιστήμη οὖσα: a passage of some elegance in the Theaetetus’,
Phronesis, 17 (1972), 219–26, who has perhaps been misled by ‘infallibility’ in Cornford’s translation).
This idea that doxa alone can access being, and that being is a prerequisite for
truth, has encouraged some scholars to suppose that Plato was thinking of beliefs with
propositional structure, on the basis that ‘being’ must be an obscure shorthand for
something that is (i) characteristic of propositional beliefs and (ii) beyond the reach of
perception. My view is that this is quite wrong, the reasons for wanting Plato to say this
are quite wrong, and the results of such a reading make it impossible to understand the
Theaetetus. The task of explaining why this is so will be quite complicated. The reader
must be patient through this chapter and the next, as we work through the text and
review the reasons for rejecting any such approach. We shall start by looking at the
canonical interpretations from the twentieth century that sought, with various nuances
and qualifications, to make Plato’s Theaetetus into a text about propositional belief and
propositional knowledge.15
II. In Which We Take Issue With Some Classic

Interpretations of the Interlude and Their More
Recent Descendants
II.i That there are four ways of reading the reference to ‘being’, and that
the most popular reading takes it as marking a feature of propositions
Three articles on the Interlude from the 1970s, by John Cooper, Myles Burnyeat,
and Michael Frede, have acquired a kind of canonical status. John Cooper’s ‘Plato on
Sense-Perception and Knowledge’ appeared in 1970;16 Myles Burnyeat’s ‘Plato on the
Grammar of Perceiving’ appeared in 1976;17 while an unpublished version of Michael
Frede’s ‘Observations on Perception in Plato’s Later Dialogues’, published in 1987,
was already known to Burnyeat when he wrote his 1976 article. Some lines of argument
that are typically attributed to these three canonical works had already appeared in
I.M. Crombie, An Examination of Plato’s Doctrines, in the 1960s.18
In the second half of the twentieth century these publications dominated not only
the interpretation of the Theaetetus but also received opinions on how Plato and
Aristotle differed over what perception can do without intellect. Their interpretations
underpin a widespread myth about ancient theories of mind.19
These, together with other canonical readings of the Interlude in the commentaries
by Burnyeat, McDowell, and Bostock, can be classified according to their position on
15
The reader may wish to skip Section II and proceed directly to my own exegesis in Section III.
We shall return to refuting the idea that ‘being’ is the copula in Sections III.v and III.vii.
16
Cooper, ‘Plato on Sense-perception and knowledge (Theaetetus 184–6)’.
17
Myles Burnyeat, ‘Plato on the grammar of perceiving’, Classical Quarterly, 26 (1976), 29–51.
18
Crombie, An Examination of Plato’s Doctrines, 26–7. Cooper, ‘Plato on sense-perception and knowledge
(Theaetetus 184–6)’, 143–4 discusses some difficulties raised by Crombie.
19
E.g. Richard Sorabji, Animal Minds and Human Morals: the origins of the Western debate (London:
Duckworth, 1993).
what is meant by the terms ousia (being), onta (beings), and the verb ‘be’ in this section
of the Theaetetus. I shall classify them under four headings: Reading P takes ‘be’ to mark
out propositional content; Reading C takes ‘be’ to mark out conceptual content; Reading
E takes ‘be’ to indicate the existence of some thing or feature; Reading R takes ‘be’ to
indicate the reality of some thing or feature, as contrasted with mere appearance.
Reading P has proved tempting to many scholars. It typically takes the verb ‘be’, and
its associated nouns, to refer to the copula. This is an incomplete use of the verb ‘be’,
which expects some predicate as complement. When Plato refers to ‘being’ as something
peculiarly discerned by D and not SP, Reading P takes this as his incompetent attempt
to pick out all and only judgements that take propositional form (loosely assimilating
all propositions to predications using the copula, in the form ‘x is F’). Plato would be
claiming that D but not SP has the ability to make judgements that use ‘is’ in this way,
that relatively few animals (perhaps only rational animals) can learn to make such
judgements, and that they learn this with great difficulty over a long time.20 By contrast,
other animals, using SP alone, are incapable of making any propositional judgements
about what they perceive.
By contrast, Reading C takes the verb ‘be’, and its associated nouns, to be what I have
been calling the ‘is’ of conceptual competence (though none of the interpreters use
this or any other term to identify this sense of ‘be’). This is a complete use of ‘is’, as in
knowing ‘what it is’ about some concept F, (‘knowing the F, what it is’, knowing what it
is to be an F, or what Fs are). According to Reading C, Socrates means that D could be
the faculty that grasps ‘what it is’ in this sense. For some readers, this means grasping
‘the Forms’. This means that, besides observing a case of F, D also grasps ‘what the
F itself is’. For some interpreters recommending the C reading, the comments at 186c
about how it takes a lot of time and thought to acquire this capacity would mean that
very few thinkers reach full conceptual understanding—perhaps not even all human
beings, if the Forms are known only to philosophers.21
Although my own reading is a version of Reading C, because I take Plato to mean
that true episteme is a conceptual grasp of the ‘what it is’, so any plausible candidate for
science must deliver that, I disagree with most of those who adopt Reading C for two
reasons: (i) because they mostly think that Plato is seriously suggesting that D delivers
the ‘is’ of conceptual competence, whereas I think that Plato means that it does not.
On my view, ETD, like EA before it, is a mistaken guess on Theaetetus’s part. As a result,
Theaetetus confuses the objects of doxa (particular tokens) with the objects known to
conceptual knowledge (types and forms); and (ii) I disagree with those who adopt
20
186c.
21
A version of the C reading is found in parts of McDowell, Theaetetus (see above, n. 8). The idea is
attacked by Bostock, Theaetetus, 137–42, whose main objections are (i) that it involves a special notion of
truth—but this is an unavoidable conclusion of any careful reading of the passage, as I shall argue below:
in fact, it involves notions of ‘truth’ and ‘being’ that are very common in Plato; and (ii) that it would be
odd to call ‘being’ one of the commons; but this is to suppose (with many other readers) that the notion of
‘common’ is doing the work here—a thesis for which the text offers no support. See my discussion below
in Section III.vi.
Reading C, if they suppose that conceptual knowledge, and conceptually rich judgements,
are not available to non-human animals or non-philosophers. In my view such knowledge
is a prerequisite for all the tasks done by both sense perception and doxa. On the other
hand, what takes time and is hard to do, and is exclusive to those animals that have
doxa, is something quite simple and perceptual, namely some simple second-order
non-sensory reflections about sameness and difference, about what is what, about
how many there are, and how this particular case differs from that one. These are things
which most animals, including most non-human animals, evidently learn to do,
though perhaps slightly later in their development compared with their acquisition of
sensory awareness.22 Arguably there may be some animals that never do attend to any
non-sensory features like sameness, difference, and so on, in their perceptions.
II.ii That many interpretations cobble together Reading C and Reading P,

sometimes with other interpretations as well, in trying to make sense
of Plato’s text
Because of the work that we have done up to this point, it should be easy for us to keep
Reading P and Reading C apart. One involves an incomplete use of ‘be’; the other
involves a complete use. One is about the syntax of the copula; the other is about
semantics, and the meaning of terms, or categories and types. One takes episteme to
be particular factual information about tokens, involving correctly predicating some
feature or property (difference, number etc.) of some subject, using judgements of the
‘x is F’ form; the other takes it to be a generic understanding of ‘what it is’ about a form
or class or type. In one case the verb ‘be’ is used in the present tense; in the other it is an
untensed use of ‘is’. We have learned that knowledge of a type does not consist of a
proposition involving the copula, nor does Plato think that it does—and even if con-
ceptual knowledge were couched in the form of a definition (a thesis to which some
readers cling, though we have seen reason to reject it on several occasions), the
definition would not be a formula of the ‘x is F’ kind (using a present-tense verb). That
logical form belongs only to statements about temporal particulars. So there is no
reason for us to confuse Reading P with Reading C, and we would not expect Plato
to be confused or trying to combine them, as though he thought that they were inter-
changeable or mutually entailing.
In some cases, interpretations driven by the desire to extort Reading P from the text
are nevertheless compelled to recognize traces of Reading C, which they must try to
accommodate by endorsing a mixture of both. The presence of Reading C alongside
Reading P in some discussions of the passage may be due not so much to confusion on
the part of the interpreter as to the need to make sense of what Socrates and Theaetetus
say—things that they would not say if they were talking about predications using the
copula (as P-readers would like them to be doing).
22
Similar thoughts (that we start life obsessed with sensory input, and only later, with difficulty, learn to
engage in abstract thought) appear at Phaedo 65a–c (discussed further below) and Timaeus 43c.
The story starts with F.M. Cornford in the 1930s,23 anticipating almost everything
that later thinkers have proposed. His main suggestion, a version of Reading C, is that
when Socrates speaks of a faculty that grasps ‘being’, he must mean grasping the Forms.
Cornford thinks that Plato deliberately avoids calling them ‘Forms’ in the Theaetetus
(which is why the text is a bit unclear).24
However, Cornford then adds something rather like Reading P. He suggests that
doxa involves propositions asserting the existence of features (‘Green exists here’, for
instance). This involves predication of the term ‘exists’. So he wants the references to
‘being’ in the text to be both about existence (this is Reading E), and about predication
of that kind of existence to property instances such as green, which is the P reading.
It is possible that his insistence that the propositions assert existence also connotes
something like the R reading, if asserting existence is asserting that the green is real,
not apparent. Cornford’s E reading is unusual, but in everything else he is anticipating
suggestions that resurface in every generation to the present time. He anticipates the
C reading aspects of Frede and Cooper, and the P reading aspects of Burnyeat’s inter-
pretation, which are also implicitly shared by Cooper and Frede.
Cooper is reacting against Cornford. He wants to reject Reading E and Reading P,
and replace them with one or other of two alternatives that he explores. One is a
version of the R reading, and the other is more like the C reading. He identifies con-
ceptualization and propositional form as two key features that characterize doxa in
the Interlude, but since he does not conclude that ousia refers to propositional
form, this is not strictly a P reading of ousia.25 So Cooper rejects (a) Cornford’s idea
that ousia means existence,26 and (b) Kahn’s idea that it includes the copula,27 which
Burnyeat would later endorse. Cooper does not favour either of these,28 but suggests
instead that by saying that doxa accesses ‘being’, Socrates means either (c) that doxa
applies concepts, to make judgements (the C reading), or (d) that doxa judges how
things really are, not how they appear (the R reading). But, says Cooper, doxa can do the
second—that is, (d)—precisely because it has conceptual access to the Forms—that is,
(c)—which permits it to apply objective standards and determine whether something
23
Cornford, Plato’s Theory of Knowledge, 102–9.
24
Cornford, Plato’s Theory of Knowledge, 106. On this kind of reading see Toomas Lott, ‘Plato on the
rationality of belief: Theaetetus 184–7’, Trames, 15 (2011), 339–64, who considers this to be the ‘traditional
reading’, and locates it in Deborah Modrak, ‘Perception and judgment in the “Theaetetus” ’, Phronesis,
26 (1981), 35–54 and McDowell, Theaetetus, 185–93.
25
Cooper, ‘Plato on sense-perception and knowledge (Theaetetus 184–6)’.
26
Cooper, ‘Plato on sense-perception and knowledge (Theaetetus 184–6)’, 139.
27
He is addressing Charles H. Kahn, ‘The Greek verb “to be” and the concept of being’, Foundations of
Language, 2 (1966), 245–65 (reprinted in Charles H. Kahn, Essays on Being, Oxford, 2009, 16–40). (Cooper
was writing before Kahn’s further publications on this theme, including Kahn, The Verb ‘be’ in Ancient
Greek.) See also Kahn, ‘Some philosophical uses of “to be” in Plato’, which defends a P reading, while also
claiming that Plato’s usage often requires more than one sense to be attached to ‘be’.
28
Cooper, ‘Plato on sense-perception and knowledge (Theaetetus 184–6)’, 140. Compare Burnyeat,
‘Grammar of perceiving’.
really is an example of the relevant kind. So in Cooper’s preferred interpretation, the

R reading is muddied with the C reading.29
So although he thinks that ‘being’ means reality, Cooper also holds that the ability to
judge whether things really are F depends on grasping ‘what it is to be F’.30 Indeed, he
finds it hard to decide between claiming (a) that SP is wholly devoid of concepts, such
that it cannot judge whether something is F, or (b) that SP can label what it encounters
as variously F or G. He finds the latter option hard to accept, partly because of assum-
ing that such labelling would require propositions (‘this is F’ or ‘x is F’), and partly
because of his commitment to the C reading, which assigns all conceptual content
to D, thereby rendering concepts wholly inaccessible to SP and precluding SP from
labelling sensory contents with conceptual labels. Without that assumption, Cooper
could have combined his preferred R reading with a conceptually rich account of SP,
which would allow SP to do conceptually informed labelling at some basic level—just
falling short of the ability to check for real versus illusory cases of F and G.31 But he
also finds the former option (the denial of conceptual content to SP) hard to accept
because of various things said in the text. So the result is a kind of impasse between
two alternatives, wholly compatible neither with the text nor with the dialectical
needs of the argument.32
Michael Frede combines a P reading with a C reading, in rather the same way as
Cornford did.33 He thinks that here in the Theaetetus, and also at Sophist 264a–b, Plato
is trying to untangle a confusion between belief and perception that had been prevalent
in the Middle Dialogues and caused problems there. Frede seems to think that Plato is
now making progress, by drawing a new distinction between perceiving and believing.34
In the Interlude, he suggests, Plato has discovered that truth is propositional, and
29
According to Lott, ‘Plato on the rationality of belief: Theaetetus 184–7’ versions of the R reading can
be found in Ernst Heitsch, Überlegungen Platons im Theätet (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1988); Yahei Kanayama,
‘Perceiving, considering and attaining being’, Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, 5 (1987), 29–81 and
Gerson, Knowing Persons, 204–12, but I think that it is a mistake to include Gerson (since he seems to
mean essence, not reality, so he belongs with what Lott calls the ‘traditional reading’: see Gerson, Ancient
Epistemology, 49). For another R reading not referenced by Lott, see Osborne, ‘Knowledge is perception’.
The objection raised by Burnyeat, ‘Grammar of perceiving’, 44 against R readings is, I think, countered
effectively on their behalf by Osborne, ‘Knowledge is perception’, 156–7 and nn. 47, 48.
30
Cooper, ‘Plato on sense-perception and knowledge (Theaetetus 184–6)’, 141–3.
31
Anyone who reads ousia as referring to conceptual content must correspondingly claim that SP lacks
it, unless (like me) they suppose that Plato means this idea (that D but not SP grasps conceptual being) to
be a mistake.
32
Cooper, ‘Plato on sense-perception and knowledge (Theaetetus 184–6)’, 132–3. I think that his ‘partial
answer’ (page 133) is on the right lines, though what he calls ‘labelling’ is much more sophisticated than
what I imagine Plato has in mind.
33
Such readings are classified as the ‘Conceptualist’ reading by Lott, ‘Plato on the rationality of belief:
Theaetetus 184–7’, note 14, who considers this the standard reading, by contrast with the R reading (which
he favours; see above, note 29). Like Frede (see below), Lott fails to distinguish the two roles for ‘is’ in his
‘Conceptualist Reading’ (in which ‘is’ implies both a syntactic copula and the essence of one or more com-
ponents of the proposition—indeed sometimes also the essence of ‘being’). His prime examples of this
so-called ‘Conceptualist Reading’, from which he is dissenting, are Christopher Bobonich, Plato’s Utopia
Recast (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), 295–331 and Lorenz, The Brute Within, chapter 6.
34
Frede, ‘Observations on perception’, 5.
hence that ‘belief ’ has propositional content. This looks like a P reading. But Frede now
suggests that such propositional beliefs presuppose sophisticated conceptual content,
and that Plato wanted to attribute that conceptual content to doxa too. Plato means, he
suggests, that to think a propositional thought ‘that A is F’, the thinker must first have a
grasp of ‘what it is to be for A’ and ‘what it is to be for Fness’.35 Hence any belief, even just
thinking that the sky is blue, requires immensely advanced and complex conceptual
competence. The thinker must grasp the essence of sky and the essence of blueness.
Knowing these essences, the ‘what it is to be for Fness’ and so on, is knowing ousia and
this is to be the work of doxa.
Evidently, this interpretation of ousia is the C reading. Frede thinks that saying that
doxa detects ‘being’ is Plato’s way of saying that doxa grasps ‘what it is to be’ about all
the concepts involved in a proposition. But he does not clearly separate this from the
idea that a proposition uses the syntactical copula, as the verb ‘is’. He clearly assumes
that part of what Plato is trying to insist upon is that propositional form is a prerequisite
for truth; and this claim cannot be grounded unless one is assuming a P reading.
Frede clearly implies that Plato is making progress at sorting these things out. He
seems to think that Plato agrees with what Socrates and Theaetetus are saying, and that
we would agree too. Plato, he suggests, has now come to see that perception and belief are
two different things, that perception does not deliver propositional content, that truth
requires propositional structure, that the earlier passage had muddled up perception
and belief, and that we cannot form any judgement ‘that A is F’ without a full grasp of
what it is to be for A and F. It is not clear why we should think that any of this is true, or
an improvement on earlier views, or that Plato was even trying to improve on his earlier
views, or was committed to any of these things, most of which are either dubious or plain
false. Given that the moves lead to confusion and failure in the dialogue, there is, it seems
to me, no good reason to saddle Plato with any of them.
Perhaps some will claim that my own proposal is a bit like Frede’s, since I also defend
a C reading of sorts. However, I differ profoundly from Frede, and from his followers
such as Lorenz, in the following respects: (i) I deny that doxa has propositional content.
I therefore reject all readings that find a reference to the copula in this passage, and also
all readings that assume that the topic is belief or that truth means propositional truth.
And (ii), while I agree that Plato thinks that knowledge has to be of concepts or essences,
there is no reason to think that what grasps those essences could ever be doxa. Granted,
D would need to do that to count as science, but it cannot actually do that because in
reality D discerns only particular cases, not the Form itself. So it cannot in fact count as
science. I think that Socrates does invite us to imagine, for a moment, that doxa might
be the faculty that grasps essences. But he turns out to be quite wrong about that,
because the things that D discerns are particulars, not forms. That is why the proposal
fails in due course.
Frede, ‘Observations on perception’, 7. See further below.

35
Myles Burnyeat too, like Frede, thinks that Plato is assigning all judgements, even of
the simplest kind, to doxa. He takes ‘being’ to refer to the copula in propositional
judgements.36 This is a P reading. But whereas Frede thinks of the moves in this passage
as evidence of progress on Plato’s part, Burnyeat denies that they are good ideas.
Stripping perception of its capacity for judgement is not progress, Burnyeat suggests.37
The only bit that impresses Burnyeat is the idea of a unified consciousness.38
David Bostock’s view is harder to interpret. First he describes a kind of conscious
experience that does not (yet, in the case of infants) bring the experiences under any
labels or concepts.39 He then contrasts that non-judgemental perception with another
kind that belongs to beings that are conceptually equipped, who then perceive things
under conceptual descriptors accordingly. Clearly Bostock means to confine the
later conceptually informed cognition to those beings that have concepts, for which,
apparently, D is supposed to be sufficient.
All these interpretations circle round three themes (propositional form, knowing
what it is to be F, judgements about reality as distinct from non-committal appear-
ance). All take the content of D to be propositional beliefs. All seem to assume that
Plato regards D as a serious candidate for counting as knowledge, and that he means
seriously to assert that D, but not SP, touches on ‘being’. In my view they are going
astray in three respects: first, in taking D to be propositional in contrast to SP which is
not propositional; second, in assuming that Plato endorses Socrates’ hypothesis that
D grasps being or ‘what it is’; and third, in assuming that Plato seriously thinks that D is
knowledge or some component of knowledge, as though the dialogue did not mean
to reject that view. Where they are right, on my view, is in the thought that some kind of
conceptual knowledge is required for any D activity to be possible. That is, to have any
kind of doxa, we need some minimal conceptual repertoire, so as to see some token of
F as a case of Fness. I think that this minimal kind of ‘seeing as’ was described by
Cooper as ‘labelling’—but that term is not wholly perspicuous, since it is not necessarily
linguistic. It requires recognition of tokens as belonging to a certain type, but need
not include the application of a linguistic label. But why deny that this can be done
within SP? As we have seen, Cooper found himself under pressure to assign this cap-
acity to SP too, although he wanted to resist it because of his expectation that it was
exclusive to propositions. I think he was right to feel that pressure, and that we too
should yield to that pressure and take it that both SP and D make conceptually informed
judgements—not propositions but discernment of simple features—using a repertoire
of conceptual tools; but—contrary to what Theaetetus has so far suggested—neither
of them can possibly provide those tools.
What then is D? And how exactly does it differ from SP? It is time to work through
the passage and present my own reading.
36
Burnyeat, ‘Grammar of perceiving’, 44–5. 37 Burnyeat, ‘Grammar of perceiving’, 50.
38
Burnyeat, ‘Grammar of perceiving’, 49. Even here Burnyeat complains that Plato fell short (too
Cartesian) by comparison with Aristotle.
39
Bostock, Theaetetus, 143–4.
III. In Which We Embark on a Reading of the

Interlude and Note That Socrates Distinguishes
Two Faculties Equipped to Detect Non-Propositional
Features, One With, and One Without, the Use of
Bodily Organs
III.i That Socrates explains his distinction between SP and D
by giving lists of paradigm cases
Socrates develops his distinction between SP and D by his customary iconic method—
customary, that is, in that we have encountered it several times in Socrates’ own practice.40
He does not give a definition or state any criteria but instead offers various examples in
the course of explaining what he means (184e–186d). We can assemble these examples
into two lists, one for SP and one for D. I shall call these List A and List B. Theaetetus has
to work out what Socrates has in mind, from the examples.
List A includes various features that we perceive by way of bodily sense organs.
Socrates mentions white, black, warm, light, or sweet (184e), salty (185b), hard and
soft (184e, 186b). List B includes features that cannot be perceived using sense organs,
but can be discerned by the soul operating itself by itself, without any organ. It includes
being, not being (185a, 185c, 186a, 186b, 186d), likeness and unlikeness, the same and
the different, one, number, odd and even (185c–d), noble and base, good and bad (186a),
and opposition (186b).
Recognizing that this is a paradigm-case approach to explaining a pair of concepts
can help us to understand the structure of the argument. These are not exhaustive
lists of all SP features and all D features. The examples are selective, the stereotypical
ones illustrating the core of the concept: classic examples of sensory perception, classic
cases of features that are not perceived through bodily organs. Socrates need not con-
tinue to add examples, once Theaetetus has successfully grasped the idea and can continue
reliably by himself (as at 186a, for instance). There is no reason to suppose that the list
of examples traces the limits of the class, or that it has risked mentioning any borderline
or tricky cases. Perhaps there are no borderline cases.41 Equally we should not hesitate to
carry on if we need to, following Socrates’ lead, so as to include, in List A, the common
sensibles such as shape and size, which evidently belong there since perceiving them
requires bodily organs, even if more than one sense or organ can serve in these cases.42
These do not pose a problem for the general distinction between features for which we
need bodily organs and features for which no organ is available or required. The first
premise of the argument is that our cognition of some features necessarily comes
40
E.g. in the Meno the diagonal in the diagram is an exemplar of a certain length, and in the Republic
the imaginary city provides an exemplar of justice.
41
kalon and aischron (186a9) might seem somewhat contentious, since certain kinds of beauty and ugliness
seem to be perceived by using eyes and ears and so on.
42
See below, note 44, and Section III.iv.
through bodily organs. We know roughly what features those are. Socrates has mentioned
some obvious examples.
III.ii That the argument does not assume that all sensibles are
special sensibles, accessible to only one sense
Socrates starts by discussing List A, at 184c–e. He wants to show that a subject (soul or
whatever)43 can survey input from more than one sense, even where the features in
question are exclusive to one sense and inaccessible via the other. This passage should
probably be more controversial than it has been hitherto: most interpreters suppose
that Socrates is foolishly assuming that all sensory features are exclusive to one sense,
and that the argument depends upon this unproven and probably false premise.44 But
there is no need for this complaint. The argument focuses on the case that proves the rule:
if there are even some sensory features that are exclusive to one sense modality, and if
there are at least two such modalities having one or more such exclusive features, and
if it is nevertheless possible for the soul to compare those pairs of exclusive features,
then the content of those sensations must be jointly accessible to something else that is
not itself one of those two exclusive modalities whose exclusive objects are being com-
pared. To generate this clear case of a situation that would be inexplicable without a
single perceiver receiving both, Socrates sets up a premise that is focused on the hardest
case to explain, the one where mutually exclusive special sensibles such as sound and
colour are involved. This says nothing about whether there are also some common
sensibles, since, if there are, they will not help with the argument, for they are not the
ones that are hard to explain.
So the second premise of the argument is that even in the case of sensibles that are
inaccessible to each other’s senses, the soul is able to make comparisons, to consider
features that they share or ways in which they differ. If this is so for mutually inaccessible
senses, then a fortiori it is so for the common sensibles. It is enough to consider one good
case where the comparison cannot be done by either of the relevant senses. This shows
that the very same soul that is engaged in SP is also capable of some other activity
besides SP.
III.iii Whether we see with our eyes or with our souls, and why stipulating
some technical terminology helps the argument here (but has nothing to do
with correcting an earlier mistake or inventing a unified consciousness)
The capacity for cross-modal comparisons shows that the perceiver is unified, collecting
information from several senses. At 184c, with Theaetetus’s agreement, Socrates con-
firmed that sense perception is an activity not of the sense organs or the senses but of a
perceiver (the soul) who uses the senses or organs as tools. It looks initially as though
184d3.
43
See Kahn, ‘Some philosophical uses of “to be” in Plato’, 121–2. Lorenz, The Brute Within, 80, and
44
note 25 is an exception. See also McDowell, Theaetetus, 186.

Socrates prefers to speak of seeing and hearing through the eyes and ears rather than
with eyes and ears, since this is what Theaetetus favours at 184c8–9, and Socrates
suggests there that the dative usage (‘with the eyes/ears’) would imply that the separate
organs perceive independently, like separate homunculi in a wooden horse. But in
reality the exact usage, whether ‘with’ or ‘through’, is not very important. Socrates is
happy to use the dative ‘with’ formula at 185c1,45 and not much hangs on the choice
between those formulae, so long as the user understands that the organs are not
themselves the subjects of awareness. Socrates needs to distinguish a subject with
awareness from a tool without awareness, but it matters not which terminology is
chosen to make that point.
Burnyeat supposed that centralization was the focus here, and that Plato was
revising some earlier failure in other works.46 I see no evidence that Plato has his
own earlier views as a target;47 nor do I think that centralization is the key issue. Rather,
I suggest, Socrates is keen to distinguish mental and bodily components in SP. Even
for perceptions through a single sense, the perceiver needs to be a soul, something with
an intentional relation to what is perceived, while the bodily part is a mere tool or
mechanism whereby that soul acquires information. Only the recipient, not the organ,
is the kind of subject that could be a perceiver.48 The point of this passage is not to insist
on the unity of the perceiver but to guard against misunderstanding the role of bodily
organs in awareness; not so much to correct something that was previously wrong as to
make things more precise,49 to express what was meant all along, namely that phainetai
moi or aisthanomai means that I am aware of something, not that some bodily part of
me, or some semi-detached sense placed in some bodily part, is aware of something.
Since one can compare colours with sounds, those sensations cannot be confined in
separate organs or senses, or isolated from the centre of awareness that is the soul. The
senses are not in the organs themselves. So we perceive with the soul, and through
the senses, using the senses as tools.50
This preliminary move is now put to use. We can now assign both SP and D to the
same subject operating in different ways, (a) via sensory organs, and (b) without any.
In this second activity the soul attends to information already acquired via the first.
It is the same subject, with access to its own sensations, and in reflecting on these it
discerns other features for which it has no senses or organs, either special or common.51
These other features are the ones in List B, and the lack of bodily organs for them is,
I suggest, the most important step in this argument.52
45
Text 11.3. See note 56. 46 Burnyeat, ‘Grammar of perceiving’, 33–5.
47
Burnyeat cites bits of Republic 10 and 7. To my mind, none of these imply that bodily organs are
perceivers. Nor do I think that Socrates is correcting earlier expressions used in discussing EA, but even if
he were, we should not assume that those expressions were endorsed by Plato.
48
184d1–5; 184e6. 49 184d7.
50
184d4. At 184d4 and 185c1 the senses are described as organs, interchangeably with the sense organs.
51
185c. 52 185d–e. See Osborne, ‘Knowledge is perception’, 155.
III.iv That the thought experiment at 185b is not a mistake, but reinforces
the key premise, to ensure it is understood
At 185b Socrates offers a counter-factual thought experiment about second-order
investigations. Suppose that I have information from two different senses (a sound and
a colour), and I now want to consider whether they share some further sensible feature
(a flavour, say). To find the answer I will need to use my tongue, because the flavour
(salty) is a sensory feature that can be detected only through the tongue. Although my
investigation is apparently a second-order enquiry about two first-order perceptions,
it is still a sensory enquiry (because it is about a sensory feature from List A). It is not
something that my soul can discover, itself by itself. It still needs an organ.
Text 11.3 is Plato’s description of this hypothetical case. It seems bizarrely counter-
factual (because colours and sounds are never tasty), but nonetheless we must be
careful to pinpoint exactly what it is trying to prove. Some of its implications are
uncomfortable to many interpreters, who end up wishing that Plato had not said it
quite like that.
Text 11.3
Socrates: And this is further testimony of what we’re talking about: For if it were
possible to enquire about both, whether they were both salty or not (ἀμφοτέρω
σκέψασθαι ἆρ’ ἐστὸν ἁλμυρὼ ἢ οὔ), do you have an idea with what (ᾧ)53 you’d say we’d
make the inquiry—and it’s not sight nor hearing, apparently, but something else?
Theaetetus: What else will it be? Surely the faculty that works through the tongue?
185b9–c3
Let us examine three crucial things that this thought experiment is supposed to reveal.
First, it affirms that when an enquiry concerns some List A feature (such as salty), then
the soul will make its enquiries using SP, via an organ, even when the task involves
comparing existing perceptions from several senses.54 The soul cannot find out
whether two things are salty by just thinking about them, and to taste whether they are
salty one must use the tongue. Testing for saltiness is always an SP enquiry, even if
(extraordinarily) one is testing two mutually inaccessible features from one’s existing
perceptions. That is simply because ‘salty’ is in List A.
Second, although the hypothetical enquiry concerns a feature that is common (to a
sound and a colour), and second-order (a feature of one or both of the first-order
perceptibles), neither of these alters the status of the enquiry (tasting is an SP enquiry,
not D) or moves the saltiness into List B (it remains a sensory feature). Nothing else—
neither comparisons, nor commonality, nor second-order enquiries into one’s own
perceptual data—is of any significance in determining whether the required activity is
SP or D. The decisive consideration is simply whether the soul uses an organ.
On the dative here, see note 56.

53
Frede, Burnyeat, and the first of Cooper’s interpretations all accept this implication.
54
Third, Socrates makes no attempt to avoid the verb ‘be’ in formulating the soul’s
sensory enquiry into the saltiness of the colour and sound in Text 11.3. On my reading
there is no distinction between SP and D in whether their enquiries or results are
formulated using the copula, as we shall see,55 but for those who take the copula to be
a marker of D as opposed to SP (some versions of the P reading), Socrates’ casual use of
propositional descriptors for an enquiry via the tongue is a challenge.56
Perhaps someone might say that the whole idea of testing the saltiness of sounds
and colours is deliberate nonsense. Would Socrates not choose a real example, instead
of a counter-factual, if he meant to make a serious point? In my view, that objection
misfires, because no more plausible example is available. Socrates needs a case of
cross-modal comparison of two special sensibles, to assess them for a third feature that
is also a special sensible and not detected by either of the first senses. There are no
ordinary examples of such situations. The contorted example is clear evidence that
Plato is doing his utmost to make his point clear, to steer us away from errors such as
thinking that D differs from SP in virtue of second-order vs. first-order enquiry, or
propositional vs. non-propositional judgements, or comparing two things vs. perceiv-
ing just one, or finding a feature that is common to two things. To fend off all those
mistakes, Plato provides an explicit example of an enquiry that has all those features: it
is second-order, cross-modal, about a shared feature, and expressed propositionally
using the verb ‘be’ in the dual; yet it is, nonetheless, attributed to SP. Unlike most recent
interpreters, Theaetetus has no difficulty in grasping what is meant. Socrates congratu-
lates him enthusiastically for getting the point exactly right (and we should not try to
pretend that he has got it wrong, therefore).57 The sole criterion is whether the feature
discerned is one for which the soul needs some bodily organ.
III.v That the ‘being’ in List B is not the copula, and that propositional form
characterizes enquiry (both sensory and dianoetic), but not its conclusions
As we have just seen, salty, being a feature for which we use the tongue, belongs to List A.
By contrast, List B contains features for which there is no sense organ. The soul identifies
such features all by itself:
55
See below, Section III.v.
56
On Reading P see above, Section II. Sedley, The Midwife of Platonism, 106 n. 29 tries to escape the
implications of Text 11.3 by accusing Socrates of using a forbidden formula at 185c1 (deploying the dative
ᾧ, instead of ‘through’, for the instrument, see note 53) and arguing that the example is too counter-factual
and undermines itself by using the discredited ‘wooden horse’ model. But since Theaetetus immediately
responds with the correct terminology (διὰ τῆς γλώττης) at 185c3 this can hardly be the point. In fact the
dative at 185c1 refers not to the organ, or to the soul, but to the sense or faculty, as also do Socrates’ examples
of ‘sight’ and ‘hearing’ at c1–2, and Theaetetus’s expression ἡ διὰ τῆς γλώττης δύναμις at c3, so there is no
breaking of the rule that one perceives through the organ (pace Bostock, Theaetetus, 121, n. 35). But equally,
as I have argued above, the choice of ‘through’ or ‘by’ is unimportant, so long as the perceiver is the soul
and not the sense or the organ (see above, Section III.iii).
57
185c4. Lorenz, The Brute Within, 77 wants the point to be the exact opposite of what Theaetetus says,
so he reckons that at ‘Stage 1’ Theaetetus has failed to get it. Bizarrely this would have Plato adding arbitrary
confusion at this point, using badly expressed examples that fail to illustrate the right contrast, and com-
mending mistakes when they should be corrected. See also Sedley, The Midwife of Platonism, 106, n. 29
(as above, n. 56).
Text 11.4
Socrates: But through which organ is the capacity that shows you what is common
to all [things], and common to these—whereby we apply the term ‘is’ and ‘is not’,
and the other features we were asking about just now [sc. List B], to them? What
kind of organs will you provide for all these, through which that in us which does the
perceiving perceives each of them?
185c4–8
Our interpretation of Text 11.4 must cohere with our finding from Text 11.3, that
checking the salty in two things is an SP activity. Here, in the very next utterance,
Socrates is asking which activity is involved in deploying the terms ‘is’ and ‘is not’. The
answer is going to be that this is a diagnostic capacity of doxa. But since it is not clear
what ‘is’ and ‘is not’ mean in this case, we have a puzzle on our hands as to what this
feature that is supposedly distinctive of D would actually be.
Could it be the predicative use of ‘is’ and ‘is not’? Some P-readers are inclined to
suggest that this is what is meant, and that it signifies that all propositional judgements
are due to doxa and none are to be found among the activities of SP.58
In what follows I shall attempt to show that Socrates’ point has nothing to do with
propositional form or the ‘is’ of predication. To see why, we need first to make a dis-
tinction between investigating a question (the soul’s enquiry) and answering it (the
soul’s perception or doxa). Enquiries are always described in propositional form. They
are a kind of wondering whether p. Answers given by SP and D consist in observation
of a feature, perceiving the Fness, not a propositional judgement that p. While these
observations settle the propositional question, they do not consist of assertions, or
claims about a propositional fact.
Let us work through the textual evidence for these claims. In Text 11.3 Socrates asks
how we would investigate (skepsasthai) ‘whether a sound and a colour are both salty’.59
The question is formulated with ‘whether’ (ἆρ’) followed by a proposition describing a
potential state of affairs that might or might not obtain, but this does not appear to
mean that the answer, when we find it, would be a proposition of that kind, such as
‘that they are both salty’. In Plato’s usage here, the verb for perceptual investigating
(skepsasthai) takes a different grammatical construction (a proposition) from the verb
for perceiving (aisthanesthai), which takes a direct object. Similarly, the verbs of
mental reflection or enquiry (dianoeisthai or analogizesthai) take a propositional con-
struction (to consider whether . . . ),60 whereas the verb of mental perception (doxazein)
takes a direct object—an odd and deliberate quirk of Plato’s style in this dialogue, as we
noted above in Section I.i. So when the soul is considering a question, its question, and
some alternative answers, are expressed as propositions—‘that they both are’ and so on.
But these do not constitute examples of doxa being propositional, since these are not
See above, Section II and nn. 56 and 57.

58
ἆρ’ ἐστὸν ἁλμυρὼ ἢ οὔ, 185b10.
59
185b6, 185b10, 186a11.

60
cases of doxa. Doxa is when we discern something (doxazein): that is, discerning the
feature in question (e.g. ‘being’, ‘sameness’). The same applies, as we have seen, to SP,
which perceives a sensible feature (e.g. salty) via the senses.61
Rereading the text with this distinction in mind, we find that propositional form
never describes discovery but only enquiry, and it is equally distributed no matter
whether the enquiries are with organs or without. Text 11.5 lists several enquiries that
the soul can make about a pair of items:
Text 11.5
Socrates: Concerning the sound and concerning the colour, this is the first thing
that you would reflect about both of them, that they both are?
Theaetetus: I would.
Socrates: And that one [is] other than the other and identical to itself?
Theaetetus: Yup.
Socrates: And that both [are] two, and each [is] one?
Theaetetus: That too.
Socrates: And also whether they [are] dissimilar or similar to each other: you are
able to consider this as well?
185a8–b5
All these are investigations about List B features. The first three are cases of reflecting
that . . . and the fourth is a case of wondering whether . . . which suggests that the soul
sometimes has two options in mind (as in the last example), while in others, it is not
such an open question, but simply investigating whether some proposed description
applies. Socrates treats all these as examples of the same type of investigation. As in
the sensory enquiry about saltiness (Text 11.3), there is an indirect question to
consider, which the soul considers either by itself, for List B features, or with a sense
organ, for List A features. Answering the question involves perceiving or discerning
the relevant feature.
Where and when does the soul perceive or discern, as opposed to considering or
investigating? Not in Text 11.3 or Text 11.5, we should note. Both those are about
enquiring. But the grammar changes at around 185c4, when Socrates asks (naively)
about the faculty and organs through which one perceives List B features. To check
whether he has understood, Theaetetus lists some possible features:
61
This distinction between verbs of thinking or internal debate and the verb doxazein, which is not a
debate and not reflective but is the conclusion of some thinking, is crucial for understanding both the
Theaetetus and the Sophist. See Theaetetus 189d7–e3, and Sophist 263e–264d. See my treatment in Osborne,
‘Knowledge is perception’, 154–5 and (more briefly) Rowett, ‘On making mistakes’, 158–9. For rival views:
Dorothea Frede, ‘The soul’s silent dialogue: a non-aporetic reading of the Theaetetus’, Proceedings of the
Cambridge Philological Society, 215 (1989), 20–49; Grönroos, ‘Two kinds of belief in Plato’; McCabe, ‘Dialectic’.
See further below, Section III.v.
Text 11.6
Theaetetus: You mean being, not being, similarity, dissimilarity, the same and dif-
ferent, one and the rest of number. And clearly also, you’re asking about odd and
even, and the other things that those entail, what organ we have through which we
perceive those with our soul.
185c8–d3
If these are what Socrates means, then, Theaetetus reckons, there is no bodily organ,
but the soul surveys them by itself.62 So whereas Text 11.5 was about considering and
enquiring, Text 11.6 is about perceiving features. Now the soul no longer wonders
whether but simply finds, and what it finds is a feature, not a proposition (Fness, not
‘that x is F’). Both SP and D are like that.
So when Socrates says (185a9, 186b6) that questions about ‘being’ and ‘that they
both are’ belong distinctively to D, not SP, he does not mean ‘x is F’ judgements. In fact,
the absence of any complement for the verb ‘be’ must be significant. ‘That they both are’
is not a shorthand for ‘that they are both salty’ vel. sim.—Precisely not, since such a
judgement would clearly belong to SP.
Thus we have three clear reasons to deny that propositional judgements are being
assigned to D. First, the fact that Plato distinguishes SP and D by their respective
objects—the two lists—which are in turn defined by whether bodily organs are used in
the investigation—and not by the logical or grammatical form of the soul’s resulting
judgements. Socrates’ procedure, of listing which features belong to which faculty,
would be beside the point if the key difference were in the logical form of the judge-
ment. Second is the fact that for both types of judgement the soul is said to detect
a feature of something (perceiving the hardness of the hard, discerning the oppositeness
of the opposites and the being of the oppositeness), while the soul always investigates,
or considers, ‘whether, or that, x is F’. Plato uses precisely the same expressions (direct
object plus genitive for the observation, ‘whether or not’ plus proposition for the
enquiries) for D and SP. Third is the fact that the whole passage conceives of both
types of judgement on a perceptual model: a case of the soul detecting a feature in
something. ‘Being’ is listed as just another such feature—one that belongs, with the
rest, in List B, as something that the soul might sometimes investigate. This would be
not just misleading but quite confused if ‘being’ were actually a syntactic component of
every D judgement, and never the content of any.
III.vi That nothing much hangs on the claim that some features
in List A or B are ‘common’
Several contemporary writers describe the List B features as ‘the commons’, treating
the term ‘common’ (koinon) as a technical term, and assuming that being ‘common’
is Plato’s qualifying criterion for inclusion in List B, and that no List A features are
185e1.
62
common.63 In my opinion, this idea is a red herring. Indeed, we have successfully made
sense of the passage thus far without mentioning any such criterion—so arguably we
could just bypass it altogether as a distraction in other commentators that is best
ignored. However, since it has tempted so many off the track, diverting them from the
one criterion that Socrates actually mentions, we should briefly defuse it.
In the thought experiment at 185b, Socrates argues from a hard case.64 It highlights
the mutual inaccessibility of some features, namely those that are exclusive to separate
senses, such as colour and sound. This is crucial, since his purpose is to prove that even
in such cases there can still be further thoughts that survey both those features, thereby
showing that a subject with capacities over and above its separate senses has access to
both. Proving this for a pair of exclusive sensibles (colour and sound) effectively
excludes the possibility that one or other of those senses might be responsible for
detecting features common to both sensibles (since neither sense can, ex hypothesi,
access the other’s object).
So the thought experiment with colour and sound is well chosen, but it is also
risky—at least it was so for twentieth-century readers, who were inclined automatically
to assume that when Socrates moves from focusing on special sensibles to talking of
‘common’ features, his ‘common features’ must be features that are accessible to more
than one sense, such as what we know—after Aristotle—as the ‘common sensibles’
(e.g. shape).65 This is evidently incorrect, since those so-called ‘common sensibles’ like
shape play no role in the argument, and would be irrelevant, since they are sensory
features observed via bodily organs, albeit potentially via more than one such organ.
More plausible is the thought that Socrates is contrasting (a) recognizing a single
feature in just one item (the colour of one thing) with (b) checking two things for
shared features (e.g. their saltiness or ‘being’, or indeed their colour), and then also,
perhaps, (c) identifying features that are inevitably shared by all or a great many items.
It seems to me that the text supports that thought.66 But what exactly is this supposed
to mean?
There is a theoretically loaded way to take this and a less theoretically loaded way.
The theoretically loaded way is to suppose that a feature becomes ‘common’ whenever
it is treated generically as (potentially) belonging to more than one thing. That is, when
we refer in a generic way to some feature that many things might have—e.g. salty—we
are identifying it as a common feature, as opposed to cases where ‘salty’ refers to the
63
Silverman, ‘Plato on perception and “commons” ’, 163, n. 23 surveys the relevant literature. According
to Silverman, Plato is distinguishing ‘sensibles’ from ‘commons’, while underspecifying the membership of
each class, which leaves multiple ways whereby something might count as ‘common’, with the result that
different readers take ‘commons’ to mean either (a) predicates applicable to more than one individual
(e.g. all classes or concepts, including concepts of special sensibles such as red); or (b) predicates accessible
to more than one modality; or (c) predicates applicable to all objects, sensible and insensible alike.
64
See above, Section III.iv.
65
E.g. Kahn, ‘Some philosophical uses of “to be” in Plato’, 97. See above, Section III.ii.
66
See 185b8, 185b10, 185c5, 185e1 for occurrences of koinon which fit this reading: saltiness is an example
of something that might be koinon to the colour and sound, and being, similarity, and the like are things
that might be koinon to both these and all other cases.
particular feature in some particular thing—e.g. this peanut having a certain saltiness.
Hence the ‘commons’ would be generic concepts or forms of which there are instances,
and by contrast, the instances of those forms are not ‘commons’ but particular. The
difference between shared features and unshared ones would thus be logical: it would
mark the difference between particular and general.
The less theoretically loaded way is to suppose that observing a ‘common’ feature is
finding more than one occurrence of a particular feature (e.g. salty), by comparing
two or more cases (in contrast to observing just one case). So the contrast between
single and common would reflect the type of enquiry (singular observation versus
comparison across cases). Observing a ‘common feature’ is noticing what two things
share, and seeing it as shared (‘common’).
The theoretically laden reading is understandably attractive to a certain way of
reading this Interlude, since it seems to make distinctions (particular vs. generic, Form
vs. particular) that we would expect Socrates to make if he is intimating that episteme
takes the Forms as its object, and if he means doxa to be a serious candidate for a
faculty that can access those Forms. One could take the term ‘common’ as a quasi-
technical reference to the Forms; but the simpler reading fits the text better, it seems to me.
Socrates is not talking about intelligible objects or generalities, but about sensible
features that occur in two objects—some saltiness in two things, discovered by tasting
them with the tongue, if you could;67 or the being and self-identity observed in each
thing we encounter. It is hardly important whether ‘being’ is more widespread than
saltiness, since it is still a feature shared by two or more things. The difference that
matters for determining whether it is an object of doxa is not whether it is shared in
that way, but that we don’t use empirical evidence in the case of being and self-identity,
to check whether everything has them. Their ubiquity is apparent to thought, not to
sensory perception—indeed, it cannot be found out empirically.
Indeed, this is the key difference between objects of sense and objects of doxa.
So why does Socrates also mention that the features noticed by doxa tend to be not just
shared (as many sensory ones are) but ubiquitous?68 Here is how I would reconstruct
Socrates’ argument: first we agree that assessing two sensory features (sound and
colour) for a shared property that is sensory (salty) would be a task for SP; next we note
that assessing two features from List A or List B for a shared property from List B would
be a task for D; third we note that the shared properties from List B tend to be not
just shared among a few items but very widespread or universal; and we find that D is
the kind of thought that can deduce that fact; so recognizing the ubiquity of a List B
feature is not (as it was for saltiness) a matter of empirical observation. It is a matter for
the soul’s independent thought without an organ.
But in all this, being common or ubiquitous is not what makes something count as
a List B feature. Indeed, List A features are common too, in this sense. What counts
for List B is the lack of any sense organ. Furthermore, when discerning the being or
185c3. 68 185c5.
67
self-identity of something, D need not be considering more than one thing. Noticing
the being of one thing is still done by doxa.
III.vii That when Socrates links being with truth,

this is not because they are propositional
As a way of inviting Theaetetus to redirect his search for episteme from SP to D,
Socrates associates the feature called ‘being’ with something that he calls ‘truth’
(aletheia). For, he says, (i) what delivers episteme must deliver truth,69 and (ii) truth
is somehow internally related to being—a relationship that is (at last) made explicit
at 186c8 (Text 11.7), though we need no more than a reminder of this. Meanwhile,
‘being’ is a List B feature, according to 186a2–5 and other texts.70 So, stripping away
these necessary conditions in reverse order, Socrates finds (in Text 11.7) first that
one cannot hit the truth if one cannot hit upon being, and second, that one has not
got science if one hasn’t hit truth:
Text 11.7
Socrates: Can someone hit upon truth if they can’t hit upon being either?
Theaetetus: Impossible.
Socrates: Something one misses the truth of: will that be something one knows, by
any chance?
Theaetetus: How could it be, Socrates?
Socrates: Then science is not in the experiences, but in the reasoning about them;
for it looks as though it’s here that it’s possible to grasp being and truth, whereas it’s
impossible there.
186c–d
This is puzzling. Should we fall for it, as Theaetetus does? What kind of truth could
Socrates be talking about?
Take, first, the common-sense conception of truth that was operative during the
discussion of EA. There an appearance was ‘true’ if it matched reality. The Protagorean
‘Man is the Measure’ formula claims that all appearances are true in this sense, whereas
we normally assume that some are true, some not. When Socrates says that science is a
faculty that grasps truth, we could well understand it in this sense, on the basis that
science correctly describes how things are. But if this is what ‘true’ means, then some,
though not all, sensory perceptions (SP) would also be true (or ‘of the truth’) and
some, though not all, doxastic impressions (D) would be false while others would not.
For we can be right or wrong in both. SP and D would both similarly hit on the truth
whenever they perceive or discern something correctly, and not when they do not,
69
This is not new news: it has been an implicit constraint throughout the discussion of EA, as we saw in
Chapter 10. See above, note 14.
70
See also Text 11.4 and Text 11.6.
regardless of which features they are observing. Yet Socrates does not say that, but
rather that one can never hit the truth with SP, but only with D, and that D hits on
the truth not invariably, or whenever it correctly discerns its object, but according to
which object it is discerning; that is, only when it is discerning ‘being’. None of its other
observations can be of the truth, so none of the rest can be science, neither D nor SP.
This does not make much sense. Evidently, then, if Socrates means anything respect-
ably helpful, he cannot mean truth in that sense, as it was used in discussing Protagoras
and EA.
Three other, more sophisticated, options for what ‘truth’ might mean are favoured
in the existing literature.71 One is associated with what we called the P reading above.
The idea is that Plato is lisping towards a recognition that only propositional structures
can be truth-bearers, but is still somewhat confused, so that he is trying, in Text 11.7,
to explain that link between propositions (thinking of these as statements using the
copula, which he calls ‘being’) and truth (which he associates with science). And he
then supposes that such propositional truths are confined to doxa, not SP.72 Such
interpreters take the general idea here to be garbling something roughly sound about
the relation between truth and propositions. However, we have already seen that Plato
is not using ‘being’ to capture the copula or propositional form.73
A second option, which fits the text somewhat better, is that ‘being’ means some-
thing like existence or reality. This is the R reading that we examined above.74 On this
reading, when Socrates talks about ‘truth’, he means ‘how things are in reality’, and to
say, of the sound and the colour, ‘that they both are’, is to say that they are real, or really
are as they appear.
A third alternative is that Plato is reaffirming the familiar Platonic claim that the
senses do not capture being or truth, because being and truth belong to a world of
Forms inaccessible to the senses. To get this out of Text 11.7, one must take expressions
like ‘hitting on truth’ or ‘grasping being’ as metaphors for discovering the Forms. But
all is not well here, since in our text both ‘being’ and ‘not being’ are listed equally among
the List B features (185c6, 9).75 Surely the faculty that accesses Forms would simply
hit upon ‘being’, not both being and non-being. It is the sensible world that manifests
both being and non-being together, surely. This text is actually very hard to fit with the
traditional claim that episteme is knowledge of the Forms, because here, Socrates does
not use ‘Being’ to mean the whole range of intelligible objects, as he would if he meant
Forms, but lists ‘being’ as one among many non-sensible features discerned by the
soul; and whereas, in other dialogues, doxa is a faculty whose objects are confined to
71
See above, Section II.
72
This roughly follows Burnyeat, ‘Grammar of perceiving’. Alternatively, for Frede, ‘Observations on
perception’, and what Bostock, Theaetetus, calls the ‘orthodox interpretation’, truth is linked to being
because predicating Fness presupposes that one knows what it is to be F. All are variants of the ‘Rylean
reading’ (see Chapter 1, Section II), with ‘being’ understood according to the P reading and/or C reading
(see above, Section II.i).
73
See Section III.v. 74 See Section II.i. 75 See Text 11.4 and Text 11.6.
the world of becoming, just like sensory perception, here, oddly, Socrates suggests that
doxa ‘touches on truth’ and could be knowledge, which gives a very poor fit with the
traditional theory of Forms and the old contrast between knowledge and opinion.
So all these existing readings encounter strange and inexplicable things in this text.
III.viii That we should respect the fact that the text lists ‘being’
as one of several doxastic features
Is there any other way to be charitable, then? If ‘being’ in Text 11.7 is not about proposi-
tions, reality, or Forms, what might it be about?
Our starting point is to ditch the hermeneutical constraints imposed by the theory-
laden readings just considered, and summarize the passage with as few hermeneutical
assumptions as possible. This is what it seems to say:
A perceiving soul S can detect features in two ways, either (a) through sense organs (SP) or
(b) in reflecting by itself on the former kind (D); and there are two mutually exclusive sets of
features detected in these two ways (List A for SP, List B for D). One of the features in List B is
called ‘being’. Unless S grasps that one, S is missing truth, and if S is missing truth S is missing
science. Since being is detected in the second way (D), let’s not look at SP in our search for science,
but try exploring doxa instead.
What do we learn here? Both SP and D are ways to detect token features in the mind-
independent world. Neither SP nor D is propositional. There is no hint of any interest
in the acquisition or use of generic concepts or forms. The two faculties relate to differ-
ent features: there are none that are the object of both faculties, but both faculties have
multiple objects (List A and List B respectively); but there is only one feature that can
be known, and count as truth, namely the one called being (ousia), which is a simple
feature, like the rest, but it falls in List B, so only D can access it. Since science requires
S to access that feature, D must be the faculty for science.
Is this a charitable reading? It seems so badly confused that one can understand
why scholars attempt a ‘charitable’ reinterpretation. But perhaps we should not try to
domesticate it, or eliminate what is alien, but instead address it and explore it. After all,
the proposal that comes out of all this (ETD) is due to fail, perhaps for good reason.
IV. In Which I Canvass a Solution to the Puzzle, by

Suggesting That Socrates and Theaetetus Are Right
That Science Must Access the Truth, But Are Mistaken
About What Truth Is, About Its Relation to Being, and
That Doxa Captures the Relevant Kind of Truth
First let us be clear that the distinction between SP and D is neither tricky nor complex.
The criterion is simply ‘with or without organs’, giving access to features in List A and
List B respectively, as we established in Sections I and III of this chapter. What is less
simple is the relation between D and the List B feature called ‘being’. If I am right,
Plato still holds that what is required for science is to grasp types or forms, and the
‘being’ that would be relevant is the ‘is’ of conceptual competence, as in knowing ‘what
justice is’, and it is fair and reasonable that he makes Socrates and Theaetetus search
for the faculty that can achieve that, and consider what tools it uses to do so. But since
Theaetetus cannot really look properly for something he does not understand, and
Socrates too is really in the dark about what they are looking for or where to find it, all
they can do is deliver and test several malformed offspring, all hopelessly disabled and
non-viable. ETD, which results from the current idea that D gets at a kind of being, is
one of those. So in one sense, Theaetetus and his midwife are looking for the right
thing: for episteme, defined as a grasp of being and truth. But because they fix on a kind
of being that is not the right one, and lacks the right connection with truth—or with
the kind of truth that belongs to forms and concepts—they hit on the wrong faculty,
mistakenly toying with the idea that it is doxa that captures the ‘being’ and truth that
are required for episteme. Mistaking the ‘being’ that they find among the List B features
for the one that is grasped by episteme, they define science as a kind of doxa. It fails; but
when Socrates and Theaetetus fail, that does not mean that Plato fails. He portrays
them failing, because he, as author, understands things that they cannot understand.76
Theaetetus, in particular, as we saw in Chapter 10, is hindered by assumptions charac-
teristic of the early stages of geometry.
In this section I explain this interpretation, by looking first at what kind of being
knowledge would grasp, if it were answering the ‘what it is’ question. I shall then inves-
tigate why the features in List B, including ‘being’, which are detected by D, cannot be
the content of that kind of knowledge.
IV.i That situating the Interlude alongside the Phaedo and

the ‘digression’ in the Theaetetus is informative
At Phaedo 65a–d (Text 11.8), Socrates says something strikingly similar to what he says
in the Interlude in the Theaetetus. Given that the two dialogues are linked dramatically,
the connection is presumably not accidental.77 We should use it as a key to understand-
ing the Theaetetus.
Text 11.8
‘But what about the actual acquisition of knowledge (αὐτὴν τὴν τῆς φρονήσεως
κτῆσιν)? Is the body an impediment or not, if one takes it on as a collaborator in the
investigation? I mean something like this: do sight and hearing hold some truth
(ἀλήθειάν τινα) for human perceivers, or is it what the poets are always banging on
about at us, that we don’t hear or see anything accurate? And if these two out of the
senses that are in the region of the body are neither accurate nor clear, we can forget
the rest. For they are all worse than these. Or doesn’t it seem so to you?’
76
See Chapter 9, Section II.i. See Chapter 10, Section I.
77
‘Very much so,’ said Simmias.

‘When then does the soul touch on truth (τῆς ἀληθείας ἅπτεται)?’ asked Socrates.
‘For whenever it tries to survey something along with the body, it’s clear that it’s then
that it’s deceived by the body.’
‘You’re telling truths.’
‘So isn’t it in reasoning (ἐν τῷ λογίζεσθαι), if anywhere, that something of the things
that are (τι τῶν ὄντων) become fully clear to the soul?’
‘Yes.’
‘And perhaps it reasons best on the occasion when none of these things molest it—
neither hearing nor sight, nor pain, nor any pleasure, but when as far as possible it
lets go of the body and gets to be alone by itself (αὐτὴ καθ' αὑτὴν), and it strives for
what is (τοῦ ὄντος), not communicating with the body and remaining untouched as
much as it can.’
‘That’s it.’
‘So here in this world too, the soul of the philosopher above all sets little store by
the body, and runs away from the body, and seeks to be alone, itself by itself (αὐτὴ
καθ'αὑτὴν).’
Phaedo 65a9–d2
Although the Phaedo is not explicitly enquiring what knowledge is, or what it is of, that
is certainly a sub-text throughout. Socrates examines his attitude to embodied life,
and his willingness to leave it, in terms of a contrast between what the soul can do with
the body (via sense perception) and what it can do by itself. The verbal and doctrinal
parallels between this text and the distinction between SP and D in the Theaetetus
Interlude are striking. In the Phaedo, Socrates says that the soul does not touch on
truth,78 when it surveys79 using the bodily senses, and that when it strives to get at being
and truth, it resorts to ‘reasoning’,80 and does not use the body as a collaborator, but
operates ‘itself by itself ’.81 In all this the soul is striving for ‘what is’.82 The vocabulary is
identical to that of the Interlude. The examples of sight and hearing are the same. The
whole passage is about the acquisition of ‘knowledge’ (here phronesis, 65a9, but the
variation in terminology is of no consequence). Basically the Phaedo is asking whether
the soul attains knowledge, truth, or being when it uses the bodily senses, or only when
it reasons by itself. The answer is, only the latter.
78
ἀληθείας ἅπτεται, 65b9. Compare ἀληθείας ἅψασθαι at Theaetetus 186e4 (Text 11.2).
79
σκοπεῖν, 65b10, echoed in σκέψασθαι at Theaetetus 185b10 (Text 11.3) and 186a11; cf. 185b5, c1, e2, e7.
80
λογίζεσθαι, 65c2. For echoes see Theaetetus 186a11, c3, d3.
81
αὐτὴ καθ’ αὑτὴν, 65c7, d1–2, echoed at Theaetetus 187a5 (Text 11.1) and cf. αὐτὴ δι’ αὑτῆςat 185e1, e6
(Text 9.2).
82
ὀρέγηται τοῦ ὄντος, Phaedo 65c9 echoed in Theaetetus’s expression αὐτὴ ἡ ψυχὴ καθ’ αὑτὴν ἐπορέγεται,
about the soul’s search for ousia at 186a4.
Evidently, in the Interlude we are in the same world as the Phaedo; and indeed there
are similar parallels in an earlier passage of the Theaetetus, 172b–177c during the dis-
cussion of EA, known as the ‘Digression’—a title helpful for those who think that
Plato has abandoned his earlier views, for whom the Digression proves embarrassingly
retrograde.83 But in truth it is not off the point.84 The passage reflects on how philo-
sophers incur ridicule in court, a topos which flags a connection with the Phaedo—not
just a narrative connection but a connection in epistemology. Here is the relevant part:
Text 11.9
Everyone who engages in philosophy could be the target of that same joke. For
such a man is literally unaware of his neighbour and the man next to him—not just
unaware of what the man is doing but even if it’s a human being or some other
creature. But what a human being is, and what such a nature is fitted to do or to
undergo that is distinctive from others—those things he investigates and takes
trouble to find out. . . .
Such a person gets laughed at in all such situations . . . because he’s ignorant of things
at his feet and lost among things in the here and now . . .
But on the other hand, if and when he gets the chance to drag someone up, and
someone is actually willing to digress for him beyond the ‘What wrong have I done
to you or you to me?’, onto a survey of justice itself and injustice, what each of those
two [is] and how those two differ from all the rest; or to digress beyond the ‘One’s
happy if one’s king, and when one’s got money’ to a survey concerning kingship and
human happiness and wretchedness in general, what kind of things each of those
two are, and in what way it befits human nature to get the one and avoid the other—
then he turns the tables on that man with the small sharp legal mind.
Theaetetus 174a8–b6, 175b4–6, 175b8–d2
Although the enquiries mentioned are not those of the Phaedo or Theaetetus but of
the Republic and Gorgias, the broader point of the passage is that the philosopher is
not concerned with particular facts, or what this or that thing is, but with ideas in the
abstract: what justice or injustice is, not whether what has happened is an injustice;
what human happiness is, not whether Archelaus is happy. These ‘what it is’ questions
are the ones that I have associated with the search for a knowledge of ‘being’ (the ‘is’
of conceptual competence) throughout this book. Notice how the verb ‘be’ is used in
Text 11.9, and how Socrates speaks of knowing ‘what it is’ and ‘how it differs from the
83
It is taken seriously by Sedley, The Midwife of Platonism, 65–86, for whom it provides clues for his
midwifery reading. The connections that he finds with mathematics in the Republic accord with my
observations about geometry (Chapter 10). Here, however, I will concentrate only on the parallels with
the Phaedo.
84
Socrates himself calls it a digression because he is talking about the importance of having leisure to
digress, which is not possible in court. Asking someone in court to talk about ‘justice as such’ constitutes a
digression from the proceedings, 175c1, c4. When Theaetetus and Socrates ‘digress’ into abstractions, how-
ever, this is not actually a digression, but the business of the day. See 172d, 177b7.
others’. The dual of the verb ‘be’, directly parallel to the dual in the Interlude at 185a8–b5
(Text 11.5), occurs in the last part of Text 11.9,85 where the philosopher considers,
typically, of some pair of abstractions such as justice and injustice, or happiness and
wretchedness, what each of them is, or what they both are, and how they differ from
each other and from the rest.86
There is a further striking parallel with a passage in the Republic where Socrates
describes how the soul becomes puzzled by receiving more than one input from
the senses, such as when a finger seems both large and small (523e1–524c13).
There the soul is provoked to reflective thought within itself about the muddled
information coming from sight, and eventually wonders ‘what the large is’ and
‘what the small is’ and thereby gets the distinction between the intelligible and the
visible (524c13).
Clearly then, Text 11.9, together with the Digression as a whole, and the passages
from the Republic and Phaedo to which it is alluding, form a crucial backdrop to the
Interlude, where, ten pages later, we meet these same questions, formulated in exactly
the same terms, about how the soul surveys two things, discerning their sameness,
their difference, and their being. In the Interlude, Socrates asks Theaetetus to decide
between two options for how the soul investigates those questions (the philosopher’s
questions), namely with the senses or without.87 It is the very same question as Socrates
asked in the Phaedo: by which mode of operation is the soul able to touch on being and
truth? There too the choice was between using sense organs or ‘by itself ’. In both cases
the answer is ‘by itself ’.
And yet, in the Phaedo, in the Republic, and in the Digression, Socrates was perfectly
clear that the soul rises to another level, no longer to consider particular cases of
justice or large or number—that, after all, is what the lawyer does—but to attend to
the purely abstract and generic. The particular, as surveyed by the senses or debated
by petty-minded men in court, is a distraction which keeps the soul from ‘digressing’
freely in the quest for being and truth. It was clear that to escape from the senses to
where the soul can operate by itself is to escape to the abstract, to the ‘what it is’ about
justice, happiness, and so on. Does Socrates retain that clarity in the Interlude? To me,
it seems that he does not. If not, why not?
IV.ii That the Interlude seems to confuse the discovery of certain

List B features with discovering the ‘ti esti’
In the Interlude, Socrates does not mention any abstract enquiries into justice and
happiness as such, but only questions about pairs of particular items and their particu-
lar similarities or differences, instances of number, cases of salty, cases of being. Most
of these are instances of non-sensible properties (from List B), but they have just the
same logical status as the one about salty that is from List A. They are still about
175c6. Contrast 175c3, where the verb is not expressed but would be singular.
85
175c3. 87 Text 11.9.

86
spotting tokens of a type. There is no suggestion of an enquiry into what ‘different’ or

‘sameness’ or ‘number’ is; only an investigation of what particular difference, sameness,
or number is discerned in some pair of items, which, if it is an activity of the soul
by itself, is clearly not the same activity as when the soul asks, by itself, what justice is
or what a number is.
In the Interlude, Socrates has forgotten the philosopher’s abstract enquiries into
the type instead of the token. The discussion focuses on a subset of particular obser-
vations, and perhaps this is no surprise—for, after all, doxa was always about particu-
lars, always in the same logical space as perception. So this is just as expected, and
predictably, as a result, doxa is not going to deliver a science of types, or any conceptual
knowledge concerning justice or difference (or, indeed, being). As when a geometer
reasons about which angles are similar, which are dissimilar, and so on, she makes her
calculations about particular properties of the triangle illustrated in her diagram. Even
when she discovers these features of her triangle by reasoning rather than looking, she
is only discerning the similarity of the two angles, not similarity itself.
Restricting attention to cases where it is not similarity but an instance of being that
is discerned does nothing to make it a type instead of a token. What is discerned is
still a particular case of being, instantiated in one or two objects or features (discerning
‘that this and this both are’, 185a9). So we have not moved into a science that under-
stands the abstract concepts themselves, but only an activity where the soul deploys its
concept of being, in observing that two things instantiate it.
So whereas in the Phaedo Socrates was quite clear in distinguishing instances of
properties (typically observed by sense perception, via organs) from the Forms in
which they partook, or however we describe the relation between token instance and
abstract type,88 in the Theaetetus, by contrast, aside from the digression, Socrates
makes no clear distinction between the tokens and the type itself. He encourages
Theaetetus to think that doxa discerns being, even though it evidently detects only
particular things that are. When Socrates asked Theaetetus to name the activity in
question, Theaetetus was right to call it doxa, since what had been described was an
activity of discerning tokens (tropes), not a grasp of the types that they instantiate. The
only difference between this activity and sense perception was indeed whether it used
any organs.
For sure, Plato has not lost his grasp of that contrast between type and token, or his
awareness that the philosopher is interested in enquiring into the type, not the token.
Those were allowed to emerge briefly in the Digression. But for our edification, he is
allowing Theaetetus to get this all wrong, with successive fruitless attempts to find
episteme in activities that are concerned only with tokens, not types. The Digression is
the nudge nudge wink wink moment, when Plato the author steps through and reminds
his reader of what Socrates would normally say, when not playing barren.
88
Phaedo 100d5–8.
IV.iii That an alternative possibility, whereby the Interlude draws the

same distinction as the Phaedo, seems less convincing on balance
One could almost read the Interlude another way, such that Socrates himself is still
quite clear about what would constitute an enquiry into ‘being’ and its relation to
truth. When he says, in Text 11.5, that we might ask, about a sound and a colour,
whether they both are, and about their differences and their number, we have been
taking this to mean a particular sound and a particular colour, and that he meant
to investigate the similarities, differences, number, and being of those particu-
lar colours and sounds that one had earlier perceived. These would be particular
features of two particular features. The colour might be the blackness of my shoes;
the sound might be the gunshot behind the fence. The particularity of these, and
the particularity of their differences etc., made this seem far from what the Phaedo
was talking about.
However, in the Greek, those items that are to be compared, in the thought
experiment—the sound and the colour—lack the definite articles that I gave them in
the translation (Text 11.5). So when he says that the soul can think by itself about
‘colour and sound’, Socrates could have a more generic enquiry in mind. He might be
asking how the soul considers the nature of colour as such, and how it differs from
sound, and whether these are two things or one, in which case what Socrates says here
would be closer than I suggested to what he says in the Phaedo and in the Digression.
The enquiry that he is imagining would be more like the enquiry that interests the phil-
osopher (by contrast with the lawyer), in the Digression (Text 11.9).
Ultimately, however, I reckon that this solution cannot be reconciled with the text,
first because Socrates insists that the soul is considering things that it has previously
perceived by the senses. These are clearly tokens: not colour in general, or black in general,
but the blackness of my shoes and the sweetness of my tea. It is the differences between
that blackness and that sweetness that the soul is then able to consider at stage two, and
those differences are token differences, characterizing particular features perceived in
experience. And second, because of the way that Theaetetus proposes—and Socrates
accepts without demur—the claim that the activity described is called doxazein.89 And
indeed, as the dialogue continues, the paradigm case of doxa is the activity of naming
or identifying some particular (such as Theaetetus), rightly or wrongly, which clearly
confirms that in the discussion of doxa Theaetetus is talking about identifying particu-
lars and tokens, not types and forms.
Hence we must conclude that our earlier diagnosis was correct. The Interlude fails to
make the distinction between particular and general, between ti esti and poion esti
questions, and between perceiving a colour and knowing ‘what colours are’. Socrates
and Theaetetus have together gone down an unpromising road, in equating science
with correct discernment of particular facts about particular experiences.
Text 11.1.
89
IV.iv That doxa can indeed discern instances of being, in some sense of ‘being’,
but not in the sense relevant for episteme
As we saw, Socrates speaks of discerning ‘that a sound and a colour both are’, using the
verb ‘are’ without a complement.90 This could mean several things, but it is unclear
whether Socrates has any particular sense in mind. He could mean that the sound and
colour both exist, or that they are both real; or that they are some kind of entities or
beings with some ontological status, not nothing. All these senses are compatible with
the specified items being tokens, and indeed if they both are, they would be two tokens
of a generic type ‘being’, while not themselves being the type.91 So if the soul grasps
(by doxa) what these two things share, then it discerns two instances, or one shared
instance, of the predicate ‘being’, whatever ‘being’ means here. It cannot mean that it
discerns ‘what being is’ by observing those two cases of it.
One might protest that the distinction between the features in Lists A and B should
have been more logical than modal—that Socrates has drawn it badly. Surely, we might
say, the List B features differ in a non-trivial way from ordinary predicates like white
or sweet. None of the List B features is a simple property: most are relations (e.g. simi-
larity) or properties of a group (e.g. number), and being is arguably not a property of
the same kind at all. Should Socrates not have focused on this difference rather than
the absence of sense organs in perceiving them? Or was the absence of sense organs
serving proxy for that? To the modern way of thinking this would, I guess, seem like a
serious challenge to Plato, but does it not depend upon assuming (as we tend to do) an
ontology of things and their properties, whereas Plato’s ontology apparently comprises
(a) perceptible features, (b) their non-perceptible features/relations, and (c) essences
or types of which (a) and (b) are the tokens. Hence, correspondingly his epistemology
maps, for each of these, the soul’s activity for grasping that range of objects, with sense
perception for the first, doxa for the second, and episteme for the third. There is no
provision for perceiving what we would call things, the bearers of properties. So in the
light of this structure of the contents of perception and thought, it seems reasonable to
define doxa by listing its contents, contrasting them with the contents of SP, and noting
that for this process no bodily organs are used. Of course, whether ‘being’ should be
mentioned as one of these at all remains questionable.
Meanwhile, as for the third category of entities (essences or types), I do not see any
suggestion that either SP or D can come to know those, in the Interlude or anywhere
else in Plato. So if science involves grasping those things, the ‘what it is’ about the con-
cepts that it deploys, neither of those activities of the soul will be the one that does it.
The idea that science grasps the ‘what it is’ about a type, and never predicates the
type of a token, has received plenty of motivation already in this book. It was Plato’s
starting point in the Meno and Republic Book 1, where Plato systematically differentiates
90
185a, Text 11.5.
91
This would hold even if we took ‘colour’ and ‘sound’ as generic, as suggested and dismissed in Section
IV.iii.
between episteme (conceptual knowledge) and something more akin to propositional

knowledge or predication, such as perception and doxa (though, as I have argued, these
do not really involve predication, nor are they propositional, nor, for Plato, do they con-
stitute ‘knowledge’).92 We found that knowing ‘Meno, who he is’ is logically quite dif-
ferent from making propositional claims about which predicates apply to the particular
man who is Meno. Discovering that Meno is handsome or wealthy, or even discovering
that this is Meno—these are pieces of information about a certain particular man,
whereas knowing Meno, ‘who he is’, is knowing something abstract and conceptual.93
To refer to that abstract ‘what it is’ type of essence or being, one could well choose
to use the noun ousia. In the Interlude, Theaetetus and Socrates are looking for the
faculty that grasps ousia, because Socrates has declared (in Text 11.7) that grasping
the truth requires grasping ‘being’ (ousia). If grasping ousia is meant to refer to what is
elsewhere called knowing ‘what it is’ about a type, then the point would be similar to
the claims about knowing the forms or the what it is in the Phaedo, Meno, and the
Republic.94 But what is odd is to think that D is the faculty. That misfires, because while
D might discern ‘that two things are’, it does not thereby discern ousia in the sense of
‘what it is’—neither of those nor of anything else.
IV.v That Plato has not changed his model of episteme, which is still
the science that grasps ‘what it is’ about a type
It is time to summarize what I am proposing, which is that Plato uniformly supposes,
throughout his works, including this one, that episteme is a science of essences, grasp-
ing ‘what Fness is’. Such essences cannot be perceived by the senses or by doxa, which
are capacities for perceiving instances of Fness, not Fness itself. Doxa is not episteme,
nor is episteme a species of doxa.
Whereas Theodorus had taught his pupils by sequential attention to examples,
looking individually at each particular case,95 Theaetetus is just ready to step beyond
Theodorus, to see pattern in the examples, and to choose a generic name for a class of
results that he has identified (his ‘powers’). He realizes that the examples are tokens
that illustrate a type, and that he should go on with the series.96 Yet having got this close
to seeing that the science is of the type, not the tokens, Theaetetus still seems to think
of episteme as a kind of attention to particular features. After refuting EA, Socrates
asks Theaetetus to think about how we reason in the abstract about features previously
observed via the senses. A geometer will naturally think of enquiries such as working
out which lines or angles are similar—calculations that are not about similarity as such
92
93
See Chapter 4 where I argued that although Plato rejects Socrates’ search for a definition, he still holds
that knowledge is of ti esti for some type/form.
94
Burnyeat, Theaetetus, 184 notices this distinction as relevant for Part 3 of the Theaetetus but not for
the Interlude or other parts. He also recognizes that what is to be defined (both for the clay and for know-
ledge) should be the type, not a token.
95
Theaetetus 147d. See McDowell, Theaetetus, 116. 96 See Chapter 10, Section I.
but about instances of similarity and so on. This remains true even if the angles and
lengths under discussion are abstracted from the diagram and treated as non-sensible
particulars. Still they are particulars. The geometer is not asking what sameness or unity
or duality is, but only whether these lines manifest those features. So this type of thought,
though abstract and intellectual, is not about essences or types.
Socrates encourages Theaetetus to consider this kind of abstract thinking, to con-
sider whether it is episteme. It is Socrates who suggests that ‘being’ is one of the features
discerned by D. But it is a false trail. We do become wiser in one respect, however,
because the false trail reveals that the criteria that Plato usually uses to distinguish
knowledge from perception, such as whether the soul uses sense organs or works ‘by
itself ’, are not the right criteria, since it now turns out that there is another intellectual
activity, in which the soul works by itself without organs, but it is still thinking of par-
ticulars, not ‘the F itself, what it is’.
Why would Plato send Socrates and Theaetetus down this false trail in the Interlude?
Perhaps he intends this to be a false start, because we are to see that the whole exercise
of seeking episteme within the range of doxa (D) is doomed to failure, as was the attempt
to locate it within the broader range of aisthesis in general (A). I would argue that Plato
means the next two proposals to fail: they are not supposed to be worth saving and
Plato is not trying to save them.97 Of course, Socrates (as midwife) makes valiant efforts
to improve their chances, within the fiction, but the project is predestined for damnation
by its creator. Plato as author is not proposing, seriously or otherwise, that episteme is a
kind of doxa or aisthesis.
Meanwhile, there remains a glimmer of plausibility to the idea that perception
and doxa could provide part of the route to discovering being, and ‘what it is’ in the
sense of conceptual understanding. We can indeed acquire knowledge, from thinking
reflectively in a certain iconic way about particular tokens. We must not try to reduce
conceptual knowledge to true doxa, or identify the one with the other, but on the
other hand, the sense that we do somehow get our conceptual understanding that
way comes from the fact that the iconic method works (as we know). It is indeed
possible to ascend from an example, to an understanding of what it exemplifies, as the
slave boy was beginning to do in the Meno, and as the reader does in the Republic.
Understandably, Theaetetus might think that he acquires his knowledge from the
example. Alternatively one might come to think (as in the Meno) that the conceptual
knowledge must be in us already, so that the particular cases just remind us of it. Because
even perceptual recognition of the token cases seems to presuppose an existing grasp
of the type, which is why Cornford, Cooper, and Frede thought that the propositional
knowledge that x is F also presupposed knowledge of ‘what the F is’.
97
See Chapter 9. Nehamas, ‘Episteme and logos in Plato’s later thought’ supposes that Plato himself
s eriously believes that knowledge of essence involves doxa. He argues that Plato rejects only what he calls
the ‘additive model’ (that doxa becomes knowledge by adding logos).
V. Conclusion: That Doxa Will Not Be a Good Place to

Look For Episteme, Given What Episteme Is About
The idea that in Plato episteme is a grasp of types or forms, not facts, states of affairs, or
propositions, may seem disappointing for those who had hoped that Plato ‘progressed’
to ‘realizing’ that knowledge is of propositions or facts, and that truth is propositional,
not a property of things. But I trust that my reader will not be disappointed in that way.
We find Plato expounding the same truths as he defended in the Meno and the Phaedo
and extending our understanding of what those truths entail for mathematics, science,
and discovery. What he said in the Meno and Phaedo about the difference between
types and tokens, and between knowledge of types and that correct perception of tokens,
was all perfectly fine and well founded. There is nothing shameful about exploring
what it is to know ‘what Fs are’ and how it differs from recognizing that this is an F thing.
It is an important contribution to epistemology.
In the next two parts of the Theaetetus Plato shows that it is impossible to do the
latter without the former. This develops the earlier idea that we cannot answer the poion
question without first grasping the ti esti.98 As in the Meno (71b4), what was there
loosely called ‘knowing’ poion esti never really counts as episteme.
In Chapter 9 I placed the Interlude in relation to the preceding section. In Chapter 12
I shall explore the consequences for Parts Two and Three of the Theaetetus, which con-
sider whether episteme could be a brand of doxa. We need to discover why Theaetetus’s
last two pregnancies fail to thrive. What is Plato’s diagnosis of their failure? Is it, as
I suggest, because doxa cannot in fact (despite what Socrates misleadingly suggests)
access ‘being’ in the relevant sense? It is to this question that we now turn.
Meno 71b; cf. Phaedrus 260b–c. See Chapter 3, Text 3.3.

98
12
On the Failure of the Remaining
Two Attempts to Analyse Episteme
Theaetetus 187b–210a
In this chapter I examine Theaetetus’s second and third attempts at analysing ‘science’
(episteme). I shall argue that these definitions fail because every kind of doxa, whether
true or false, with or without an account, is dependent upon conceptual content that
must be known in advance and cannot be reduced to a function of doxa, however hard
we try. Our doxastic abilities depend upon a more fundamental kind of knowledge,
and it is the latter that grasps ‘what it is’ in respect of types or concepts.
Theaetetus, I suggest, being still a lad, and only partway through geometry, has not
grasped the difference between having and using concepts. To see the difference, he needs a
logical and epistemological distinction between abstract types and their token instances.
Without those distinctions, he cannot locate episteme (conceptual knowledge) as a distinct
epistemic condition from the recognition of cases where the concept applies. He cannot see
why or how the objects known to science (as a science of concepts and types) are distinct
from the particular objects of observation and doxa. And he cannot see the role that such
conceptual tools play in perceptual or doxastic recognition of particular examples. As a
result, his attempts to define episteme fail, because no matter what further conditions one
might add to cases of recognition of particular features, one can never turn that activity into
the epistemic condition that renders it possible, namely having the right concepts to deploy.
I. In Which We Consider What ‘True’ Means, When

Theaetetus Says That ‘There Is Also False Doxa’, and
Conclude That He Is Noting the Difference Between
Correct and Incorrect Answers to ‘What Is It?’ Questions
I.i That Theaetetus, being misled by the irrelevant contrast sketched
in the Interlude, tries to analyse science as a subset of doxa
In the Interlude, Socrates invited Theaetetus to think that ‘truth’ and ‘being’ are
detected by doxa, as opposed to sensory perception.1 I argued in Chapter 11 that this
1
187a. See Chapter 11.
suggestion is off target. In drawing the distinction between SP and D in the Interlude,
Socrates failed to make any logical distinction between tokens and types (or concepts
and objects, descriptors and the items that fall under those descriptions etc.), so he
failed to direct attention away from ‘Is it F?’ questions, about a token, towards ‘What is
the F itself?’ questions about a type. Even when he spoke of how the soul can discern
‘being’, when it thinks all by itself, his examples were token-recognition, not cases of
grasping the ‘what it is’ about the types that they instantiate. Instead Socrates drew a
distinction between modes of perceiving (whether it uses bodily organs or not).
In response, Theaetetus tries out a new analysis of science. He thinks that episteme
might be true doxa (ETD).
Text 12.1
Theaetetus: We can’t say that it’s all of doxa [D], Socrates, since there is also false
doxa. But there’s a chance that true doxa [TD] could be episteme [E], so let that be
my answer.
Theaetetus 187b4–6
Let us call this second analysis ETD:
ETD: Episteme is true doxa.
Later (201c–d), he refines this further, subdividing true doxa to mark off a kind that
is ‘with logos’. This yields the third analysis, which we shall call TDL:
TDL: Episteme is true doxa with logos.2
The dialogue ends with the failure of TDL. Theaetetus does not, during this dialogue,
manage to escape from the idea prompted by Socrates’ argument in the Interlude, that
episteme could be a brand of doxa. It seems plausible to suppose that this is at least part
of the reason why the boy never manages to bring forth a viable thesis.
As we saw in Chapter 9, Section I, Socrates serves as midwife, by first trying to make
the new-born viable in some way, typically by devising some kind of auxiliary support
system. The characteristic pattern of each part of this dialogue is (i) delivery of a new
analysis; (ii) construction of various devices to prop it up or make it workable; (iii)
testing to see whether with those devices in place it could survive; (iv) declaration of
failure and exposure of the child as non-viable.3 For each thesis examined, it turns out
that the devices required are either inherently problematic, or incapable of providing
sufficient support. So the child is declared too weak to survive, with or without help.
I.ii That there are two notions of truth at work in the dialogue
What does ‘true’ mean in ETD and TDL? In both cases the Greek word is alethes. In
Chapter 11 we briefly mentioned a distinction between two notions of ‘true’ and
‘truth’, which we shall need again here.4 First, there is a folk sense of ‘true’, where what
is ‘true’ is what correctly describes or labels reality. Many of our perceptions and
See Section IV.

2 3
See Chapter 9, Section I. Chapter 11, Section III.vii.
4
On the Failure of the Remaining Two Attempts to Analyse Episteme 233
thoughts count as true in that sense, because we are often right about things. Part
One of the Theaetetus used the term ‘true’ in this sense for discussing thesis EA, since
part of the support package for that infant was the idea that every perception must be
true to reality.5
Second, there is a more sophisticated sense of ‘truth’, relevant to the kind of con-
ceptual ‘what it is?’ knowledge that episteme should be grasping—where it is getting
‘the truth’ (or being) by grasping the type or form. This is the area in which Plato
typically links being with truth, in that the truth grasped is ‘what the F is’, a kind of
ousia or being, not merely discerning contingent facts about particular F things. When
Socrates said, in the Interlude, that discovering ousia is not a function of SP, and that
without hitting ousia one cannot hit truth, he seems to mean being in this sense, and
truth in this sense—or he should mean that if hitting this kind of being, and grasping
this kind of truth, was to be a special mark of episteme.6
Myriads of sensory perceptions are true in the folk sense, though they are not about
‘being’ in the sophisticated sense. Similarly, a myriad cases of doxa must be true in the
folk sense. We truly perceive colours and flavours, we truly discern similarities, differ-
ences, and number. It makes no sense to deny that SP or D can ever capture the truth in
that ordinary sense. Clearly they do, on many occasions.
Yet although Socrates had used the term ‘true’ quite happily in the folk sense all
through Part One of the dialogue, in the Interlude he has suddenly diverted us to the
sophisticated notion, whereby science alone grasps being, and truth is confined to this
superior kind of being, which is then supposed to be inaccessible to the senses. This
sophisticated kind of ‘truth’ is not achieved just by perceiving how things around us
really are, and collecting empirically verifiable contingent facts. It is about attending to
something on a different logical plane.7
I.iii That when Theaetetus contrasts true and false doxa he must
mean ‘true’ in the folk sense
In trying for a second definition, Theaetetus experiments with a formula that takes
doxa (D) as the main component of science, in place of perception (A). But, says he,
not all cases of doxa can be included, since some are false (187b4–6, Text 12.1), while
science must always be true. So the doxa that goes to make up science must be just
true ones (TD).
What does ‘true’ mean there? His observation that ‘there is also false doxa’ pulls us
towards the folk sense of ‘true’, whereby correct impressions are true, and mistaken
ones are false. Had Theaetetus meant it in the more sophisticated sense, whereby
nothing but a grasp of being as such is a grasp of the truth, surely he should have said
not ‘some is false’, but rather ‘not all is of being’. The relevant contrast would be not
5
See Chapter 10, Section III. 6
See Chapter 11, Section IV.
7
I have mentioned only the two kinds of truth relevant to reading these discussions in Plato. The idea
that ‘truth’ belongs to propositional structures is not relevant here (but see Chapter 2 and Chapter 11,
Section II).
falsity, but detecting some feature other than ‘being’, since ‘being’ is the sine qua non
mark of episteme.
Thus we are naturally inclined to take ‘true’ in the folk sense in Text 12.1. Theaetetus
does not say that episteme correlates with just those cases of doxa which concern being,
but rather implies that he means all cases, concerning all the List B features,8 so long as
they are true (in the folk sense of true). We naturally take him to mean that we have
true doxa whenever we correctly discern any of the List B features—including, but not
exclusively, cases where we discern the being of something, whereas we have false doxa
when we are mistaken. And he means that just the former cases are science.
However, if it means that, ETD is a strange proposal, since it follows directly upon
the Interlude where Socrates had used ‘truth’ in the sophisticated sense, in his claim
that being and truth are features that can be grasped only by doxa.9 Since Theaetetus is
now responding to that idea, it is strange that he should revert to a more ordinary
sense of ‘true’.
Could Text 12.1 be read in some other way, then, so as to have Theaetetus respond to
Socrates’ appropriately?10 Here I consider two options, (a) and (b), for how we might
connect the ETD proposal with Socrates’ use of a sophisticated notion of truth, from
which I favour option (b), since (a) has difficulties with the notion of ‘falsity’.
(a) On the first option, Theaetetus would actually use the word ‘true’ in the sophis-
ticated sense, so that, in Text 12.1, ‘true doxa’ would comprise only the cases where
being and truth are discerned, not cases of discerning any other properties. ETD would
be proposing that just those cases of doxa might be science.
Such a proposal would be an appropriate response to the Interlude; but what could
Theaetetus mean by false doxa, in that case? For he says, in Text 12.1, ‘Just the true
kind, for there’s also false doxa’. By ‘false doxa’ he surely cannot mean ‘those that are
of something else, besides being’ (including, for instance, correct observations of
sameness and number). Calling such things, including the true ones, ‘false doxa’
seems perverse.
(b) On the second option, which makes better sense, Theaetetus uses the words
‘true’ and ‘false’ in the folk sense, which, as we saw, seems the natural way; but he does
not mean just any true and false doxa. Rather he is referring to a contextually restricted
range of cases, based on the implicit restriction generated in the Interlude, where we
were invited to consider only the discernment of being, while side-lining the other List
B features. While implicitly endorsing that constraint, Theaetetus now proposes that
among such cases, there can be both true and false answers, even about being. Not all of
our observations about being are accurate, so not all are true, in that ordinary sense.
8
See Chapter 11, Section III.i on the List A and List B features. 9
186c–d, Text 11.9.
Cf. Nehamas, ‘Episteme and logos in Plato’s later thought’; McDowell, Theaetetus (both of whom share
10
my view that the ‘what it is’ question is central to Plato’s project in the Theaetetus).
So on option (b), Theaetetus means to equate science with just those cases of doxa
where both the content is about being (which allows it to be ‘of the truth’ as Socrates
recommended in the Interlude) and we get the answer right rather than wrong (for
both right and wrong answers are possible, even in judgements about being).
Option (b) is the one I recommend. So Theaetetus would be saying that science is
correctly discerning being/truth:
ETD: ‘Science is discerning the being (of some feature F), iff one does so truly,
not falsely.’
ETD (thus interpreted) will seem odd to anyone who takes science to be a compen-
dium of truths in general, about all kinds of features and things. It is already strange to
treat being as a feature of things, and yet more strange if it is one among many features,
most of which cannot be known, even if they are correctly discerned. This will not be a
comfortable theory for us.
We can domesticate the oddity a little, however, by recalling that both Theaetetus
and Socrates are searching for episteme in a special sense, as the science that grasps the
‘what it is’, the ‘is’ of conceptual competence. In ETD they are (as always) missing the
target, since conceptual being is not some observable feature alongside other features
in a thing, nor is it that being that some two things share in virtue of the fact that ‘they
both are’, as the Interlude had implied. But the fact that they are looking for a science that
grasps being has brought them to this odd thought that there is some science whose
object is just that one thing, ‘being’, and that it must be a true grasp of it.
ETD is itself a case of false doxa on Theaetetus’s part. Theaetetus does not have an
accurate grasp of ‘what it is’ about science. From his experience of some instances of
so-called sciences that he studies he has formed an opinion to the effect that geometry
and arithmetic are sciences. But it is doubtful whether any of those ‘sciences’ actually
meet the demand that Socrates has in mind, if the only true science is a grasp of ‘what it
is’ about the conceptual tools we think with.
II. In Which We Consider the Falsity Problems

That Socrates Raises, and How They Contribute to
the Discussion
II.i That ETD fails because it cannot distinguish knowledge of types
from discernment of tokens, which is parasitic on the former
Socrates must do the best he can for ETD, before declaring it unsuitable for keeping.
This is what he does from 187c7 to 200c6. As usual, he spends much time presenting
the possible adaptations in epistemology or ontology that might help to make it viable.
The difficulties that threaten its viability appear to be about falsity, because, as I shall
suggest, ETD cannot distinguish possession of conceptual resources (episteme) from
the true and false judgements that deploy them (doxa), and this makes misidentification
and misclassification impossible. It also makes correct identification impossible, of
course; but Socrates highlights its difficulties with false doxa, partly to show that know-
ledge and true doxa dramatically come apart in the false cases, in that those mistakes
depend upon true knowledge of the concept that we incorrectly deploy, in the absence
of true doxa of the token; and partly, no doubt, because Plato can thereby diagnose and
explain some puzzles that had mesmerized members of the Megarian School, after
Socrates’ death.11 Euclid and Terpsion, the characters in the frame dialogue of the
Theaetetus, were founder members of that School. Here Plato imagines Socrates in his
final days dictating the current conversation to Euclid, as we heard in the frame
dialogue.12 So we are probably reading Plato’s Just-So story about Euclid’s interest in
such puzzles, and his proposed diagnosis of their errors.
The point is philosophical, not just a story. If I am right, Plato diagnoses, in ETD, the
erroneous epistemology that generates the Megarian puzzles and hence when he puts
ETD to the midwife’s test, he is examining the ailments that afflict the Megarians.13 On
the other hand, the discussion retains its importance even if we forget about these
Megarian targets. ETD expresses a certain naive view that exactly characterizes the
outlook of the young geometer who sees nothing more to science than correctly
identifying the lengths and angles on a diagram.14 We learn about right angles by first
examining the features of a right angle on a diagram. We progress to the generic idea of
‘right angles’ from observing a token example. As we have seen, Plato knows and uses
this method in his own work.15 But it is naive to think that, by the end, all we know is
the particular (as ETD would have it). For clearly, once we have acquired the abstract
notion of a right angle, we can wrongly apply it to something that is not a right angle. If
we did not have the generic notion, we could not misidentify an angle as a right angle.
So two kinds of knowledge must be distinguished,16 the grasp of the generic type, and
11
See Myles Burnyeat, ‘The material and sources of Plato’s Dream’, Phronesis, 15 (1970), 101–22. A link
to Protagoras is sometimes detected (e.g. Sedley, The Midwife of Platonism, 119, and Sedley, ‘Three Platonist
interpretations’, citing Proclus In Plat. Prm. 657.5–10). Socrates momentarily (187d) refers back to some-
thing earlier, but (i) I doubt that this means Protagoras and (ii) Socrates proposes to investigate the matter
in a ‘different way’ this time.
12
142a–143b. See Chapter 10, Section I.
13
Cornford, Plato’s Theory of Knowledge, 111–14 suggests that Socrates is limiting his discussion to
terms accepted by the Sophists, or adopting a naive view to see what needs to be added. Bostock, Theaetetus,
185 sees what is lacking, but supposes that Plato is struggling to find the solution (hence he congratulates
Plato on making progress in the wax block). Neither sees that the constraints arise from ETD. Contrast
Chappell, Reading Plato’s Theaetetus, 152 who, like me, reckons that the problems are in ETD, not Plato’s
ignorance. Chappell takes Socrates to be refuting an empiricist model that derives cognitive content from
mere sensation without semantic content. See also Timothy Chappell, ‘The puzzle about the puzzle of false
belief: Theaetetus 188a–c’, Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies, 45 (2001), 97–111. I defend my view
in full in Rowett, ‘On making mistakes’.
14
See Chapter 8 (on geometry in the Republic) and Chapter 10 on Theaetetus as geometer.
15
16
Compare Phaedo (73c8; 74d–e), where the knowledge is not the same and could not be acquired at the
time of perceiving the particular. See Osborne, ‘Perceiving particulars’. This does not preclude the possibility
that one previously obtained it from some such encounter.
the discernment of the particular token, if mistakes are to be possible (and this shows
that we can have knowledge—of the type—without true doxa of the token: indeed we
must have it, if there is to be any false doxa). This is the first phase of the refutation of
ETD, showing that there is episteme even and especially when there is not true but
false doxa.17
II.ii That the ETD brainchild cannot survive, because it undermines

itself; for if it were correct, neither truth nor falsity would be possible,
even in discerning the identity of singular tokens
After first diagnosing ETD’s ailments and disabilities concerning mistaken identifica-
tions, Socrates turns to the task of suggesting supplementary props and resources to
help the failing child to thrive, or at least to struggle on for a bit. It is going to fail, of
course, and Socrates will eventually point out why it is failing, but, first, as midwife, he
must explore any adjustments that could be made that might allow it to survive for a
bit, and he must examine whether those adjustments can be coherently made.18
In the section from 187c to 200d, Socrates provides props for ETD that try to address
its shortcomings while remaining true to the original project (of reducing all know-
ledge to singular discernment of tokens; that is, doxa). He develops two prosthetic
devices for it (the wax block and the Aviary).19 The first is a very simple device for
storage of previous singular impressions, while the second facilitates more complex
tasks, but still derives its tools from nothing more than stored impressions, but by
allowing them to be sorted into groups that are caged together as a collection, they can
go some way to serving in lieu of a structured system of generic types and concepts.
These two supplementary devices provide a sort of substitute for conceptual tools;
but the contents of these memory devices are just particular objects, even when they
are collected in bunches,20 so it is still impossible to form judgements, either right or
wrong, about whether this or that is an instance of some general type, and hence it
would also be impossible to make any correct or incorrect judgements about whether
something is a case of knowledge, since the generic type knowledge is not something
that we can know. In some sense this undermines the whole project of attempting to
define knowledge, if there can be no such concept to deploy in identifying examples,
let alone to serve as the type that we must define.
II.iii That Plato is not confused and is not struggling

Socrates’ repeated (and always unsuccessful) attempts to support ETD, and solve its
problems, have led many scholars to think that Plato himself is struggling and con-
fused, and to commend him for what looks like evidence of ‘progress’, in what they
suppose is a later attempt to address the same problem, in the Sophist. This is because
17
The second stage is the passage about the jury, discussed in Section III.i.
18
The procedure is the same as in his assessment of EA. See Chapter 9. 191a; 196c.
19
20
I have discussed the passage in detail in Rowett, ‘On making mistakes’.
they take the present passage as a failure, as though Plato lacked the tools he would
have needed to solve the puzzles, such as certain distinctions that Frege and Russell
famously made between names and descriptions, sense and reference, and so on.21 It is
as if they suppose that Plato (and Socrates) really favour ETD and were trying to get it
to work, but struggling.
Fortunately, this is a misreading. By contrast, a correct reading of the midwife’s
behaviour shows that Plato is doing a tolerable job at using the failure of ETD to
draw the reader’s attention to exactly those distinctions that the modern scholars
thought he was missing. This discussion is not Plato’s best attempt at an account of
what knowledge is, but his examination of the simple-minded account offered by the
young student. Socrates attempts to defend the account because he is obliged, first,
to give it the best chance. Eventually, however, he will discard it,22 by which point,
ideally, Theaetetus needs to see how disabled it is, and to recognize that it cannot
survive on its own or with the aids that Socrates supplies. Naturally, what Socrates
diagnoses are problems in ETD itself: its limitations, among which are the limita-
tions diagnosed as ‘faults’ by Ackrill and others; but those are not Plato’s problems,
nor are they problems for which he has no solution. The point of the destructive
phase of the examination is to show what the problem is, and its problem (which I
have described as a lack of abstract knowledge of types) can readily be re-expressed
in Platonic terms as a lack of abstract knowledge of ‘Forms’; but that is not some-
thing that was beyond the grasp of the author of this dialogue: in the Phaedo Plato
was well able to explain that our recognition of equals and unequals is parasitic on a
pre-existing grasp of the Form ‘Equal’.23 We can hardly imagine that this has escaped
Plato, when writing the Theaetetus.
So the puzzles that baffle Theaetetus cannot be puzzling to Plato except as the excuse
for a philosophical investigation of whether one can solve them without resorting to
anything extravagant in the way of ontological and epistemological paraphernalia.
Nor would these puzzles trouble any ordinary person, since we naturally distinguish
(informally) between proper names and descriptions, and between an extensional
object and the description used to classify it. The problems are peculiar to the strange
reductionist proposal that is being examined. ETD was a guess of a kind typical of a
21
See, for instance, John Ackrill, ‘Plato on false belief: Theaetetus 187–200’, The Monist, 50/3 (1966),
383–402. Also (diagnosing a confusion about knowledge and knowing what something is) W.G. Runciman,
Plato’s Later Epistemology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962), McDowell, Theaetetus, 196,
Bostock, Theaetetus, 196, Sedley, The Midwife of Platonism, 121–3. All these think that Socrates is unable
to solve the puzzle (though Sedley, at pp. 148–9, thinks only that Socrates is unable to solve it without
Platonic metaphysics, whereas Plato has the resources). Contrast Fine, ‘False belief in the Theaetetus’ and
J.C.B. Gosling, Plato (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), 137–9 who think (as I do) that the problems
are due to ETD which is being examined by Socrates to reveal its inadequacies. On Burnyeat, see note 26.
22
For the two dialectical directions of the midwifery, see Chapter 9, Section I and Chapter 10, Sections
III and IV.
23
Phaedo 75b. See also Phaedrus 249b for the idea that all humans have access to knowledge of the
Forms.
student with a simple-minded misunderstanding of what knowing would involve,24

though Plato is also addressing some less innocent uses of the reductionist move, by
paradox-mongers like the Megarians. But nothing suggests that Plato was remotely
tempted by these muddles. By diagnosing how and why it runs into difficulties, he
helps us to reject it and understand the need for at least some minimal kinds of
abstract knowledge.
Although the attempts to save ETD all fail, they also offer hints about what is wrong,
and why even the artificial aids such as the wax block cannot fill the gap. Hence the
discussion is instructive: it should lead Theaetetus to a better idea (although in fact it
does not).
II.iv That false doxa of the relevant kind is not due to ‘ignorance birds’, but
uses the same conceptual tools as true judgements on the same matters
Clearly Plato means us to learn from the failure of ETD. One lesson we might learn is
that ETD has difficulty explaining how false doxa can occur, because to identify
something wrongly we require some existing conceptual content to deploy in the
judgement. One of the aids that Socrates supplies to cover for this is the Aviary, which
tries to create the relevant resource by storing the memories of particular items pre-
viously encountered. But even this supplement falls short of what is required to deliver
the full range of capacities that depend upon conceptual knowledge, of types qua
types (episteme).
The mistakes that are interesting in showing the inadequacy of the Aviary system for
concept acquisition are the ones that happen despite the fact that we have a good con-
ceptual grasp of the types in question: that is, mistakes in areas where we can, on a
good day, get the answer right; mistakes which we make and then correct ourselves,
from our own resources. When we do our sums wrong, it is not usually because our
grasp of the numbers themselves is at fault. So our mistakes are not due to ignorance:
we do not lack the relevant concepts, which constitute episteme. In fact, such mistakes
are impossible without episteme.25 This is the conclusion that Socrates draws from
the Aviary:
Text 12.2
Socrates: First that while having knowledge (episteme) of something, not to recog-
nize that very thing, not in virtue of ignorance (ἀγνωμοσύνῃ) but in virtue of his
own knowledge (episteme). Second, to think (doxazein) it is something else, and the
other thing is it—how is that not massively illogical, given that it is just because
knowledge (episteme) is present in the soul that the soul then recognizes (γνῶναι)
nothing at all but fails to recognize (ἀγνοῆσαι) everything. Nothing will stop us from
24
The reductionist thought is common in young philosophers, who, when they first read Plato, stand-
ardly reject the Theory of Forms and deny that there is anything other than particulars.
25
199d1–8.
finding, on this basis, that when ignorance (ἄγνοιαν) is present in the soul it makes
one recognize (γνῶναί) something and when blindness is present it makes one see, if
it is true that when knowledge (episteme) is present it makes one fail to recognize
(ἀγνοῆσαί) something on some occasion.
Theaetetus 199d1–8
Granted, the Aviary is precisely not a store of genuine episteme, but only of memorized
tokens: that is the point of it. But here Socrates the midwife is attempting to use it to
assist ETD, in the hope that it can provide a substitute, within the constraints of ETD,
for the missing conceptual resources. The memorized tokens in the Aviary approximate
to the repertoire of genuine concepts required for mathematical errors, so Socrates
calls them episteme to highlight their role in the calculations. He points out, in Text
12.2, that misidentifying something involves misapplying something from some
repertoire of episteme. So mistakes, here called ‘ignorance’ (ἀγνοεῖν), are parasitic
upon episteme.26
In response to this paradoxical result, Theaetetus proposes (Text 12.3) that the
stored ideas in the Aviary might include some that are unsound, so that some mistakes
might be due to fetching a piece of stored non-science (anepistemosune) instead of a
piece of stored science:27
Text 12.3
Theaetetus: Well, perhaps we were wrong when we stocked the aviary with just sci-
ences (epistemai). We ought to have put non-sciences (anepistemosunai) there too,
both lots flying around in the soul together, and we should have made the hunter
sometimes catch a science (episteme) and sometimes a non-science (anepistemo-
sune) on the same subject, so that he would discern falsehoods in virtue of the non-
science and truths in virtue of the science.
Although this is a brilliant idea, as Socrates notes, the kind of false doxa it would
explain is not the kind relevant to this discussion:
Text 12.4
Socrates: But he will not suppose that he is discerning falsities (ψευδῆ δοξάζειν).
Theaetetus: How do you mean?
Socrates: He’ll take himself to know (ὡς εἰδὼς), and to be discerning truths, about
the things he’s wrong about.
26
See Burnyeat, Theaetetus, 119–23. Burnyeat also notes that Plato’s interest cannot be fully captured by
using the tools of contemporary philosophy of language, but should be approached epistemologically.
Burnyeat, Theaetetus, 121.
27
I use ‘science’ and ‘non-science’ to reflect the episteme terms, by contrast with the gnosis terms used in
Text 12.2. Both Theaetetus and Socrates systematically use episteme for the abstract knowledge in the
Aviary, and doxazein (here) or gignoskein for particular judgements that deploy it.
Theaetetus: So?
Socrates: So having hunted for science (episteme) he will think that is what he has,
and not that he has non-science (anepistemosune).
200a3–9
What needed explanation was not errors we are incapable of discovering (because our
concepts are faulty), but accidental mistakes made by one whose concepts are fine,
such as thinking that 7 + 5 = 11.28 If that were due to a faulty idea of 11 or 12 the student
would be incapable of correcting it, since, by his own lights, he would see no mistake.
So mistakes caused by corrupt ideas or pseudo-science (which is what Theaetetus
has just described) would never show up as mistakes, however erroneous. Perhaps
such errors do occur, particularly in morality and political judgements. But if they
do, we can only learn to correct them by revising our understanding and restocking
our aviary.
Could our grasp of the forms be faulty? That would be problematic for Socrates’
procedure in this and other dialogues.29 It seems that it would be a very real risk if our
conceptual repertoire were stocked from experience, in the way that the Aviary model
suggests: nothing there could ensure that it contained sound or well-labelled items.
This provides a further good reason for thinking that Plato could not seriously endorse
the Aviary model of concept acquisition, which seems to leave our concepts lacking
any objective checks and immune to correction.30 But in any case, in the dialectic of
this dialogue, the Aviary clearly offers an unsatisfactory model of concept acquisition,
but it is the best that can be done within the constraints of ETD (which is a mistaken
theory and is destined to be discarded).
III. In Which We Examine Why Socrates Concludes

the Examination of ETD With the Jury Example
There remain unsolved problems about falsity despite the provision of the various
supplementary aids devised by Socrates to help the ailing thesis. These unsolved diffi-
culties comprise the first part of its refutation, showing as they do that episteme and
true doxa come apart, that one can have the former without the latter, which in itself is
already sufficient to show that ETD cannot be correct.
Why then does Socrates go on to offer another refutation of ETD in the passage
about the jury? In my earlier discussion of this material, I observed that the jury
provides the complementary case, where we have the latter without the former (that is,
28
The distinction between these two kinds of mistake is important for understanding why Socrates
dismisses the ignorance birds as irrelevant, but the main commentaries, e.g. McDowell, Theaetetus, 225–6,
Burnyeat, Theaetetus, 116–18, seem not to distinguish them clearly.
29
This threat figures in the Republic (especially the Cave), and in some dialogues about rhetoric, e.g. the
Gorgias.
30
true doxa without episteme). So the non-identity is proved in both directions.31 But
I also noted that the jury case is rather sketchy: it works by a very rough and ready
methodology. Since it is not strictly necessary for the dialectic (the first refutation is
technically sufficient and explanatory) and is methodologically less sophisticated, we
might wonder why Plato puts the jury case in at all. I shall argue, in this section, that
the trial-and-error method is required to meet the needs of young Theaetetus who has
been unable to follow the more theoretical refutation.
By 200d Socrates is ready to conclude that the term episteme better describes the
birds in the Aviary than the judgements made by catching them, and that the term
doxa fits the latter. Theaetetus, however, seems not to understand. When Socrates asks
for a new analysis (Text 12.5), Theaetetus does not take the hint just given, which might
have prompted him to identify ‘science’ with one’s repertoire of concepts, not one’s
occasional deployment of them, but instead simply repeats ETD. True doxa is infallible
and delivers good results, he says. What else could we want?
Text 12.5
Socrates: Tell me, then. What’s the best thing to say, that would be least likely to
lead to us contradicting ourselves?
Theaetetus: Perhaps what we tried before, Socrates? I’ve nothing else to offer, for
my part.
Socrates: Which one?
Theaetetus: The one about true doxa being science; because discerning truths is
infallible, and what happens on the basis of true discernment is all fine and good.
Theaetetus 200d8–e6
Evidently, Theaetetus is not yet ready to abandon his second baby. Socrates needs to
address this incomprehension by providing an argument that Theaetetus can under-
stand—something that meets him at the developmental stage he is at. What follows in
the Jury example reaches the same conclusion as the previous theoretical refutation of
ETD, but it reaches it by a less theoretical approach: in fact by a trial-and-error method
that is compared to feeling with your feet to discover whether the river is fordable:
Text 12.6
Socrates: When fording a river, I gather, the leading man says that ‘the crossing is
itself the proof ’. If we give this one a go, perhaps we’ll stub our toes on the very thing
we’re looking for; whereas if we just stop here, nothing is apparent.
Theaetetus: You’re right. Let’s go on and see.
Theaetetus 200e7–201a3
Rowett, ‘On making mistakes’, 165.

31
Trial and error is one method of proceeding in geometry: one can propose a hypothesis,
then test it on particular cases, to see whether you hit any counter-examples. This
doesn’t deliver a theoretical proof, and could not show that the theorem applies univer-
sally; but it is a method that is familiar to Theaetetus, for, as he had explained earlier,
that very morning Theodorus had set the boys to test numbers up to 17 severally, to
discover in each case whether its square root was irrational.32 Theodorus had given
no general theory, proved no theorem, nor asked the boys to find a proof; meanwhile,
although Theaetetus and his friend identified a pattern in their numbers, they did not
come up with a general theory about them, nor did they propose or prove a theorem at
any stage. Rather they saw their task as requiring them to generalize from a sample,
and apply a common name to the characteristic shared by a set of numbers. These
tasks came after some trial-and-error enquiries which had first shown up what they
saw as a pattern.33
So while trial-and-error methods are what Theaetetus has been brought up on, he is
less equipped to understand theoretical reasoning such as Socrates had given in his
discussion of falsity. Socrates had been pretty clear about the difference between
episteme and doxa in the Aviary model, but evidently Theaetetus had not cottoned on,
and hence Socrates needs now to find a simpler, less theoretical, approach. The next
plan is to see how far we can continue with ETD before we meet an obstacle in the form
of a counter-example that no one can deny is a counter-example.
III.i That the jury example is vague, intuitive, and offers no theoretical
explanation of the reason why
Socrates puts his toe in the water and immediately discovers an impasse (201a4) when
he imagines a lawsuit being tried by jury, in which the jurymen produce a correct
verdict—so they have true doxa—but they gave their judgement despite lacking some
item of knowledge. Yet if true doxa just is knowledge (ETD), then they cannot have the
former without ipso facto having the latter.
Almost all readers find this procedure immediately convincing, as does Theaetetus.34
But his satisfaction should not be ours, unless we too are content to work by trial and
error without any aspiration for theoretical explanation of the reason why. Or, if we are
satisfied that it implicitly diagnoses the reason for the failure of ETD, we must have
supplemented in our imagination the very vague and paradoxical description that
Socrates gives of the jury case. For it is by no means clear what the counter-example is
supposed to be, when we examine the details.
32
147d. 33 148a. See Chapter 10, Section I.
34
Burnyeat, Theaetetus, 124 describes it as a ‘brief argument and persuasive counter-example which
is all it takes to prove the non-identity of knowledge and true judgement. No tricks or complications
here to threaten sea-sickness’. But contrast the opening paragraph of Burnyeat, ‘Socrates and the jury’,
173 (‘So effective, in fact, that few readers stop long enough with the passage to notice that it is packed
with paradox’).
One oddity that scholars notice is the fact that Socrates gives two apparently different
reasons for why the jurymen lack knowledge.35 One is that the court rules allow insuf-
ficient time for the jury to be taught whatever it is that they don’t know, so they are
merely persuaded:
Text 12.7
‘Or do you think there are any teachers so clever that, concerning some people
whom they were not with, when those people had some money stolen or suffered
some other offence, they could adequately finish teaching (sc. the jury) the truth of
the things that happened to these people, in the short time the water runs?’
Theaetetus 201a10–b436
The other is that some things can only be known by someone who sees them,37 and
since the jurymen lack that first-hand knowledge, they drew conclusions on the basis
of hearing:
Text 12.8
So when jurors are justly persuaded about things that only someone who sees could
know, and not otherwise, by passing judgement on these things at that time on
the basis of hearing, and reaching a true opinion, they pass judgement without
knowledge, having been correctly persuaded, if they adjudicate well.
201b8–c2
In the first, Socrates implies that the missing knowledge could have been conveyed by
teaching, given sufficient time; in the second, he implies that eye-witness access is
required and the knowledge cannot be delivered, even by lengthy teaching, to those
absent from the scene. The reasons conflict, and the second thought, about the need
for experiential knowledge, is particularly surprising at this stage of the dialogue, since
we have already considered and rejected the thesis EA, which supposed that to per-
ceive is to know, or to know is to perceive. It was the death of that thesis that brought
ETD to birth.38
We should hesitate before blaming this discrepancy on carelessness, whether by
Plato or Socrates.39 First we need to think about some other puzzles. What is it that the
jury are right about? What range of things might they not know? At what stage, and
about what, do they exemplify true doxa (without knowledge)? About what exactly
would the lawyers teach them, given time? Which people exactly lack eye-witness
35
E.g. Bostock, Theaetetus, 200, Chappell, Reading Plato’s Theaetetus, 196.
36
On the Greek and problems of translation, see note 43.
37
περὶ ὧν ἰδόντι μόνον ἔστιν εἰδέναι (201b8–9). See note 43.
38
On whether Plato could or would endorse an eye-witness requirement for knowledge, see Section III.ii.
39
As suggested by e.g. Bostock, Theaetetus, 201. Burnyeat, Theaetetus, 124 also discerns a contradiction
here, but diagnoses deliberate provocation to the reader, not carelessness.
knowledge, and for what purpose does it matter? As Burnyeat noted, very few (if any)
scholars stop long enough to ask, let alone answer, these unanswered questions. Yet the
answers are not obvious. The epistemic status of both the jurymen and the lawyers,
with respect to both factual and conceptual knowledge, is pretty unclear.
David Bostock supposes that the jury’s question is who did it.40 Myles Burnyeat
supposes that they must decide ‘whether the defendant is guilty’,41 that the case is a
robbery, the victim is prosecuting, and the victim (alone) was an eye-witness.42 Many
assume that the knowledge that the jury lack is knowledge of what actually happened.
None of this is unproblematically there in the text. Most editors fiddle with the Greek
in Text 12.7, to make it fit with their assumption that the lawyers do know the facts and
must persuade a jury who don’t know, because the jury weren’t there to see what
happened, but the text makes perfect sense if the problem is something different: that
the lawyers were not present and know no more than the jury about the event.43 Since he
refers to ‘a techne called “orators and lawyers”’ (201a8), Socrates is evidently thinking
of cases where professional orators conduct the prosecution.44 It could be a public case,
brought by a quasi-professional litigant prosecuting on behalf of the state, in which
case the crime might be, say, tax evasion or misappropriation of property;45 but even
for a robbery or burglary, it is highly unlikely, even inconceivable, that the orators were
present at the scene of the crime. Indeed, victims themselves rarely see the crime
occurring. They are often defrauded, swindled, or pickpocketed unawares. So if no one
was there to see, the prosecution cannot call any witnesses who saw what happened.
Instead they will present other ‘evidence’ to convince the jury that the defendant is to
blame, and, after all, the jury do not need all the details. They just need enough to reach
a correct decision.
If neither the lawyers nor the jury know the facts, we can eliminate some problems
with the second point, in Text 12.8, about judging on hearsay. Socrates need not be
suggesting that one can never transmit experiential information by testimony or
40
Bostock, Theaetetus, 200.
41
‘The jury cannot be expected to end up knowing whether the accused is guilty or innocent’, Burnyeat,
‘Socrates and the jury’, 177.
42
Burnyeat, ‘Socrates and the jury’.
43
I would retain τούτοις in line b2 (with the manuscripts of family β) to give the following text: ἢ σὺ οἴει
δεινούς τινας οὕτω διδασκάλους εἶναι, ὥστε οἷς μὴ παρεγένοντό τινες ἀποστερουμένοις χρήματα ἤ τι ἄλλο
βιαζομένοις, τούτοις δύνασθαι πρὸς ὕδωρ σμικρὸν διδάξαι ἱκανῶς τῶν γενομένων τὴν ἀλήθειαν. For transla-
tion see Text 12.7. The people who were not there and don’t know the facts are the orators, not the jury. On
τούτοις, as dative of the people to whom the things happened, not the people being taught, see Burnyeat,
‘Socrates and the jury’, note 4 (who adds more different groups to avoid making the lawyer ignorant). There
is no accusative object for διδάξαι, indicating the hearer, but only an accusative of the content (τὴν ἀλήθειαν,
the truth).
44
Burnyeat, ‘Socrates and the jury’ takes the reference to professionals to mean a professional speech-
writer, so as to avoid the implication that the lawyers for the prosecution were not present as eye-witnesses.
45
The expression ἀποστερουμένοις χρήματα ἤ τί ἄλλο βιαζομένοις need not mean violent robbery, but
could mean fraud, dishonest dealings, or other breaking of the law.
teaching.46 For testimony to convey knowledge, somebody needs to have first-hand

information. If no one can testify from evidence, then there is no information to convey.
So Socrates is right that the jury may have no information, either first- or second-hand,
because in some cases there was no eye-witness, yet what actually happened is such
that only an eye-witness could know. Nonetheless, even then, a just verdict can be
obtained on the basis of reasoning or persuasion. Such a verdict may be no less sound
than one based on known facts.
These worries about whether the jury has information about what happened fit with
the reference in Text 12.8 to their lack of direct experience, and in Text 12.7 to teaching
them ‘the truth of the things that happened to these people’. Yet we should also notice
that these facts about ‘what happened’ do not by any means exhaust the relevant things
on which the jurymen need some knowledge. They need to understand what is forbid-
den by the law, what mitigating factors are relevant, and what would count as a just
punishment. These also involve knowing what justice is, and understanding which
factors in this case bear upon questions of justice and recompense. It is not sufficient to
think that so and so did such and such. The jury must then identify that deed as an
instance of wrongdoing, and (in trials in Athens) they will have to choose a suitable
penalty. In Socrates’ trial, for instance, the defendant did not deny doing what he did.
The jury’s job was to decide whether what he did constituted ‘corrupting the young’ in
a way that was unjust, and whether death was a suitable penalty.
Once we begin to think of this kind of knowledge, which is more conceptual than
factual, we shall immediately see the implications of the shortage of time, and the
difficulty about how the relevant knowledge could be taught in such a short time. This
time constraint, mentioned in Text 12.7, implies that, given enough time and good
teachers, the jury could learn something and would then make their judgement from
knowledge.47 This would make a lot more sense if what Socrates has in mind is not just
circumstantial facts but also understanding the requirements of the law, and what
counts as justice. Socrates, of course, did try to teach the jurymen to discriminate
between criminal corruption of the young and beneficial teaching of philosophy, but
without success.
III.ii That we should remember how, in the Digression, Socrates spoke about
the lack of time for the lawyers to do their job properly in the law courts
What evidence is there that Socrates might mean that the jury pass their judgement
with insufficient time for learning what justice is and how to apply it to this case? This
idea begins to look highly plausible when we juxtapose this passage with the so-called
46
Burnyeat, ‘Socrates and the jury’ takes Plato to be flouting the normal inference from ‘I know that you
know that p’ to ‘I know that p’. But if, as I suggest, the lawyers do not know either, there is nothing but
guesswork and probability, and the transfer of factual knowledge is not the issue. Cooper, ‘Plato’s Theaetetus
reappraised’ writes as though knowledge of facts or events cannot be conveyed by teaching or testimony,
an extreme claim that is neither self-evident nor plausible.
47
For problems with construing the sentence and translating, see note 43. The aorist aspect of the verb
implies that (given time) one could complete the teaching.
Digression at 172b to 177c, where Socrates reflected at more leisure on the shortage of
time in court and how lawyers lack the time to attend to matters of importance, like
‘what justice is’, being required to focus on the topics dictated by the rule book.48 As a
result, petty-minded lawyers are stunted by their lack of opportunity to address the
philosophers’ question.49 When Socrates returns in Text 12.7 to the constraints of the
courtroom clock, the reader is surely supposed to remember that the problem identi-
fied there was that the time was too short for teaching people about ‘what justice is’.
Indeed, the jury example makes more sense and fits Socrates’ project much better
if what the jury lack (but can proceed without) is the conceptual knowledge that a phil-
osopher would teach. One certainly can reach the right judgement without knowing
why it is right, or what justice actually is, in any profound sense, just as (in the Meno)
someone can find the road to Larissa by correct doxa alone.50 In the Meno Socrates
seemed to imply that one who travelled the road would thereby ‘know’ the road, and
here he seems to imply that by actually being there, one could learn about what actually
happened at the crime scene. But is knowledge of what actually happened the right
kind of thing to be ‘knowledge’? Surely by episteme we do not mean knowing a singular
road or knowing some singular events that took place. We mean things like knowing
what justice is, so as to make an informed decision on whether the deeds are to be
condemned. Why, then, does Plato not make that distinction here (or in the Meno at
the equivalent point)?
Could Plato have lost the plot? Has he borrowed the jury example from someone
else without sufficient care?51 Clearly we should avoid those depressing explanations
unless there is no better one. I reckon that we can find a better one if we recall our
earlier lessons from the Meno. In Chapter 5 we distinguished between ‘knowledge of ’
and ‘knowledge about’, to show that Socrates was still keeping the distinction between
the abstract knowledge of ‘what it is’ and the recognition of the particular: he claims
that one is better placed to know the road after travelling to Larissa; but this is because,
in travelling along the particular road, one also gains knowledge about something else:
namely, about what it is to be ‘the road to Larissa’.52
So perhaps something similar is happening here. Probably the jury do not really
need particular factual information from an eye-witness: mere doxa will be fine for all
that, and arguably doxa is all they could get from a witness anyway; but what they
48
Theaetetus 172c–e; 175c. See Chapter 11, Section IV.i. The link between the jury example and the
Digression is briefly noted by Sedley, The Midwife of Platonism, 149–51.
49
172e–173b; 175b–176a.
50
Most scholars note the reminiscence of the Meno, 96d5 to 97c11 in Theaetetus’s claim that doxa gives
excellent results (in Text 12.5). E.g. McDowell, Theaetetus, 227; Sedley, The Midwife of Platonism, 149–51.
Burnyeat, ‘Socrates and the jury’, 175 is convinced that Plato has slipped up. For my exposition of the
relevant part of the Meno, see Chapter 5, Section III.ii.
51
A comparable jury example appears as a topos in a debate on whether knowledge differs from true
belief in Antisthenes’ Ajax (Fragment 14 in Fernanda Decleva Caizzi, Antisthenis fragmenta (Milan: Istituto
Editoriale Cisalpino, 1966)). On allegations of plagiarism from Antisthenes see Burnyeat, ‘Plato’s dream’,
108–17.
52
Chapter 5, Section III.iii.
crucially need is a sound grasp of some of the relevant ideas, such as what a just penalty
is, and what counts as an offence against property rights. As things stand, that knowledge,
which is of a quite different order from the factual information, cannot be taught in the
courtroom, partly because the lawyers themselves have never had time for philosophy,
and partly because there is no time to teach even what they do know under the constraints
of the clock. Certainly the jurymen must be drawing upon some implicit grasp of justice as
they make their decision, but they have not learned it from their lawyers, or from some
eye-witness; and that abstract knowledge about justice is nothing like the information
produced in court, nor is it to be equated with the true verdict that they reach.
Is this passage a refutation of ETD? Is it the refutation of ETD? As we have seen, the
proper theoretical refutation of ETD was complete once all the attempts to provide a
mechanism to explain false doxa (187c–200d) had failed. There would be no need for a
further refutation after that were it not that Theaetetus failed to understand that ETD was
refuted. Predictably, young Theaetetus is better able to understand the trial-and-error
method, and to recognize the counter-example as decisive. Many commentators have
the same difficulty, seeing the falsity passage as a diversion into a mire of confusion,
and indicating a strong preference for the ‘start-crossing-the-river-and-see’ method of
testing the hypothesis. It suits the non-theoretical mind better.
Such commentators puzzle over why Plato did not go straight to the simple counter-
example. Our puzzle is the reverse. Since the falsity discussion provides a detailed and
accurate theoretical refutation of the ETD thesis, and has the resources to explain why
ETD fails, we should wonder that Plato now offers another that is so much less precise
and so lacking in explanation. The jury is not a satisfying refutation, if you are looking
for philosophical clarity. Hence the reason for including it must be methodological
and literary/dramatic: the simpler refutation works for Theaetetus, because it is a kind
that is familiar and easy for the young, but it offers no explanatory understanding of
what knowledge is. So it cannot make him or the reader wiser about the topic of the
enquiry, namely ‘knowledge, what it is’, and it will not help him to give an account or
explanation of what he sort-of-knows. He remains at level 3 of the Line, unable to give
an account of the posits that he has reached.
IV. In Which We Consider the TDL Analysis, and

Socrates’ Attempts to Devise a Rescue Package for It
IV.i That the Dream theory tries to explain what puts an object out of reach of
science, on the mistaken assumption that science consists in the analysis of
composites into their components
To complete this chapter, I shall briefly review Socrates’ response to Theaetetus’s third
and final brainchild. Theaetetus refines his previous analysis of science by adding that a
successful case of doxa could or would count as science if a logos is added, so true
discernment is science if and only if it is with logos. We are calling this thesis ‘TDL’:
TDL: Science (episteme) is true doxa plus logos.
Text 12.9
Theaetetus: What I once heard someone say . . . I’d forgotten but it’s coming back to
me now. He said the true discernment that’s with logos is science, but the irrational
sort (alogon) is beyond science. And things of which there is no logos, those are not
scientifically knowable (that’s how he put it). But the ones that have logos, they’re sci-
entifically known.
It would be nice to link this demand for logos to the idea that episteme could be taught
in court if the lawyers had time for a longer speech; but Theaetetus speaks of having
heard the idea somewhere before, and this probably means that we should seek our
orientation not in law-court practice but once again in the area of geometry.53 In Text
12.9, Theaetetus dimly remembers hearing a theory of the conditions for science, and
he mentions a kind of true doxa that is alogon (irrational), which, according to the
theory, does not so much fall short of science as lie outside it—it is ἐκτὸς ἐπιστήμης.
The theory imagines that science ranges over just those subjects or objects that are
capable of rational explanation, but there are other things that are inaccessible to
science. We can see how this might have started life as a thesis about the scope of
geometrical science: it would be a statement that limited the aspirations of geometry
to dealing only with items for which a ratio or finite proportion can be supplied. In the
light of that theory, the boys’ work on irrational square roots and cube roots is hugely
significant, because showing that it is possible to give an account of such roots as
having a whole number ratio to their squares and cubes brings an apparently recalci-
trant area of the subject into the scope of the science. ‘Irrationals’ no longer lie outside
the science, because they are no longer irrationals, lacking any ratio to other known
things in the field. Theaetetus and his friends had been at work on this task of working
out how to handle these things within geometry, instead of just treating them as strange
phenomena to be examined one by one, as Theodorus had presented them.54
For some phenomenon to fall within the purview of a science, there must be a way in
which that science can offer an account of that phenomenon. If there is no science that
can do that, perhaps the phenomenon is not scientifically explicable. This way of think-
ing invites the idea, which Socrates takes up, that the world is divided into scientifically
knowable objects and those that cannot be accounted for in the terms of the science,
which are alogon. Having grasped this distinction, Socrates then wants to know how
the theorist whose formula Theaetetus has recited divided the knowable from the
unknowable.55 Theaetetus is not sure.
53
The connection between this text and geometrical theory (including the work of Theaetetus) is noted
by Burnyeat, ‘Plato’s dream’, nn. 13 and 14 (with references to earlier work on the same theme).
54
147d4–e1.
55
A theory in geometry on these lines might be about axioms being beyond the scope of science, being
the starting points, or about some objects (e.g. irrational numbers or lines) being not amenable to explan-
ation in ratios or complete accounts.
Socrates famously responds by offering what he calls a ‘dream in return for a dream’,
in which he expands the proposal by imagining a distinction between primary non-
composite elements that ‘have no account’ and composite things that can be analysed.56
It is a theory about knowable objects, not about who knows them. It is not interested in
whether someone who knows can subjectively give a logos of what he knows, but
whether the thing to be known objectively has a logos that could in principle be given
by a scientist, or whether, lacking any such logos, it is outside the scope of the sciences
altogether. Socrates takes these unknowables to be aloga because they are the bottom
rung of analysis. It seems unlikely that this was what Theaetetus meant, but Socrates
makes it so in the exchange of his own dream for that of Theaetetus.
We should recall the paradigmatic analysis of clay that Socrates offered at the start
(147c4–6). As we observed, this idea of decomposing something into elements under-
pins all Socrates’ efforts in the Theaetetus.57 It is, I suggested, a model typical of the
natural sciences.58 As we now discover, such an analysis can, in a way, account for
compounds, by defining them in terms of their elements, but it cannot account for the
elements, which must then either be excluded from the range of scientifically know-
able items (as here), or one will need instead some alternative scientific account of the
elements (e.g. a periodic table that charts their differences). The latter idea is adum-
brated, perhaps, in Socrates’ third attempt at imagining what a logos might be.59
IV.ii That Socrates provides support by seeking potentially helpful meanings of

logos, and that the first two kinds of logos—though inadequate for the task—are
not so simple-minded as they seem
As before, Theaetetus’s new child is not going to survive without some adjustments.
In this case the main focus is on adjusting the meaning of the term logos to make it
provide a sufficient condition for something to qualify as science. If no such adjust-
ment can be found, the child is doomed.
There could be two reasons why no such adjustment is possible: for (a) there might
be no plausible meaning of the term logos that could meet the requirement (because of
limitations on what can count as a logos); or (b), it might be that no kind of supplement,
whether it counts as a logos or not, could ever turn doxa into episteme, because the very
idea of equating science with something composed of doxa is just hopeless.
In the drama, Socrates seems to address the first challenge: he searches for a sense of
logos that would make the TDL thesis viable. But Plato the author is surely also con-
sidering the second possibility, that the problem lies with the inclusion of doxa, which
means that no matter what else you add, it will never work. I shall argue that (i) Plato
does not hold that any logos of any kind can be conclusive evidence in itself of knowing,
and also (ii) Plato does not think that episteme is any kind of doxa. The enthusiasm that
Socrates shows for TDL60 should not be taken as Plato’s considered view on the reductive
201d–e. 57 See Chapter 10, Section II.ii.

56
Chapter 10, Section II.
58
See Section IV.iii. 60 202d1–7.

59
enterprise. Perhaps Socrates is right to say (in support of the new proposal) that one
wouldn’t expect to find that science is devoid of true discernment or of reason/logos.
But it does not follow that it is to be reduced to those features, since they may be symp-
toms of the scientist’s knowledge, not what it consists in. So the search for an adequate
sense of logos will prove futile, for reasons that Plato can surely see. Perhaps Socrates in
the drama does not yet see what Plato the author can see.
At any rate, Socrates, as midwife, tries his best on behalf of TDL. From 206e to 210a
he explores various kinds of logos that things might have, or that people might give, for
things that they can identify.61 He offers and rejects successively three proposals about
what a logos would have to be, if it were to guarantee that the true discernment to which
it is attached qualifies as science.
The first suggestion is that a logos might be a spoken utterance accurately reporting
your true observation:
Text 12.10
Socrates: The first would be making your thought-process apparent through
voiced utterance with verbs and nouns, printing off your conclusion into the flow
from the mouth like onto a mirror or water as it were—or doesn’t that kind of thing
seem to you to be a logos?
206d1–5
Could such a logos be evidence of scientific knowledge? The idea may be less foolish
than it looks. The mirror analogy suggests that Socrates is thinking of an audible utter-
ance that is wholly transparent such that it can make the mind’s content apparent
(ἐμφανῆ): a transparent medium giving unimpeded access, via an exact print-out
(ἐκτυπούμενον), to the thought-process (τὴν αὑτοῦ διάνοιαν) which led to the con-
clusion (τὴν δόξαν) which is the correct doxa. If what is evidenced in speech is a pro-
cess of dianoia (reflection) leading to a conclusion (doxa), then Socrates is talking
about an utterance that reveals the mind’s reasons for reaching its conclusion, not an
utterance that merely states the resulting conclusion (doxa).62 But even though this
looks superficially plausible, it takes no time at all for Socrates to conclude that it will
not help,63 because just about anyone can voice their thoughts and reasons, so that abil-
ity cannot be a mark of science.
Second, Socrates suggests that ‘logos’ might mean an analytical list of components—
listing the elements (stoicheia) of the thing about which one possesses scientific
knowledge. He cites the example of a wagon, familiar, no doubt, from Hesiod, who
claims that one needs one hundred timbers to make a wagon, and that only a fool who
61
This is preceded by four pages in which he unpacks the dream theory and raises various puzzles about
how it would work (202c–206c), which are not directly germane to our present concern.
62
On the crucial distinction between dianoia (thinking) and doxa (the conclusion), see Chapter 11,
Section III.v.
63
206d–e.
doesn’t know about wagons would think it can be built in a day.64 So Socrates infers, at
207a3, that being a scientific expert on what a wagon is (τεχνικόν τε καὶ ἐπιστήμονα
περὶ ἁμάξης οὐσίας γεγονέναι) involves being able to list those one hundred parts, and
that would suffice to turn a correct impression of a wagon into a scientific grasp of the
being (ousia) of wagon.65
However, this cannot save TDL, because, as Socrates observes at 208b8, expertise
involves being able to go on where relevant to handle such tasks successfully in another
context. Being able to use letters correctly in one name but not in another indicates
that one is not fully competent in the science of letters.66 The expert can recognize the
same syllable in a new context, and understands how to continue systematically for
various token uses of one syllable-type.67 One might see, in the failure of this logos,
hints that what is missing is a generic science of types, but Socrates does not propose
any such solution, or prompt Theaetetus to that.
IV.iii That the third suggestion is also somewhat trickier to understand

than it seems, and that Plato is not secretly recommending it
Next Socrates suggests that having a logos might mean having a distinctive ‘sign’
(σημεῖον) that differentiates the specified item from all others. Is this a more promising
survival aid, as some have supposed?68 I shall argue that it is not:
Text 12.12
Theaetetus: What’s your third species of logos?
Socrates: What the ordinary folk would say—having some sign (σημεῖον) that you
can mention, by which the thing in question differs from all the others.
Theaetetus: Can you give me an example: what sign of what?
Socrates: Like, say, concerning the Sun, I reckon it would satisfy you if we declare
that it is the brightest of the heavenly bodies that orbit the earth.
The idea is often paraphrased in terms of ‘finding the distinguishing mark’ for
something. That terminology should be accepted only on condition that we really
understand what it means. It is tempting to see it as a version of definition by genus and
differentia, but, as we shall see, that is actually the opposite of what is meant.
64
Works and Days 454–7. In the work as we have it, Hesiod does not provide a catalogue of the parts
which is surprising given that catalogues are characteristic of didactic poetry. Plato may be making a
literary joke about the poet not knowing what he is talking about.
65
207c4. 66 207e–208d. 67 Note the singular noun at 208a2.
68
Some scholars propose that the Theaetetus is less aporetic than it appears: that Plato is hinting at ana-
lysis that would come close to succeeding (something like JTB). Many think the third meaning of ‘account’
promising or nearly perfect, and some see a hint that analysis by collection and division (as in the Sophist
etc.) is the way forward. This approach in various guises can be found in Nehamas, ‘Episteme and logos in
Plato’s later thought’, Polansky, Philosophy and Knowledge: a commentary on Plato’s Theaetetus, Cooper,
‘Plato’s Theaetetus reappraised’, and Fine, ‘Knowledge and logos in the Theaetetus’. See further Section IV.iv.
Socrates illustrates the proposal by defining the Sun as ‘the brightest of the heavenly
bodies that orbit the Earth’ (Text 12.12). This might be quite successful if what he was
trying to do were to define the role that the Sun occupies, i.e. ‘what it is to be a sun, or the
sun’. One can indeed define a role with one occupant, or a type with only one token, as
we saw in Chapter 3: to do so one should identify a distinctive feature or attribute that
could be possessed by no more than one member of a certain class of things, whose
possessor is the sole occupant of that role or sole member of that class.69 One could
do that for the idea of ‘the sun’ by identifying a description, e.g. ‘the brightest’, instan-
tiated by just one of the items that orbit the Earth. That could be done in advance of
identifying which body fits the description.
However, although Socrates’ account of the sun superficially seems to read like that,
closer analysis shows that he is not in fact trying to define the role, or idea, of ‘the sun’.
He is not after all thinking of a case of knowing, in the abstract, what it is to be the
Earth’s sun, but rather knowing the body that fits the role: the concrete particular, our
Sun itself. He is considering what would be required for me to be said to know this
body, Sol: to know it for what it is, that this one is the Sun. He is looking for a stamp
(σημεῖον) that the item itself bears, some sign that marks it out as the thing it is, and
assures us that this is the one. He suggests that if one knows what that sign is, for some
particular thing, one will then know that the item we have discovered is the one. The
stamp or sign mentioned in Text 12.12 is like the signet ring or token that you carry to
prove that you are the person you claim be: it is the proof of identity, the passport or
identity card. In this case, this body’s brightness is what proves that it is the Sun, not the
Moon or Venus, say.
So by this last meaning of logos, you count as knowing what you correctly think (that
it’s the Sun), if you can detect in it the sign that it carries that guarantees its identity. For
Sol, that sign is its brightness, because only one thing in our solar system has such
brightness. A scientist would be the one who can identify the Sun, Venus, Mercury etc.
by the distinctive mark that each one has, while an amateur just guesses which is which.
So we should not understand this third meaning of logos as it has normally been
understood. Socrates is not explaining how to define a class or type by genus and differ-
entia, or even how to define a role or a class with one member such as Earth’s sun.70 He is
not talking about knowing in principle what marker counts as a sufficient condition for
being a sun (although such an ‘in principle’ condition is clearly implicit in the idea of
looking for the mark on some actual body that has it).71 Socrates is still talking, as at the
start, about knowing a thing for what it is. To know that this is the Sun, he suggests, is to
identify it by a special mark or signet that it has (its brightness).
So Socrates is talking about knowing that this is the Sun, not what a sun is. He is not
defining a concept but identifying an object. But the account still fails as a sufficient
69
Chapter 3, Section IV.
70
Contrast the case of knowing Meno, discussed in Chapter 3.
71
See below for how the identification of such a sufficient condition is also parasitic on knowing first
‘what counts as a sun’.
condition for science, even once we have correctly understood it as the sign that an
object bears, for two reasons: first because it implies that mere doxa cannot include
noticing the distinctive sign, as if an amateur saw only the commonalities in the object,
and only the scientist saw the distinctive feature (whereas in fact it seems that everyone
sees what is distinctive, by mere doxa);72 and second because (Socrates argues) what
the scientist needs in addition is to know that this distinctive sign is the one that is
required.73 This is not a simple complaint of circularity in the definition, as commenta-
tors sometimes assume.74 Rather it is a radical problem, which is inescapable, however
you express the point. If the sign that proves that this body is the Sun is its supreme
brightness, we can cite that as proof of its identity only if we first know theoretically that
such a mark is distinctive of the Sun. We need the theoretical knowledge, the know-
ledge of the type or role, to the effect that ‘for any orbiting body, if that body is the
brightest, then it is the sun’. Only by deploying that theoretical grasp of the type (which,
I submit, is episteme) can the scientist use the brightness of a body to prove that it is
the Sun. So if I am right, Socrates means that recognition of anything (Theaetetus
with the snub nose, or Sol in the sky) is parasitic on first having an idea (of what it
takes to be the sun, or to be Theaetetus) and it is by consulting that theoretical know-
ledge that we can derive the list of distinctive signs that mark out members of the class
or the single member of the class. In fact we need that conceptual knowledge for our
proof or sign to be a proof or sign at all. So the giving of such a logos would not itself be
the knowledge, but it presupposes some other conceptual knowledge—for which there
is no such account, since it is the source from which that account is drawn. Yet, so far
from making that unknowable, because it lacks an account, it is actually the episteme
on which we draw for all our judgements and all our accounts, about everything,
whether right or wrong.
IV.iv That the survey of meanings of logos is probably not

noticeably incomplete
Socrates was exploring possible meanings for the term logos, to see whether there was
one that could make TDL viable. TDL will fail if there is no plausible meaning of logos
the having of which can turn a case of true doxa into a case of episteme. It seems, then,
that Socrates needs to consider and eliminate all likely meanings of logos, before con-
cluding that nothing can save this baby. In the text, he implies that there are only three
to consider, but some commentators think that he has omitted the best candidate,
which would be a logos that provides an explanation or justification for the true belief.
Some suggest that the dialogue implicitly invites us to notice that this fourth option is
perversely ignored and to infer Plato’s proper answer, which is that knowledge is true
72
209d1. 73
209e7.
74
E.g. Sedley, The Midwife of Platonism, 174; McDowell, Theaetetus, 156. See also Sedley, The Midwife of
Platonism, 176.
belief with a justification-type logos.75 But this is a counsel of despair, since there is no
way that TDL could be saved by such a supplement. And in any case, it seems wrong to
say that the ‘reason why’ kind of logos has not already been considered.76 According
to my exposition above,77 the first sense of logos was an audible unimpeded expression
of the internal thought-processes that justified your conclusion (your doxa). This
amounts to an expression of your reasons—your justification or explanation of why
you reached that view. However, as we saw in Section IV.ii, giving your subjective
reasons in that way cannot make your conclusion into knowledge. It is no more know-
ledge than it was without such a supporting utterance, and since your reasons might be
good or bad, sound or fallacious, expressing them does not turn something that was
not science into science, nor does refusing to express the reason aloud make it not
science. In fact, merely having a reason or explanation for your belief, or stating that
reason, is not sufficient for knowing. You need to know that the reason is a good one.
And so the regress threatens again.
Most recent commentators have accepted that Socrates’ survey of the meanings
of logos is sufficient and exhaustive, and that all the options deserved to be rejected.
It follows that one cannot make true doxa into science by adding a logos, because what-
ever kind of logos one adds, it will always presuppose a further kind of knowledge that
is not any kind of doxa, or in any way conveyed by attending to the particular empirical
example about which one currently has correct doxa.78 This is my view too, and I take
these other scholars to have understood, in embryonic form at least, what I have been
trying to show. The majority opinion seems currently to be that the Theaetetus is
entirely compatible with the Middle-Period position on knowledge, and that the
difference is that it adds a more extensive exploration of how an empiricist account of
knowledge must fail.
Christopher Rowe stands apart from this consensus in suggesting that Plato (who,
for Rowe, is identical to Socrates in the dialogues) is seriously looking for episteme
among the examples of true doxa.79 I disagree, because I do not think, as Rowe does,
that throughout the Middle dialogues, the knowledge resulting from dialectic
75
See note 68. This view is typically ascribed to Cornford. In practice, Cornford seems to deny that true
belief plus the right kind of account is episteme, since he holds that true belief is of the wrong kind of thing
and cannot be knowledge. He does remark, however, on the absence of any reference to aitias logismos as
though that was a fault (Cornford, Plato’s Theory of Knowledge, 141–2). But he does not mean that aitias
logismos would turn true belief into knowledge but only that it can lead to a grasp of the Form. In reality
few recent commentators have taken this line, but arguably Edmund L. Gettier, ‘Is justified true belief
knowledge?’, Analysis, 23 (1963), 121–3 must have done, since he attributes JTB to Plato.
76
The tradition that this is what is missing starts with Anonymous, Commentarium in Platonis
‘Theaetetum’, 2.52–3.25. The idea is traced through the tradition, and rejected, by McDowell, Theaetetus,
257–8. See also Burnyeat, Theaetetus, 236, and White, Plato on Knowledge and Reality, 183.
77
Section IV.ii.
78
This view seems to me to be common to Burnyeat, Sedley, Bostock, McDowell, Chappell, Cornford,
and Fine (and myself). McDowell and Fine think that Plato is moving towards the idea that simples are
knowable in virtue of definition by collection and division, which is another kind of logos. Thus they retain
the idea that definition is required for knowledge.
79
Rowe, Plato and the Art of Philosophical Writing, 229–31.
included, as one of its components, true doxa concerning particulars. In my view, we

can see, once we understand the iconic method, that the passages that encouraged
Rowe to that conclusion are the ones where Plato is exploring our ability to use par-
ticulars as icons; but what we acquire, by using them in that way, is not knowledge of
those particulars but a grasp of something else, on a different logical plane.
IV.v That regardless of whether the discussion has been exhaustive,

TDL still fails
Is Socrates entitled to discard TDL at this point (210a–b)? In an argument like this, it is
not always necessary to complete an exhaustive survey of possible solutions, once we
have the general gist of the problem. Socrates has considered three possible meanings
of logos which cumulatively are sufficient to indicate that such props systematically run
into problems, because of something disabling the very core of TDL: namely the fact
that the proposal is still searching for science among the contents of ‘doxa’. In fact
Theaetetus has simply divided the generic class of aisthesis once more: his second idea,
about true doxa, was already a sub-class of the broad notion of aisthesis;80 his third idea
was to mark off a sub-sub-class within true doxa, namely true doxa with logos. If the
problem is that episteme is not any kind of doxa, then this proposal is doomed to fail,
not because of a fault in the logos component, but in virtue of confining itself to doxa,
with various additions or constraints. But in truth, one can add whatever additions or
constraints one pleases and nothing will solve the problem, if science is just not a kind
of doxa at all.81 If doxa is a way of deploying episteme and episteme is a conceptual grasp
of the tools for recognition, and is of the type and not the token, and is a precondition
for true doxa but not a case of it, then the search for a meaning of ‘account’ that could
assist is hopeless, and will always leave us needing another repertoire of knowledge to
draw upon, to verify the claim that the account is based on knowledge.
Certainly TDL had to be tested, to see if it was viable. Socrates was required, as mid-
wife, to devise some ingenious aids, as for Theaetetus’s other babies. The methodology
in this conversation is trial and error, so it does not attempt to produce the theoretical
explanation of why these proposals could not work. There is nothing that Socrates can
do but explore each one as it comes until young Theaetetus of the excellent wits comes
to see for himself what the pattern is (as he did with the square roots).
As we noted in Chapter 10, Socrates has been looking for a technical definition on
the same model as his chemical analysis of clay.82 That ambition belongs to the natural
sciences, but not to dialectic, I suggested. The ‘dream theory’,83 and the difficulties that
it raised about the indefinability of elements, hammered another nail into its coffin.
Besides, that kind of definition turns out to be useless for defining types, classes, or
80
See Chapter 11.
81
On the addition of aitias logismos at Meno 98a, see Chapter 5, Section V. See also Chapter 8, note 67.
And against what they call ‘an additive account of knowledge’, Burnyeat, ‘Plato’s dream’, 103–5; Nehamas,
‘Episteme and logos in Plato’s later thought’.
82
Chapter 10, Section II. 83
Theaetetus 203a. See Section IV.i.
forms. It is appropriate only for a restricted range of natural-kind terms and chemical
compounds. It provides no explanatory understanding of concepts that are in any way
contextual or open ended, such as ‘knowledge’ or ‘justice’.
Furthermore, as we saw before,84 even if the ability to give an account can count as
evidence that you know the concept under scrutiny, Plato probably thinks that the
logos is not itself what is known, or any part of the knowing. It is not a necessary condi-
tion for knowledge since, as is apparent in this dialogue, even without being able to
give a proper account, one can have an adequate grasp of what science is, sufficient for
using the term competently (up to a point) and testing the definitions of it, in a trial-
and-error kind of way. So the conversation between Socrates and Theaetetus shows
that two people can possess conceptual knowledge (of ‘what science is’) and yet be
unable to express what they know in words, or analyse its parts, or pick out a key fea-
ture that marks out all cases of science, or distinguish systematically between things
that are scientifically knowable and those that are not. Nor can they give any other kind
of account of ‘what science is’. Their inability to locate how science relates to cases of
true doxa suggests that they would fare no better at the kind of task that some com-
mentators recommend, such as fixing the notion of science on a chart of concepts,
using collection and division.85 Yet, I submit, they do know what science is. Their abil-
ity to reject the definitions each time clearly relies on their inarticulate grasp of what
they are trying to define, and it seems to be no less useful, for that purpose, for being
inarticulate. We should conclude, I suppose, that Plato does not think such a definition
is necessary.
One response might be to say that no one claims that Socrates knows all there is to
know about what science is. In fact, he disclaims any such knowledge. Yet, surely, the
dialogue makes better sense if we read it as an exploration of just how much Socrates
does know, despite his disclaimers. His disavowal of knowledge is based on the mis-
taken claim that you must be able to define it if you know it, whence he supposes that
neither he nor the others know what knowledge is, being unable to find a definition.
But arguably it turns out that the supposedly ‘barren’ midwife is amply stocked with
knowledge, because his systematic ability to use the concept and refute others’ mis-
taken definitions is sufficient evidence of conceptual knowledge.
V. Conclusion: That Plato Is Not in the Same Position

as Socrates, Since He Never Approved of the Naturalistic
Project That Socrates Pursues in This Dialogue
At Theaetetus 210a–b, Socrates decides that none of Theaetetus’s three proposals can
be saved. Finding no further pregnancies, Socrates dismisses Theaetetus with the hope
that he may one day get pregnant again, or that, if not, he will at least be conscious of
84
Chapter 8, Section V. See note 78.
85
his own ignorance, and more modest in his dealings with his companions. These
closing lines remind us again of the unfulfilled promise of one who, when a boy,
seemed destined to become a philosopher, but who is now (in the imagined dramatic
setting of the frame conversation) on the verge of premature death.86
Was Theaetetus right to cite geometry as a paradigm case of episteme? It cannot help
us to understand what a science is unless we have grasped what it is about geometry
that is scientific. If by ‘geometry’ we mean a science that grasps truths about what a
right angle is, and about the circle as such, then it qualifies. But Theaetetus is not very far
advanced in his study of geometry, and he has a limited understanding of its founda-
tions: he understands about positing and naming things (e.g. the powers or surds);87 but
positing and naming is not all there is to it.
In the Phaedo and the Phaedrus Socrates spoke of a pre-natal encounter with Forms
as the source of our grasp of (e.g.) what it is to be equal. Here in the Theaetetus no one
has any successful suggestion to make about how we acquire the concepts that we use
in court, to pass judgement on matters of injustice, or in geometry to pass judgement
on which things are equal. Given that (as it appears) it cannot be by way of a device that
captures particular experiences, such as the wax block or the Aviary (which both fail to
produce the right kind of generic idea), and since our daily engagement with the world,
including our capacity for error, presupposes that we read the world through eyes that
are conceptually equipped and capable of ‘seeing as’, the question about how we acquire
the concepts is a fundamental one: a point that would be familiar to Kant, Wittgenstein,
McDowell, Russell, Frege, and Hume. Plato does not answer the question in this
dialogue, but he doesn’t do anything to make the question go away.
See Chapter 10, Section I.

86
87
PA RT V
The Bigger Picture
13
Conclusions and Further Tasks
I. Where Are We Now?

I.i A retrospective on certain unexpected results of this enquiry
When I first embarked upon writing this book, I had in mind something rather different
from what has emerged here. I had conceived the idea that we could better understand
Plato’s views on knowledge in the Theaetetus by thinking of the relevant kind of
knowledge as a knowledge of objects. I thought that we would do well to contrast the
discussion of true and false perception and doxa, in the Theaetetus, which (as I still
hold) is about perception (and misidentification) of objects, with some very different
work on truth and falsity in the Sophist and the Cratylus (where the former would be
about true and false propositions, and the latter about correct and incorrect applica-
tion of names). I had in mind that by contrasting these three topics (true identification
of things, true statements about things, and true names for things), I would be able to
demonstrate what I thought at the time was true and interesting—but which I now
think is false—namely that Plato’s topic in the Theaetetus was knowledge of things
and not knowledge of propositions, and that it was a mistake to try to make the text
say something sensible about propositional knowledge and propositional truth.
Some of those original thoughts still stand. I hope that I have successfully shown
that it is unhelpful to try to read propositional knowledge into the Theaetetus. But
I had started this inquiry thinking that in the Theaetetus Plato meant to take, as his
paradigm case of knowing something, the perceptual recognition of a particular thing
(e.g. Theaetetus). That remains sort of true; but I had inferred, from the dialogue’s
obsession with recognition of the sensible particular, that Plato himself must have
conceived of that as the archetypal case of ‘knowing something for what it is’. I had
assumed, therefore, that the principal alternatives available, for explaining what Plato
was talking about, were these: (a) that knowledge was of propositions—true proposi-
tions, that is—or (b) that knowledge was of things and people and so on; and I thought
that Plato (in the Theaetetus) had no interest in the former, and that we would under-
stand him better, therefore, if we took him to be exclusively interested in the latter.
My idea, then, was to make clear this absence of any propositional structure in the cases
discussed in the Theaetetus, by contrasting what I found in the Theaetetus—namely,
knowledge of things (and not of propositions)—with (i) what I found in the Sophist,
namely an interest in truth and falsity in propositional utterances (albeit without any
suggestion that such propositions might be the content of knowledge or belief, which
would preserve the thought that Plato did not think of knowledge in propositional
form, even then), and (ii) what I found in the Cratylus, namely an interest in the truth
and falsity of labels for things.
So my view at that stage was roughly similar to what Timothy Chappell had in
mind, when he talked of ‘objectual knowledge’, and attributed that idea to Plato.1
I too was inclined to suppose that Plato’s idea of knowledge was a knowledge of things,
not of facts.
However, this idea did not survive. As I worked on the texts, I came to a quite
different conclusion: namely that Plato does not think that knowledge is of objects,
or of propositions either. To bring out the reasons why I reached this conclusion,
I have followed a different procedure in the book from the one I had originally planned.
Instead of contrasting the Theaetetus with the works on language (Cratylus on names
and Sophist on statements), so as to focus on three kinds of truth relating to things,
names, and sentences, I have found it helpful instead to re-read some other famous and
central works by Plato that were not part of that original plan, namely the Meno and
the Republic. In the process I have substantially changed my conclusions. I no longer
think that the range of alternatives for what Plato was talking about in the Theaetetus
is exhausted by the dichotomy between knowledge of ‘things’ and knowledge of
‘propositions’—nor would a knowledge of names be a third option as it might have
seemed. I now think that Plato means neither things nor propositions when he speaks
of episteme and what can be known. What he has in mind is another kind of know-
ledge, the grasp of concepts or types, which is neither propositional nor a knowledge of
particular sensible things. This knowledge is what Plato sought to explain. This is what
he meant by episteme, and this is what we need to get our heads round if we are to
understand the failure of the Theaetetus.
So I have written a book to show what I now think that Plato means by ‘knowing
the F, what it is’, and to explain why what is known, when you know something of this
kind, is something on a quite different logical plane from the particular tokens that
instantiate that type, and why it is an object of a quite different kind of cognition.
Because episteme is not to be equated with knowing a definition or any set of proposi-
tions, we have not needed to move on to the investigation that I had originally planned,
into Plato’s own enquiries into propositional truth and falsity, since those have no
bearing on episteme as he meant it (though they clearly are parasitic upon it).
So we have come a long way, through texts that have required serious reflection;
and we are still not ready to move on to considering the connections between the topic
in the Theaetetus and the discussions in the Sophist and the Cratylus.2 Instead we
have had to rethink what Plato means by terms like episteme, ousia, and aletheia. We have
Timothy Chappell, ‘Varieties of knowledge in Plato and Aristotle’, Topoi, 31 (2012), 175–90.
1
A recent contribution on the connections between the Cratylus and the Theaetetus can be found at
2
Deborah Modrak, ‘Meaning and cognition in Plato’s Cratylus and Theaetetus’, Topoi, 31/2 (2012), 167–74.
conclusions and further tasks 263
disentangled episteme from two notions that have tempted other interpreters: it is
now clear that episteme must not be confused either with propositional knowledge
(knowing that p or that x is F) or with objectual knowledge of some particular token
or thing, whether that is taken to be about identifying and/or naming it as the thing it
is (recognizing Theaetetus), or classifying it as one of a certain kind (recognizing it as
a right angle).3
Instead we have identified another kind of ‘knowing what something is’: namely,
the kind involved in ‘knowing what a virtue is’ or ‘what virtues are’. We are no longer
tempted to confuse knowing that virtue is [a kind of] knowledge with knowing what
a virtue is. The former is knowing what sort of thing it is (poion esti), while the latter
is knowing what it is (ti esti). Nor should we think of knowing a type as something
like knowing an object. That idea, that Plato thinks of episteme, including knowledge
of the Forms, as a knowledge of objects, now seems quite wrong.
Plato seems not to be talking about knowing objects in any of the texts so far inves-
tigated. We have found two kinds of cognition, one of which is apparently a form of
doxa, namely recognizing a particular token as falling under a type, and the other is
episteme, namely knowing the type itself. Neither of these is propositional, and neither
of them is a knowledge of objects. It is true that doxa is often about an object or thing.
When I recognize that a certain flower is a rose, my thought is about an extensional
object, that rose. My thought ‘that it is a rose’ looks propositional, because it applies a
certain description, ‘rose’, to the extensional object I have encountered. But I have argued
in several chapters of this book that such cases should not be analysed as propositions,
even though one would use a proposition to convey what one knows to someone else,
in language. The experience itself, of recognizing the rose, does not contain a proposition
but only a single descriptor (‘rose’). There are not two semantic items involved: rather,
there is one non-semantic item (the flower, an extensional object) and one semantic
item (the descriptor ‘rose’, which is intensional).
In Chapter 3 we considered cases where the item occupying the ‘token’ place is
another type (e.g. ‘virtue’ in ‘virtue is knowledge’) and even when the item occupying
the ‘type’ place is such that it has only one token, as for instance ‘Meno’ in ‘knowing
Meno, who he is’. In the chapters on the Republic we explored the way in which particular
tokens can be used as exemplars, standing to their type as what I have called icons.
In Chapter 12 we noted that the ability to identify something (perceptually or in thought)
under a description presupposes a repertoire of conceptual tools (the relevant descrip-
tors) that are logically distinct from the items to which we are applying them, even
when there is only one token that merits the description. But nowhere have we found
that grasping or possessing the conceptual tool (the type or descriptor) consists in
knowing an object. When we know ‘what roses are’ (or ‘what a rose is’), what we know
is not a rose, or any kind of physical object, or an immaterial object, but it is rather a
3
On the ambiguity of the term ‘identify’ and the distinction between correct identification and correct
naming, see J.L. Austin, ‘How to talk’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 53 (1952), 227–46, 237.
semantic or conceptual idea, the very notion of a ‘rose’. We need access to such an idea
if we are to recognize actual roses in the world in those terms. What we know when we
know what roses are is not another object, I suggest; but that is not because it is more
complex or propositional than an object; nor is it because it is something less objective,
or something merely in the mind. Rather, when I say it is not an ‘object’ I mean that in
something like the sense in which Frege spoke of ‘objects’, when he distinguished
concepts from objects: ‘rose’ is the conceptual tool for classifying other objects (roses)
as roses, and for forming propositions about roses.
It seems helpful, then, to reserve the term ‘object’ for those things that occupy the
logical space represented by the physical rose, about which we say ‘this is a rose’, and to
use terms like ‘concept’ or ‘idea’ or ‘type’ for the things that play the role that is played
here by the idea of ‘a rose’. ‘Type’ is probably our normal term for this—that is, for what
is conventionally called ‘Forms’ in Plato, it seems to me. In philosophy, we sometimes
find ourselves mentioning, classifying, listing, or describing various concepts (as, for
instance, we are doing now). On those occasions, the concept moves to the object
place in the discussion, so we find ourselves treating the concept or type as a token
(object) falling under another type (e.g. the type ‘concepts’ or ‘types’). But the basic
distinction, which is a logical one, still holds. The things that we can say or do with the
notion ‘a rose’ are quite different from the things we can do with a rose.
I.ii That we need a special sense of ‘is’ for knowing ‘what it is’
in the ti esti sense
These thoughts bring to light the important difference between grasping the conceptual
‘what it is’, about ideas like ‘roses’, ‘knowledge’, ‘virtue’, or ‘justice’, and grasping ‘what
it is’ about some object, whether physical or mental. I have proposed that there is a
special sense of ‘is’ that relates to the conceptual understanding. The hardest task in
this book has been making sense of the Theaetetus, with its repeated failure to work out
what episteme is. I have argued that these failures were caused by looking always at the
wrong kind of ‘what it is’. Socrates keeps talking about recognizing some object or thing,
and about avoiding mistakes or false doxa about what, or who, the thing is. That is,
he looks at cases of identification of a token, saying ‘what it is’. But this is something
quite other than the grasp of ‘what it is’ that makes for conceptual knowledge, such as
knowing what justice is, or what science is. In the Theaetetus the examples about recog-
nizing individuals and answering ‘what is it?’ questions illustrate doxa without a doubt,
but they do not qualify as episteme because they are not about the type but about the
token. They do presuppose and deploy conceptual knowledge, for sure—but this is a
problem rather than a virtue, because that conceptual knowledge, which is not defined
or even recognized in the dialogue, is what they should have been explaining.
Why is the Theaetetus so confused and unsuccessful? My view is that we should not
imagine that Plato has given up his idea of episteme as a knowledge of types, not tokens;
or that he is searching for propositional knowledge or knowledge of particular things.
By drawing attention to the parallels and continuities between the Theaetetus and
other dialogues about knowledge, I have tried to show that the Theaetetus is devoted to
diagnosing the problems that ensue if you think, as Theaetetus does, that the tasks that
belong to perception and doxa, relating to knowledge of the particular, are all there is
to science; or if you think that perception or doxa can serve as the sole source of the
conceptual and semantic tools required for making particular judgements. It is
Theaetetus who thinks that the work of doxa might be the work of episteme—that this
might be all there is to it. The suggestion fails, for good reason, I have argued, because
doxa cannot operate without semantic tools brought to the task by the perceiving
mind, and it cannot itself be the source of those tools.
Noticing the distinctive logical role of the verb ‘be’, in phrases such as ‘knowing vir-
tue what it is’, or ‘knowing what a game is’, is an important move in a larger argument
that I have been developing, to show that when Plato links episteme to being and truth,
it is that kind of being and truth that is meant. I have argued that Plato systematically
associates this kind of being with knowing, not only with the noun episteme but also
with other verbs and nouns signifying genuine knowledge. Genuine knowledge, or
science, for Plato turns out to be the cognitive condition in which one grasps that
kind of being.
I.iii That the key to reading Plato can sometimes lie
in the dramatic setting
Part of my argument for this rather difficult reading of the Theaetetus concerned geom-
etry, and the dialogue’s emphasis on Theaetetus’s youth, and his promise even in the
early stages of geometry. These are careful hints by the author, which help to explain
why Theaetetus is unable to answer the ‘what it is’ question, about science in the
abstract. The failure is meaningful—it provides evidence that Plato himself under-
stands the distinction between grasping a concept and identifying the token, and is
illustrating what happens if you don’t understand that distinction, and try to answer
the ‘what it is’ question without clarity on that. The failure illustrates a problem in
Theaetetus’s immature thinking, but not any confusion or struggle on Plato’s part.
My argument here drew heavily on the dramatic setting and the frame dialogue of
the Theaetetus, and also on its links with the Republic. Geometry figures in all three
of our dialogues, and in each case it is something that one does at an early stage of
education, before turning to real philosophy. A certain kind of geometrical thought
that comes relatively easily to the young student begins to open her eyes to the
abstract nature of the ideas instantiated in visible forms. Ultimately, the student
would move beyond looking at forms in particular drawings and models, and realize
that those forms can be treated independently as abstractions to be manipulated in
the mind. She would come to realize that they are tools for thinking with, that they
are separate, in some sense, from the particular objects that bear their names from
time to time; she would discover that these forms are objective and mind-independ-
ent, that one can be right or wrong about them, and that they are a true subject of
scientific knowledge.
The picture of young Theaetetus at an early stage of geometry is not simply a literary
motif, or Plato’s pious memorial to a great man. It is also a key to understanding the
dialogue, because it explains why, at every turn, Theaetetus thinks that science must be
something like perception or doxa—that science is about perceiving and describing
individual things, and that’s all. He is used to seeing his results instantiated on the
diagram and to acquiring his scientific knowledge from looking and seeing, about
some object, ‘what it is’ in the sense of ‘what kind of thing it is (poion esti)’. Just because
Plato portrays someone at the junior end of geometry, it does not follow that Plato
himself was convinced that science can be reduced to a kind of acquaintance with the
objects of perception and doxa. Rather he is showing that the idea will not work, and is
hardly even coherent.
I.iv That Plato is right about the logical distinction between semantic
tools and extensional objects
On the basis of this work on the Theaetetus, and the comparison with the Meno, I have
argued that Plato is quite right to draw a clear distinction between the grasp of concep-
tual truths—that is, the grammar of concepts and ideas, including ideas of singular
things that have only one token—and the deployment of such conceptual resources, in
describing things and particular facts about things in the world. I believe that Plato is
right that there is a crucial logical distinction between the intensional semantic tools,
and the extensional items to which they are applied in thought and perception and
language. This is roughly his distinction between a sensible world of particular token
instances that bear their names descriptively, and an intelligible world of forms that
bear their names constitutively. In the case of the latter, the name (or descriptor)
identifies what notion it is, rather than how it seems to someone trying to describe it.
Plato is right about that. And ‘seeming’, or doxa, is a suitable term to use for the cases
where it seems to someone that a certain descriptor applies.
I.v That Plato is right about the special kind of knowing involved
in grasping or possessing concepts
Plato is also right, for the same reason, to distinguish between the ‘is’ of predication or
description and the ‘is’ of conceptual competence. He is right to develop a special
vocabulary for this kind of ‘being’, so it is a mistake to assimilate what he calls ‘knowing
virtue, what it is’ to some other kind of knowing that he was not interested in, such as
knowing a definition or a fact, or acquaintance with an object. Knowing what virtues
are, or what a virtue is, does not equate to any of those things. Plato is right about that,
and the fact that modern western philosophers have not hitherto noticed that there is
another quite different sense of the verb ‘be’ involved in knowing ‘what it is’ about
the type, as opposed to the token, has been a great hindrance to understanding how
significant and fundamental Plato’s contributions to logic and epistemology are. Once
we get it right, and see that this question about knowing ‘what it is’ addresses the same
issue as Wittgenstein was addressing when he considered the example ‘knowing what
a game is’, this opens up a whole area of contemporary philosophy focused on the
topic that Plato was addressing. In particular, it invites us to consider the discussions
of rule-following and what it is to know ‘how to go on’ when using an open-ended
concept, or one that is context-dependent or metaphorical. Suddenly it becomes clear
why Plato’s interest was in precisely those Forms that are deeply contextual: moral and
aesthetic ideas, relational predicates like large and equal etc. Now we can understand
why Plato shows, repeatedly, that understanding the ‘what it is’ cannot consist in
knowing a definition, or being able to give a simple formula that fits all cases, or finding
a single common factor, or any of the kinds of analysis considered in the last part of
the Theaetetus. For some of these are compatible with not knowing, and others are a
symptom that depends upon knowing, but none can be what it is to know.
I.vi That Plato is right that searching for definitions is vacuous,

and that there are better ways to make philosophical progress,
by using images and icons
In several chapters we have considered the failure of the ‘Socratic project’ of definition.
One of my key themes has been the realization that Plato is portraying a Socrates who
fails, a Socrates obsessed with a theory that Plato does not share—namely, the thesis
that a competent user of a concept must be able to give a definition or single common
factor. Yet it is also a Socrates who succeeds, as soon as he gives up that fruitless search
and finds some other way to discover ‘what it is’ for the idea in question. This does not
happen in the Theaetetus, where Socrates holds rigorously to his midwife role, and
merely reveals the difficulties that Theaetetus encounters in trying to analyse episteme.
Yet even in that dialogue, in the parts where Socrates is providing props to assist the
failing theory, his proposals do some positive philosophical work on the problem they
face. The wax block and the Aviary images, for instance, provide the first steps for a
reader to start thinking about distinctions between concept and object, and between
the worlds of things and ideas. Theaetetus may not get the point, but a careful reader
might. Similarly, the reader may also see what those images lack: what they fail to capture,
about the nature of a concept, which will help us to see how it differs from the singular
memory print of a particular, or sets of particular experiences classified in cages; for it
is these failings that mark the limitations of the props that Socrates provides.4
Another theme of this book has been the positive side of what Plato achieves in the
dialogues. The failure of Socrates’ project is generally only the beginning, to be imme-
diately replaced by another story, of discovery and enlightenment, and the ascent to a
vision of the truth. The pictorial methods of geometry are a recurrent theme, because
they illustrate a new rich and exciting way to move beyond the impasse of Socrates’
quest for a definition. Geometry unlocks the impasse, because it is a paracletic science,5
capable of lifting the eye of the soul out of the bog of material things, and removing the
4
On the heuristic value and limitations of these images, see Rowett, ‘On making mistakes’.
5
mind from that condition where (like the lovers of sights and sounds) it supposes that
the particular visible world is all there is to know. When it is done well, geometry
makes one aware that its visible diagrams stand for something else more abstract and
intelligible, and hence it invites the thought that real science is about the abstractions,
not the particular physical things that illustrate them. And that is not all: geometry also
provides a clue as to how one can make positive progress on questions such as what
justice is. We make negative discoveries in finding that the search for definitions is
vacuous (for various reasons, some but not all of which are explored in the dialogues
we have here), and that it is no help to investigate particulars or token cases as if they
were all there is to know, or as though knowing those particular things were all the
knowing there is. But our positive discovery is that a kind of iconic thinking about the
particular can serve as part of a more abstract enquiry, when we treat the particular as
if it were a diagram instantiating the form. Just as we recognize that the right angles
and parallel lines on a drawing are only a picture of what we mean by right angles and
parallel lines, so we come to recognize that the justice in the particular city can serve as
a picture, even though what we are talking about when we consider justice in itself is
something other than the justice in the city we have founded.
So some of the most exciting work we have done in this book has been on the value
of images, their relation to truth, and their role in contributing to knowledge of the
truth. Geometrical diagrams illustrate two opposite ideas: first the disparity and
ontological distance between the icon and what it stands for, and second the capacity
that images have to draw the mind across that divide, so that the icon can be used as a
tool to escape its particularity and enable the thinker to consider the form in itself, no
matter how unlike the form it is in certain respects. It is dangerous to imagine that
Plato means to emphasize only one of those aspects of the geometrical approach to
philosophy: it is not that geometry is bad. It is bad only if it is done stupidly. For those at
Level 2 of the Divided Line (or worse still, at Level 1) it may be no help to look at par-
ticular things: this will lead to the idea that the true reality is the material reality of
ordinary sensible particulars. But the Divided Line is itself a visual or audio diagram
that reveals how to escape that error: it compares it to the error made by one who
mistakes a shadow for the thing whose shadow it is. At the same time it reminds us that
once we do know that something is a mere shadow, we can then use it as such: we can
use the shadow that we do see to discover things that we cannot see directly. Suddenly
we realize that pictures, icons, reflections, and images are not something to avoid, but
something to use. And we suddenly see that Plato is using images everywhere, and that
those are the passages of his texts in which we get closest to understanding what he is
really talking about.
I.vii That Plato is not an opponent of images or illustrations
Here we have a Plato who is quite unlike the caricature presented in the typical under-
graduate course on art history, aesthetics, or theatre studies. This is not a thinker who
denigrates the visual or rejects images as deceptive or corrupting. This is a thinker
who rejoices in the power of images to call the soul to understanding of something

sublime. The Divided Line is a diagram to show how we can step through the icon to
the reality it reveals, and it justifies the method of writing in dialogue and stuffing the
conversation with pictures, metaphors, and illustrations. Plato is both the author of
those works of art and a believer in their power to lift our thoughts to higher things.
We have not diverted to consider what Plato would say about the value of tragic
drama, a topic that will merit attention in another place; but there are some points to
be made now. First, the ideal city in the Republic is a shadow of justice, which we use
(among other things) as an icon to think about what justice is as such. One lesson that
a philosopher must learn, when she breaks free from Level 2 of the Divided Line, is that
not every icon illustrates the concept perfectly, and since there are many ways of
approximating to justice, each icon will illustrate something of what we mean by ‘just’
but that will not be the only way to make something just. Second, what Socrates says in
Plato’s dialogues is often confused, wrong, or misleading, because he is not free of the
mistakes and prejudices that beset those struggling to climb out of the cave. In Book
10 of the Republic, Socrates puzzles over how to justify keeping dramatic poetry in the
perfect city, because he, personally, is in love with it, but cannot find any excuse for
having it in his strange city;6 but we should not infer from what Socrates says that
Plato has no solution to that puzzle, and no idea how poetry could benefit citizens
who seek justice and truth. One answer to how it might benefit them has in fact been
provided in the Republic, in the Line and the Cave, where the value of images, at least
for those capable of working intelligently with icons, was explained.
One might think (with some justification) that this potential value in images is lost
if the original is available to observe directly, or if there are other practitioners and
craftsmen with a more immediate knowledge of the original, and how it works.7 Yet
that thought should be resisted, since it is founded on a strikingly limited view of
the kind of knowledge we need (as should now be apparent). It remains possible, for
instance, that poetry better portrays virtue and goodness than life or experience will
ever do. So in the search for conceptual understanding of moral ideals, poetry might
be a better icon to use than the events and actions that instantiate them more immedi-
ately, but often less well or less clearly.
And finally, we should note that when Socrates pictures a city, as an icon of justice,
in the Republic, he imagines a peculiar city whose citizens are no longer struggling
to discover the truth (as we are and always shall be) but rather a city whose citizens
have either found it (the kings and queens) or will never be needing to find it. This is
not for us, for we are learning to aspire to the truth, and if poetry leads us there, that is,
for us, just fine.
Socrates himself is not a citizen of Callipolis, nor is Plato. Hence the character
Socrates, in the dialogue, can express his own more positive evaluation of poetry, in
Republic 607b–608b. 7 Republic 599b.

6
commenting on his imaginary city, and he can imagine that he would be unhappy in
the city he has described, were he to be placed there. This does not stop him from
supposing that, for that city, there could be nothing but harm to be had from includ-
ing dramatic poetry, at least in respect of its harmful effect on the citizens’ epistemic
virtues. We might think that the absence of something fine like poetry makes his just
city rather less than perfect in certain respects, particularly as an instantiation of beauty
and of human excellence. And since the city he is describing is a particular, it is quite
probable that it would fail to exhibit some other perfections, even if it illustrates one
tolerably efficient way of instantiating a certain kind of justice. On the other hand, if it
fails in aesthetics, it should surely not be called Callipolis (the fine or beautiful city).
I.viii That Plato is on sound ground speaking of the truth in representations
as derivative from a prior truth in the things
Truth has been one of our themes in this book. We started with some reflections on
what I take to be a natural or common-sense idea (largely forgotten by philosophy)
that truth is first a property of reality and the things themselves, which we then try to
describe in language and poetry and art. We then drew from that the idea that truth
comes in degrees, as iconic things capture something of the truth of what they illus-
trate, and poetry and language deliver something of the truth when they convey the
nature of reality to their hearers. This helped us to see why the ideal of absolute truth, to
which such representations might aspire, was to be the things that are to be known. The
idea that the ultimate kind of truth is reality, or being, surfaces repeatedly throughout
the discussion in this book, but we have also discovered a sense of the word ‘being’ that
is not to be equated with existence, or with predication or identity, but with conceptual
knowledge, such that being is what one knows, when one grasps ‘what it is’, as in ‘know-
ing what justice is’. So when we say that truth aspires to approximate reality or being,
we should understand ‘reality or being’ in that sense of ‘being’, so that knowledge of
being (or the truth) amounts to conceptual competence with the form in question.
That is the truth and reality that we are talking about, and it is that truth and reality
that episteme is a knowledge of. When I speak of concepts or forms, I do not mean
something mind-dependent, but rather mind-independent absolutes, of the kind
that Plato thought we could know (and coming to know them is therefore a kind of
discovery of the reality that is most real and most true).
This kind of knowledge manifests itself in various abilities: the ability to apply the
concept appropriately, to point to examples, to give a definition, or perhaps to test
and reject possible definitions, and suggest counter-examples to proposed definitions.
So someone who has a grasp of a concept is likely to exhibit know-how as a result, but
we should not infer that the knowledge consists in the ‘knowing how’. Know-how is
evidence of knowing, rather than what the knowing is.
What is the knowing itself, then? I think that we have now reached the point of
understanding why there is no neat formula to describe what episteme consists in.
We have discovered that sometimes the only way to move towards a grasp of ‘what it is’
about some form is to use icons, and ascend from the particular token to the abstract
type. So here, too, we should not find ourselves dissatisfied if we are still unable to
answer the question ‘what then is conceptual knowledge and what form does it take, if
not propositional, or definitional, or knowing how, or a knowledge of an object?’
To give a definition of what conceptual knowledge is would betray the whole project.
What we are invited to do instead, by Plato’s example, is to get the idea on the basis of
considering some examples—to see what is involved in having some concept, such as
‘equal’ or ‘five’ or ‘justice’, and to reflect on what that knowledge is like. The task is a bit
like that undertaken by Wittgenstein in his discussion of what it is like to ‘know what a
game is’, and what it is to follow a rule, to know how to go on, and how we can tell the
difference between someone who has got the rule correctly and someone who does it
right only for a bit, and the difference between someone who is actually reading and
someone who is pretending to read.8 All these examples remind us that there is some-
thing that we know, when we know how to read, or how to continue a series. The
knowledge is evident in what we do, even though the things we do can sometimes be
indistinguishable, externally, from a parallel activity produced by someone who does
not have the knowledge (someone who recites the words by heart instead of reading
them, for example). So the external expression of the knowledge is not itself the
knowledge, since what looks like the same thing can happen without knowledge;
but examples of characteristic outward actions and behaviour that are normally expres-
sions of knowledge serve adequately as paradigm cases or icons. In the Philosophical
Investigations, Wittgenstein too uses the iconic method: he asks us to imagine examples
of people who do things on the basis of knowledge or understanding, and to use them
as Plato used his pretend city as an exemplar of justice instantiated. So now we can
consider an exemplar of conceptual knowledge—it can be imaginary if necessary, like
thinking of someone who knows ‘what a game is’, say—and then try to point to what
(if anything) there is about it that would reveal that the person has understood the
concept. How exactly does someone who has grasped it differ from someone who can
apply the term only up to a point, say for one or two cases? The answer is that there is
no single thing that one must be able to do if one knows and not if one doesn’t; and
the knowledge cannot be reduced to any other kind of knowledge or ability, or to some
state of mind or ‘inner condition’. It is, if you like, primitive. It is a kind of knowledge
that is not to be redescribed in any other terms, except by illustrating what generally
happens when you have grasped the concept in question.
II. Where Do We Go From Here?

I have tried to open up a range of big issues about the interpretation of Plato’s dialogues:
to suggest a radically different approach to the dialogues of definition, and to Plato’s
8
Wittgenstein, PI, 66–71; 143–7; 156–71.
attitude to his Socrates figure, and his proposed solutions to the methodological
impasse. These moves have implications for nearly the whole of Plato’s work, some of
which challenge the current orthodoxies about Plato’s meaning and intentions.
As I mentioned above, my original plan was to extend the enquiry to two further
dialogues that are not explicitly about knowledge. Although my conclusions are not as
I originally envisaged, it would still be appropriate to look at those texts in a future
study. By way of aperitif, I shall sketch here a brief outline of my current thinking about
the Sophist and the Cratylus.
II.i About Plato’s Cratylus

As I said in Chapter 1, the Cratylus considers the relation between knowing what
something is and knowing what it is called, and the fact that these two can come apart.
But we can now see that ‘knowing what something is’ must be ambiguous. ‘Something’
here might refer to a particular thing, and when we ask what it is, we are typically
trying to find a descriptor for it. Hence we shall be giving it a name that is not its own
proper name, but one that properly belongs to the relevant form or type of which it is a
token. The particular qualifies for that name in virtue of what Plato tends to call ‘par-
ticipation’ or ‘resemblance’—that is, because it is or aspires to be a token of the type and
therefore has a right to be described as such a thing.9 If, on the other hand, ‘something’
in the expression ‘knowing what something is’ refers to the type itself, then the name
applied is not a descriptor but its own proper name, and to know it is to know it for
what it is, not under a description that it has earned by relation to something else.
‘Knowing what justice is’ means having a correct idea of justice, not recognizing a case
of justice as just. But even here, knowing what justice is cannot be the same as knowing
what it is called. We might not know the right word, or have a word at all. We may need
to find a name (or to discover the name, if it already has one) for an idea that we have in
mind. It is not always the case that any old name will do.10
In some passages I spoke of ‘applying a descriptor’, and I distinguished between
‘referents’ and ‘descriptions’, but speaking of ‘descriptions’ in this way is not entirely
helpful. It does not allow us to distinguish clearly between two things that Plato is able
to distinguish much better, at least in the Cratylus. It confuses knowing which idea is
to be applied with knowing which word is to be applied to convey that idea. Russell and
other philosophers of language tend not to preserve the difference, because they treat
ideas as linguistic tools.11 We are accustomed to use signs to stand for things and ideas.
But there seems to be a difference between knowing the word for ‘virtue’ and knowing
‘what virtues are’. It is possible to know and live by the second—to live virtuously, and
9
See Phaedo 100d, among other texts. On the terminology of participation etc, see Fritz-Gregor
Herrmann, Words and Ideas: the roots of Plato’s philosophy (Swansea: The Classical Press of Wales, 2007).
10
See further in Catherine Rowett, ‘On calling the gods by the right names’, Rhizomata, 1 (2013),
168–93.
11
But see Austin, ‘How to talk’, for a clearer view.
aim at virtue in one’s life—without having the first—without having a term in one’s
language for what it is that guides one’s life, for example.
This gives some sense to the idea that there is a special kind of ‘truth’ in names,
which is distinct from the truth in things and the truth in propositions or utterances.
We are not, after all, at liberty to call just anything ‘virtue’, or ‘justice’. ‘Justice’ is a sign
that correctly refers to justice itself, and hence to what justice is (which is not up to us),
and it is wrong to use that word for something that is unjust. Yet the name ‘justice’
seems to be ultimately a construct, unlike the reality to which it applies.
The Cratylus is a discussion of names that addresses this point, and it reflects on the
practice of using names to mark things out in an appropriate way. Socrates canvasses
the idea that names are tools and function to ‘divide being’ (388c). It seems that he
is using the special sense of ‘being’ that I have been emphasizing in this book. The
Cratylus also picks up the distinction (explained in Chapter 3) between the type or
role (‘what it is to be a shuttle’) and the one who occupies that role (the shuttle that
is made and broken).12 Using this distinction, we can understand the Cratylus as
proposing that a name does its work if it succeeds in referring to the role or type, and
not just to the token occupying a role.
II.ii About Plato’s Sophist

The Sophist deals with assertions that involve two terms, rather than just one as the
Cratylus and Theaetetus do.13 In the Sophist Plato investigates (among other things) the
relation between subject and predicate in simple assertions relating to particulars,
and considers how falsity can occur in situations where a speaker draws on a repertoire
of sound conceptual knowledge to produce false predications. Whereas the discussion
of singular mistakes in the Theaetetus involved the application of one semantic idea
to one extensional object,14 here the focus is on the combination of two semantic ideas
(of different grammatical kinds) in speech or thought (262a–c5).
The two-component utterances in the Sophist provide for false predications, even
where the speaker correctly and successfully names an extensional object. One can
identify and label one item correctly, but then apply another descriptor that does not
apply to the situation as it obtains in the world.15 All the descriptive tools, for both the
subject and predicate terms in the sentence, must come from the speaker’s repertoire
of ideas, so the speaker must know both. The speaker need not have any falsity or
misunderstanding in their concepts or the names they apply to those concepts. One
can assert a falsehood about something that does exist and has been correctly named,
by simply choosing to add a descriptor that does not apply. So a false sentence can be
uttered, while all its components have meaning, and all are understood. Since all of
them refer to some idea about which we say that it ‘is’, using the conceptual sense of ‘is’,
the sophist who speaks falsely is using names that accurately denominate a certain
12
Cratylus 389b. 13 On this aspect of the Theaetetus, see Chapters 9–12.
14
See Chapter 12 and Rowett, ‘On making mistakes’. 15 Sophist 263a10–b7.
kind of ‘being’ (namely, the type that is ‘what it is’, for each idea deployed in the sentence),
to say something untrue.16 In the Sophist, the Eleatic Stranger creates a puzzle about
this kind of falsity, and then resolves it using these tools.
The puzzles and solutions canvassed in the Sophist look less strange, I think, in the
light of the distinction between the use of ‘is’ in assertions with propositional form,
and the ‘is’ of conceptual competence (as in ‘knowing what a virtue is’). Because Plato
associates this latter kind of ‘being’ with a certain kind of ‘truth’—as in true justice, or
what it is to be truly equal—Plato finds more paradoxes here than one would find
in modern treatments of the topic, given that this notion of truth is largely neglected
or explained away in contemporary philosophy. This lends an air of strangeness to
the discussion in the Sophist. It would be worthwhile to examine that strangeness in a
future volume that might go into more detail.
We should also think about the method of division, found in the Sophist and some
other dialogues traditionally supposed to be from Plato’s later period. The Sophist
illustrates some proposed definitions of ‘what the sophist is’, derived by way of the
method of division.17 Are these sample definitions supposed to be an expression of
knowing ‘what it is’ about sophistry? Is Plato recommending them as part of a philo-
sophical method? I can see reasons in favour. For example, the idea that competence
with a certain concept would include seeing its logical relations with other concepts in
the vicinity has appealed to many recent readers. But I can also see reasons against
thinking that Plato was recommending it, since one can read the multiple definitions in
the Sophist as a reductio of the procedure when applied to types and classes that do not
fall neatly into genus and species rankings. The method works only for taxonomies
where all species are coordinate, and any token falls exclusively into one class and
never appears on both sides of any boundaries. Aristotelian science works with taxon-
omies of that kind, but it does not adapt readily for understanding or explaining the
concepts that Plato spent his life exploring, such as the beautiful, the equal, or the just.
Such contextual and evaluative forms can figure on any table in many different posi-
tions that identify different logical connections; different tables would divide the field
differently, offering different sets and subsets, useful for various purposes. In fact it
seems highly unlikely that ‘knowledge’ (or even ‘science’) could be placed onto such a
table of divisions and be remotely useful for understanding ‘what knowledge is’.
So there would be strong reasons against supposing that Plato’s ‘hidden answer’ to
what knowledge is would be ‘knowledge is knowing a table of dichotomies’, nor should
we imagine that his preferred answer is that knowledge is a species under the genus
belief, differentiated by having a logos of a specific kind, such as justification. For it is
just as plausible that we should find that at the very beginning, the first division is made
between knowledge and belief, so that there are species of belief, and there are species
of knowledge, and no species of belief is ever a species of knowledge, or vice versa.
263d. 17 Sophist 223b1–6; 224c9–d2; 224d–e; 226a1–4; 231b3–8; 268c8–d4.

16
Nothing in the Theaetetus or any of the dialogues of division suggests that we could
find a reason for preferring the classification that makes science a species of belief, over
the one that makes knowledge and belief mutually exclusive. Indeed, it seems that the
Theaetetus is an attempt to show that the former is persistently question-begging.
To me it seems far more likely that, in the works we have, Plato neither defines
the knowledge that he calls episteme to his satisfaction nor suggests any method of
defining it. Indeed, it seems to me that we should understand him to deny that it is
necessary, possible, or desirable to define it, and that all attempts to reduce it to some-
thing else, as though it were not basic, will fail. Many of Plato’s dialogues revolve
around this theme, exploring various images that capture what it is to grasp the forms
and how it is done. It seems clear that Plato was fascinated by the task of modelling
what it means to know ‘what it is’ about a type or form.
II.iii Conclusion: that conceptual knowledge is irreducible and primitive

In this book I have argued that Plato reserves the term episteme for conceptual
understanding, and that conceptual understanding does not involve knowing a
proposition, definition, or necessary and sufficient conditions, nor is it an ability or
know-how, or knowledge of an object, whether by acquaintance or any other mode
of discovery. Because there is a logical chasm dividing forms, which cannot be
encountered in experience, from particulars which can and are, it is not helpful to
assimilate knowing a form to knowing a particular, because if the form were some-
thing like an object or feature that we encounter in the world, then recognizing it as
what it is would involve classifying it under another description, using some other
conceptual tools, and that (potentially) generates a third-man regress. One could see
that worry expressed in Socrates’ suggestion at Theaetetus 200a, where a regress
threatens,18 not just because some birds in the Aviary are (ex hypothesi) ‘ignorance
birds’, but also because the birds are all just objects, knowable only under some
description, which requires further conceptual tools.19
We have not looked for a positive answer to the question of what kind of knowledge
conceptual episteme is, because that question seems to assume that it must be reduced
to something else. That is the faulty assumption, the reductive move. If conceptual
knowledge is sui generis, and primitive, there is no sense in trying to discover what
other kind of knowledge it can be reduced to. We just have to add to the list of kinds of
knowledge (or rather not add to them so much as notice that there is also this kind, and
pay attention to it, which is what Plato quite properly did, but his recent commentators
18
At 200b there are two refutations: (a) Socrates’ own (showing that if one had ignorance birds one
would not know there was a mistake; and (b) a reductio by a ‘logic-chopper’ who shows that more concep-
tual mechanisms must be piled up to allow for knowing the known things under further descriptions. See
Chapter 12, Section II.iii.
19
It is true that we can classify Forms under more generic kinds, in which case we treat them (for that
purpose) as tokens of a type, not the type. But that cannot be what we do when we consider the Form as
the Form it is (when we are not classifying it but using it to classify other things).
in the analytic tradition have tried hard not to, for the most part). I have suggested
that Plato himself problematizes all those false images that have attracted his recent
commentators. He does not do that to attempt what recent thinkers have tried to
make him do (such as to claim that knowledge is propositional, say). He does it to show
precisely the opposite. Episteme cannot be propositional, since it is a precondition for
propositions, not composed of them.
Plato provides a few creative stories and pictures to illustrate how this conceptual
repertoire that constitutes episteme was acquired by the human soul that now draws
upon it. For instance, Socrates tells of the flight of winged chariots and charioteers in
the Phaedrus, and there is the image of escape from the cave to a world of Forms in the
Republic.20 But those myths stand to what they portray as icons, just as the iconic city
stands to justice itself. To get beyond the icon, one must escape from the particular
imagery to discover the abstract lesson it delivers. It seems clear to me that Plato has
said all that he can, using those images, about what it is to have access to a concept and
what it is to come to grasp such things in all clarity, and that we cannot do better than
what he has done on that topic, in these and other dialogues.
20
Phaedrus 246a–256e; Republic 514a–518b.
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Index
abstraction 51, 103 Aristotle 64, 137n.57, 188, 207n.38, 216

Ackrill, John 238 on truth 43, 45–6, 48
acquaintance see also exemplars Metaphysics θ 45
with particulars 91, 266 arithmetic 182, 235
with forms 12, 14, 179 assent 37–8
knowledge by acquaintance vi, 10, 14, 60, Austin, J.L. 263n.3, 272n.11
62–5, 179, 200n.12
Adam, James 113n.2, 157n.49 Bäck, Allan 49n.56
agreement 157n.51 Barnes, Jonathan 116n.2
aisthesis (perception) 5, 7n.6, 179, 198 Barney, Rachel 96n.34
in EA definition of knowledge 170, 171–4, Barton, David 200n.12
175, 189–90, 192–5, 244 Bedu-Addo, J.T. 71n.11
broad (and includes doxa) 175–6, 194 behaviourism 27
but redefined in the Interlude as sensory being see also ‘what it is’
perception 175–7, 194n.58, vs. ‘becoming’ 18, 21, 21n.47
197–230 related to truth 20, 178, 218–20, 222, 233, 270
which is defined by use of organs 176, the verb ‘be’ 15–16, 41, 48
177, 208, 212 in the dual 212, 224, 227
subdivided again in TDL 256 asserting reality 202, 204–5
includes false impressions/misperceptions existential sense 179, 204
194–5 veridical sense 41–2, 45
but made infallible in defence of EA 195 the copula 21, 65, 201n.15, 202, 203, 205n.33,
is of tropes 193, 194 206, 207, 219
is not propositional 193, 194, 213 linked to propositional form? 16, 21, 200,
takes direct object construction 198, 213 201, 202, 204, 205n.33, 207, 213, 219
aisthanesthai 176–7, 195, 213 predicative use 179, 202, 203, 204, 213, 215
aitias logismos 95–7, 102–3, 104, 108, 163, the “is” of conceptual competence 177, 202,
255n.75 203, 204–5, 221, 223, 235, 265–6, 270
aletheia vi, 40, 41n.24, 43–5, 154, 218, 232–3, 262 in Plato v, 3, 20, 41
etymology of 43–5 who uses it for the conceptual ‘what it
Allen, R.E. 17n.41 is’ 17n.41, 20, 21, 65, 177, 185,
Allen, Danielle S. 154n.37 203, 205n.33, 206, 223, 235, 264,
alogon (irrational) 249, 250 266, 273–4
analambanein (drawing up, recovering) 101, associated with episteme 170, 233, 270
102, 103 which is a grasp of ousia 177, 222, 228,
analogical reasoning vii, 112 252, 264
“rubbing together” 112, 122, 124–5, 140, 147 but what kind of being? 170, 178, 200–1,
analytic philosophy v, 4, 6, 8–10, 11, 13, 17, 21, 213, 215, 219, 221, 227, 228, 232, 233
29, 45–6, 47–8, 51 four theories on this matter 201–3, 203–7,
animals vi n.1, 202, 203 213, 215
their possession of conceptual knowledge can it be grasped by doxa? 199n.8, 213, 215
33, 203 e.g. if ousia is the “what it is” 199n.8, 202,
Annas, Julia 139n.60, 155n.44 205, 221, 222, 223, 235
Antiphon the Sophist 40 i.e. conceptual being or essence 3, 202,
Antisthenes 247n.51 205, 206, 228, 233, 264
apate 45 can it belong to particulars? 170, 226
aporia 70–1, 72, 101 as Theaetetus thinks 177, 225, 226, 232
appearance, in Protagorean theory or only types? 170, 185
always true 171 which cannot be grasped by aisthesis or
vs. reality 45 doxa 177, 222, 225
288 index
belief 45, 47, 205 collection/division 252n.68, 255n.78, 257, 274

true 71 common features/perceptibles 178, 202n.21,
false 14n.27, 37 211–12, 215–18
not a good translation for doxa 5, 10, 36, can be sensible or doxastic 217
65, 198–9 concepts 179–80, 207, 231, 232, 257, 270
not what is meant in the Interlude 201 not objects 82, 179, 264
not about propositions 36–40 not propositional 264
not a genus of which knowledge is a acquisition of, grasp of v, 3, 8, 30, 40, 51, 180,
species 10–11 241, 258, 276
contrasted with knowledge 10 deployed in true and false token-recognition
credence/view ambiguity 10n.14, 37–8, 231, 263–4, 270
67n.30 deployed in seeing as 32, 179, 258, 270
can be correct vs incorrect? 37 available to animals? 33, 203
or true vs false 37, 39 available to sense perception? 205
can true belief become knowledge? 71–2, conceptual competence v–vi, 60, 82n.37,
96–7 84, 103
or be used in place of knowledge? 73, conceptual knowledge vi, 3, 5, 8, 9, 30–2, 59–60,
87–99 60–2, 111, 169, 179–80, 190, 203,
must be discarded to enable progress 72 231, 257 see also ‘what it is’
Benson, Hugh 58n.9, 76nn.23, 24, 77n.26, what is it? 271
114n.7, 155n.42 sui generis, primitive, and irreducible 62, 82,
Berkeley, George 50 84, 231, 271, 275
Bluck, R.S. 60n.13, 62n.21, 64, 76n.24, 82, not taught by experts 80n.32, 82
103n.53, 200n.12 not obtained empirically 180, 241
Bobonich, Christopher 205n.33 does not require definitions 27, 56, 61–2, 73,
Bostock, David 13, 14n.27, 15, 61n.15, 170n.5, 75, 82, 84, 163, 203, 257, 275
175n.22, 183n.13, 184n.19, relation to rule-following 31, 62
199nn.9, 10, 201, 202n.21, 207, density of information 33, 62, 162
212n.56, 219n.72, 236n.13, comparable to a map 62
238n.21, 244nn.35, 39, 245, 255n.78 includes knowing roles with one
Broadie, Sarah 152n.34, 155n.42 occupant 63–4, 253–4
Brown, Lesley 14n.29, 49n.56 including knowing who Meno is 64
Bryan, Jenny 152n.34 knowing what a sun is 253–4
Burnyeat, Myles 6–7, 8–10, 12, 13, 14, 15, and knowing what justice is 223, 246, 247
96n.34, 114n.8, 119n.12, 121n.17, which the jury should know 223, 246
126n.32, 139n.62, 152n.34, but can do without 247
175n.22, 182n.4, 183n.13, 185n.21, content 34n.1
186nn.29, 30, 187nn.35, 37, Cooper, John M. 175n.22, 201, 204–5, 211n.54,
188n.39, 191, 194, 199nn.9, 10, 201, 229
204, 205n.29, 207, 210, 211n.54, Cooper, Neil 182n.7, 246n.46, 252n.68
219n.72, 228n.94, 236n.11, Cornford, F.M. 12, 17, 114n.8, 175n.22, 179,
238n.21, 240n.26, 241n.28, 204, 229, 236n.13, 255nn.75, 78
243n.34, 244nn.35, 39, 245, counter-example, in trial-and-error
246n.46, 247nn.50, 51, 249n.53, method 243, 248
255nn.76, 78, 256n.81 courage 120–1
craft 33
Cameron, Robin 38n.8 credence (pistis) 10n.14, 37–8, 67n.30
Castagnoli, Luca 172n.12 Crivelli, Paolo 45–6, 49n.56
Chappell, Timothy/Sophie Grace 11n.19, 12, Crombie, I.M. 89n.16, 175n.22, 201
175n.22, 179, 180n.42, 183n.13, cross-modal comparisons 209, 211–12
186n.30, 199n.9, 236n.13, 244n.35, Cross, R.C. and Woozley, A.D. 150n.29,
255n.78, 262 159n.57
charity, as an exegetical priority 11, 11n.19
Charles, David 45n.40, 49n.56, 75n.21, 82n.37 Daedalus 95n.30
Cherniss, Harold 12n.20 statues of 95, 98n.39
clarity 151–4, 161 Davidson, Donald 34nn.1, 2
Coby, Patrick 115n.1 Davidson, James 182n.11
index 289
deception 45 division see collection/division

definitions v, vi, 5, 7, 20, 23–7 see also logos dokein (seem) 20
their role in philosophical method 23–7 doxa (seeming, discerning, opinion) 5, 18, 40,
as preliminary to enquiry, or stipulative 23, 65, 67, 99, 156, 197–200
188–9 not any kind of belief 10, 36, 65, 197, 199
as the result of an enquiry 23, 26 not a propositional attitude 10, 20, 36, 107–8,
tested in the course of enquiry 24, 198–9, 206, 213–14, 215
190, 257 but recognition of particular/token 20, 31,
as a tool for elucidating a question 24 36, 66, 81, 90, 97, 98, 108, 179, 213,
useful when unsuccessful 24, 257 225, 226, 227, 261
not required for knowledge 7, 64, 73, 113, as contrasted with episteme (knowledge of
150, 255n.78 types) 20, 65–8, 81, 84–108, 170,
not required for conceptual knowledge 27, 179, 226, 227, 235–6
56, 61–2, 73, 75, 82, 84, 169, 257 on which it is parasitic 66, 81, 108, 178,
not offered in the Republic 112, 115–18, 127, 180, 207, 230, 231, 235–7
138–9, 166 and of which it is a symptom 102, 106
not used for teaching meanings 26, 187 how related to episteme? 84–108, 170, 178,
dialectical requirements 24, 26, 187, 190–1 227, 231, 250
real vs. nominal 75n.21, 82n.37 grounded in knowledge 106, 178
by compositional analysis 170, 174, 186, but is it reliable? 95
187n.35, 188–90, 192, 197, 232, 248, or unstable? 95–7
250, 256 same content as episteme? 66, 89, 92–4, 96–7,
by genus, species, differentiae 190, 252, 253 104, 107
by collection and division 252n.68, 255n.78, about the same things? 92–4, 104
257, 274 grasps being? 200–7, 230, 231
disjunctive definitions 25 turns into knowledge? 84–5, 96–7, 98, 101,
Socrates and definitions 26–7, 61–2, 70–3, 103–6
74, 75, 103, 111–12, 116, 186–7, what kind of transformation is that? 104–6
187n.35, 189, 190–2, 267 quasi-propositional? 65, 67, 198–9, 200n.11
priority of definition 71, 81, 83 as answer to investigation 213–15, 251n.62
Plato and definitions 23, 27, 51, 62, 70–3, 74, mere appearance (contrasted with truth) 45
112, 127, 138–9, 187n.35, 189, 192, contrasted with sensory perception
255n.78, 257, 267 (at Theaetetus 184–7) 48, 175,
definition of the good 148–50 197–230
definition of knowledge 170, 186, 232–5, can be right or wrong 108, 218
236–40 false doxa 96n.32, 178, 198n.5, 232, 233–5,
all attempts fail in the Theaetetus 170, 171, 235–7, 264
189–90, 220, 232, 252n.68 also presupposes episteme 108, 230,
which is deliberate 173, 189–90, 192, 236–7, 239–40
202, 220, 238–9, 264 true doxa/doxai 58, 65, 67, 81, 84, 95–7, 101,
density viii, 5, 32–3 104, 242
Descartes, René 37n.7 translates as true seeming 67
descriptors vi–vii, 19, 32–3, 46n.44, 63–4, 179, correct impressions 67, 84
232, 238, 272 see also concepts and right opinion 67, 101
types/tokens or discernment 67, 174n.17, 200
Detienne, Marcel 44–5 but true in what sense? 232–5
diagrams 30, 33n.64, 57, 59, 118, 127, 166, 169, an adequate guide for conduct? 81, 86,
195 see also maps 88, 92–4
use in geometry 154, 157–8, 166, 193 starting point for discovery 101
relation to iconic method 57, 68, 141, 153, relation to experience 89
195, 268 in two failed definitions for knowledge
dialectic 158, 159–60, 182, 183, 256 231–58, 264
dianoeisthai (reflective enquiry) 213, 251 first ETD 171, 174–5, 178, 202, 206, 220,
discovery 230 221, 229, 230, 232–4, 234–48
distinct from enquiry (doxa) 213–15, second TDL 174–5, 178, 231, 232, 248–57
251n.62 true doxa without knowledge (the jury) 178,
future tense of 105–6 243–8
290 index
doxastic features (List B) 208, 212–13, 218, 234 being a science of being (ousia) 177,
perceived not via bodily organs 208, 210, 202, 228
212, 217 i.e. a knowledge of types qua types, not
but by the soul “by itself ” 215 tokens 20, 21, 63, 65–8, 81, 83,
that is by thought 217 90–1, 97, 98, 107–8, 147n.17, 170,
supposedly includes ‘being’ 213, 218, 179–80, 190, 195, 227, 228, 231, 264
234, 235 amounting to a repertoire of concepts
among many others 220, 235 32, 170, 179–80, 190, 231, 235, 270
but what kind of being? 213, 218–20, 235 or, especially, the explicit philosophical
their ubiquity 217 grasp of “what it is” 82, 202, 221,
doxazein 7n.7, 89nn.14, 15, 197–200, 214n.61, 227, 228, 231, 254, 264, 270
226, 240n.27 i.e. truth in the sophisticated
with direct object 67, 198–9, 213 sense 218–20, 233–5
a Platonic peculiarity 198–9, 213–14 precondition for propositions 276
and untranslatable 198, 199 infallible 195
translates approximately as discerning cannot be right or wrong 108
67, 199, 200 but comes in degrees of clarity 108, 147
contrasted with mental enquiry 213–15 can be acquired using exemplar 90–2, 147
dramatic settings 265–6 translates as ‘knowledge’? 67, 169
dreaming 102, 106, 108, 157n.51, 172 translates as ‘science’ 170, 240n.27
Ducasse, Curt John 38n.8 on the Divided Line 147, 163–5
three definitions in Theaetetus: 189–90, 225,
eidenai (know) 5, 84n.1, 100n.44 231–58
eidos (form, type) 82, 134, 139 (a) as aisthesis (EA) 170, 171–4, 175,
eikasia (illustration) 155 189–90, 192–5, 244
eikazein 98nn.39, 40 (b) as true doxa (ETD) 174–5, 178, 220,
eikos 152n.34 221, 225, 231, 232–4, 234–48
elements (and compositional analysis) 170, 174, (c) as true doxa plus a logos (TDL) 174–5,
186, 187n.35, 188–90, 192, 197, 232, 178, 231, 232, 248–57
248, 250, 251–2, 256 in plural, epistemai: knowings 84–5, 98, 103,
Empedocles 188n.41 104–6, 105n.57, 108
empiricism 13, 236n.13, 254 sciences 105n.57, 147, 157n.51, 163, 170,
enquiry,paradox of 58, 71–3, 75 186, 235
future tense of 105–6 epistemic states, truth in 49
is worthwhile 101 epistemic troika 6, 7, 8–9
can lead to knowledge 101 epistemology v, 3–33, 230
dianoeisthai and skepsasthai 213 reductive 4, 5, 10
distinct from answering questions Plato’s 11–23, 227
213, 215 eponumia (adopted name) 123
and takes propositional form 213–15 essence vi, 169
done by the soul by itself 221 essentialism 20, 25, 69, 80, 83, 115n.1, 116
or via the senses 212, 222 in Williams’s reading of Plato 134–8, 139
episteme vi, 5, 7, 65–8, 81, 82, 83, 86, 88, 89, 90, etymology, etymology of 40n.17
97, 111, 189, 217, 231, 240n.27 Euclid of Megara 182, 236
a collective and count noun 186 examples 51, 56, 60, 84, 185–9, 191, 228
what is it? 169–70, 183 rejected by Socrates 75, 121, 186–8
not part of the epistemic troika 7, 8 as insufficient to answer “what it is”
irreducible 8, 62, 83, 170, 275 questions 60, 121, 122
and not amenable to definition 275 role in the iconic method 121–2, 155, 185, 229
not a propositional attitude 107–8, 113, 199, used to sketch List A and List B features 208
275, 276 exemplars 57n.3, 84
nor knowledge of an object 275 used for acquisition of knowledge 90–2,
nor know-how 275 113, 118
not a species of belief 10–11 role in iconic method 121, 124, 141, 147, 165,
contrasted with doxa and perception 18, 20, 185, 191, 263, 271
65–8, 84–108, 147n.17, 170, 177, the city’s justice as exemplar 118–22, 134,
178, 228, 235–6 140, 185, 208n.40, 271
index 291
experience 150, 244 see also eye-witness geometry 64, 156, 225, 228, 235, 236, 264
authority use of pictures/diagrams 154, 157–8, 166,
role in acquisition of knowledge 89, 90–2, 193, 267–8
111, 113n.4 its visual proofs 181n.2, 193
explanation, reason why 8, 96–7, 103, use of examples 185n.26, 228
104, 132, 160, 163n.67, 251, trial-and-error procedures 184, 243, 249
254–5 dealing with abstractions that are
reduces to grasping “what it is” 103, 108 particular 228–9
explanatory reasoning see aitias logismos is it a science? 258
eye-witness authority 90, 244, 245–6 in the Meno 56–8, 64, 74, 77, 99–103,
157n.51, 170, 181
falsity 14n.27, 17, 37, 38, 40, 235–7, 264 in the Republic 166, 181, 183
in propositions/simple sentences 48, a paracletic science 182, 267–8
261, 273 on the Divided Line 153–5, 156–60, 163
in names 261 in the Theaetetus 170, 181–96, 221, 228, 231,
false doxa 96n.32, 178, 198n.5, 232, 233–5, 249, 265–6
235–7, 264 solid 183
parasitic on knowledge 108, 230, 236–7, rotational 183
239–40 of irrational square and cube roots
family resemblances 25, 124n.25 see also (surds) 184, 185n.21, 189, 249
definitions and focal meanings Gerson, Lloyd 11, 12, 46–7, 65n.26, 105n.58,
features/attributes see tropes 205n.29
Ferrari, G.R.F. 137n.56, 139n.64, 145n.9 Gettier, Edmund L. 255n.75
fiction 45, 69 Gettier cases 29
fictional characters 69 gignesthai (become) 104–7, 122n.21
including Socrates 55, 59, 69 translates as ‘turn out to be’ 106, 122n.21
Fine, Gail 14, 22n.49, 26, 60n.13, 64, 65n.26, gignoskein (know) 5
66nn.27, 28, 71–2, 89n.17, 101n.46, Gonzalez, Francisco J. 17n.41
162n.65, 163–4, 163n.66, 179n.37, good, what is it? 148–50, 185
199n.9, 200n.12, 238n.21, 252n.68, form of 50, 148
255n.78 Gorgias 72, 85–7, 88
focal meanings 25 Gosling, J.C.B. 238n.21
forms v, vi, 5, 7, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 18, Grönroos, Gösta 175n.22, 214n.61
19–20, 21, 40, 41, 46n.44, 50, 66, guesswork 86–7, 90, 98n.39
120, 138, 151, 154, 161, 165,
179–80, 185, 202, 204, 217, 238, harmonics 153, 182, 183
241, 255n.75, 258 Heidegger, Martin 41n.22, 43–4, 46, 47n.49,
theory of 51, 66n.29, 179, 239n.24 161n.62
understood as types 51, 179–80, 185, 266, Heitsch, Ernst 205n.29
275n.18 Heraclitus (flux doctrine) 172–3, 194–5
not metaphysical objects 179, 263–4 Herrmann, F.-G. 272n.9
primary bearer of name 123, 266, 272 Hesiod 251–2
referent of “truth”? 219–10 hope 37
visual language for 47–8 Hume, David 258
grasped by iconic reasoning 52, 165 hypotheses/posits 147, 156–60, 164, 166,
on the Divided Line 151, 165 183, 258
Form of the Good 50, 148 not propositional in Republic 156–7
Form of Justice 124, 134 hypothetical method 58–9, 74n.20, 76–80,
Fowler, David 183n.13 147n.15
Frede, Dorothea 214n.61 the point of it 58
Frede, Michael 14n.27, 15, 16, 176n.26, how it works 58, 76
177n.30, 199nn.9, 10, 201, 204, for concepts with no unitary definition 58–9,
205, 206, 211n.54, 219n.72, 229 74n.20
Frege, Gottlob 14, 16, 238, 258 for disjunctive questions 76–7
for enquiries with some unknowns 58,
Gash, Tony 161n.63 76, 77
Geach, Peter 72n.13 poorly undertaken in Meno 58n.9, 59, 77–80
292 index
iconic method mentioned 91n.23, 118, 169, do the jury know what justice is? 246–7
195, 256 is there time to teach it? 223, 247
explained: how it works 49–52, 127–8 justification 8, 29–30, 96n.34, 164, 254
comparable to inference from imprint to justified true belief 8–9, 10–11, 29, 96n.35, 106,
type 125 252n.68, 254–5, 255n.75
comparable to use of diagrams 68, 140–1,
268–9 Kahn, C.H. 17n.41, 41n.21, 45n.38, 47, 115n.1,
or abstraction in geometry 236 204, 209n.44, 216n.65
what it’s good for 27, 111–12, 123–4, 229, Kamtekar, Rachana 121n.17, 128n.38, 129n.40,
268–9 139n.62
a short cut? 142–66 Kanayama, Yahei 205n.29
used even in dialectic 160–2, 165 Kant, Immanuel 43, 50, 258
used by Theaetetus 192 Kiteley, Murray 38n.8
by Socrates 208 knowing how v, vi, 4, 9, 62, 82, 270
by Plato and Wittgenstein 271 and rule-following 9n.10, 62
iconic relation 153–5, 165 knowing objects v, 16, 17, 60, 62, 82, 162n.65,
iconic thinking vii, 50, 98n.39, 108, 155, 156, 200n.12, 261–3
195–6, 229, 268 parasitic on conceptual knowledge 174–5,
a kind of perception 196, 229 253n.71, 254, 263
icons 49, 51, 160–2, 165, 166, 256, 263 knowing Meno 60, 90, 253n.70
choice of term 51–2 the road to Larissa 90
intelligible/conceptual icons 162 the sun 253–4
ideal city 52, 111, 114, 117, 121, 123, 126n.32, 269 Theaetetus 261, 263
serves as a maquette 127–8, 141 knowing that, propositional knowledge v, vi,
as exemplar 208n.40, 269 4, 8, 9, 13, 14, 35–6, 60, 62, 63,
for iconic thinking about justice 155, 159, 65, 169
166, 269 focal in contemporary epistemology 28, 34
identification 263 parasitic upon conceptual knowledge viii, 8, 22
images 52, 111, 113, 146 n/a in Plato 261–3
value of 113, 150–2, 268–9 knowing what it is viii, 3, 7, 10, 20, 59–62, 202,
truth in 49, 268 253–4, 262 see also conceptual
can be used to transmit truth 49, 51–2, 268 knowledge and ‘what it is’
in place of definitions 275 compatible with not being able to say 82–3,
relation to original 49, 52 124, 257
e.g. reflection 49 not applicable to tokens 21, 59–60, 228, 253
on the Divided Line 113, 151 knowing what virtue is 68, 69–83
individuals 122n.22 why bother? 93–4, 94–7
intentionality 35–9, 39n.12 knowing who or what 4, 9, 122n.23
Irwin, Terence 72n.13, 139n.63 knowing who Meno is 30, 62–5, 68, 228
knowledge v–vi, 3–33, 148
justice vii, 111 what is it? 27–30, 169–70
what it is 111, 112, 114, 121, 147, 166, 223 is it a propositional attitude? 36–40, 46–7,
definition of 112, 114, 115, 116 107–8
univocal across domains 112, 124, 134–5, 138 is about something 35–6, 39n.12
justice itself 120, 124–5, 166, 223n.84 about objective states of affairs 195
vs. the imaginary city’s justice 115, 119–20, i.e. not propositions 36, 46–7
121, 122, 124–5 or representations 50
definite article 122n.21 no difference from belief therein 36–40
vs. the just city 122, 166 not composed of propositions 30, 57
internal vs. external justice 128, 129–34 relation to success in practice 27–8, 31,
aka ‘Platonic’ vs. ‘vulgar’ 128–9, 132 92–4, 270
relation to altruism 131–3 to truth 34–5, 38, 39n.13, 194–5, 200n.14
does it pay? 111, 114, 126n.30, 128–9, 133–4, to true and false statements 28, 29, 30
147, 166 its infallibility 195
its value explained 128–33 relation to belief 34–5, 96n.35, 106, 274
a psychological explanation 133 JTB analysis 8–9, 10–11, 29, 96n.35, 106,
not a reductive one 131–2 252n.68, 254–5, 255n.75
index 293
‘knowledge first’ accounts 10 as perception 170, 171–4, 175, 189–90,

various kinds 30–2 192–5
e.g. by acquaintance vi, 10, 14, 60, 62–5, as true doxa 174–5, 178, 202, 220, 221
179, 200n.12 and as true doxa with a logos 174–5, 178,
of things or objects? v, 16, 17, 60, 62, 82, 248–57
162n.65, 200n.12, 261–3 Aristotle’s usage 47
should also include conceptual koinon (common) see common features/
knowledge 275 perceptibles
knowledge of (vs. about) 92–4, 247 Kosman, Aryeh 131, 139n.65
spectator model 47–8 Kripke, Saul 17
Greek words for 5–7, 8, 62n.21, 65n.25, 81, kulindeisthai (roll around) 119, 120
84n.1, 87n.9, 100n.44, 148n.21, 222,
240n.27 labels 31, 205, 207, 262 see also names
with direct object construction 64, 193, 194 ladder 113, 160, 161
Plato’s usage 22, 36, 40, 46, 47, 65–6, 190 language vi, 11, 13–14, 22, 30, 50, 51, 57
which is technical 22 impossible under flux 172–3
constrained to a knowledge of concepts, not necessary for knowledge 57
ti esti v–vi, 3, 62–5, 82, 146, 169, philosophy of v
221, 262 Larissa, road to 64, 68, 81, 82, 86, 88–91, 104,
i.e. of types vi, 4, 8, 59–60, 62–8, 81, 89, 105n.58, 247
108, 190, 203, 221 law courts 223n.84, 244
as contrasted with contingent facts and lawyers and jury 245, 246
propositions, poion esti 59–60, time constraints 244, 246–7, 249
62–5, 70 Lear, Gabriel Richardson 127n.35
contrasted with perception 170 Lesher, J.H. 150n.29, 154n.35
and with doxa 20, 65–8, 92, 98, 274 light 162, 169
of which it cannot be a species 67, Locke, John 50
96n.35, 170, 256, 274 logical atomism 13
nor a composite of doxa and other logos 14, 157n.51, 162n.65, 185
things 170, 256 demand for 56, 163
the additive model 229n.97, 256n.81 not available for irrational lengths 56–7
having different content 66, 67, not given by ‘scientists’ 163, 183
96–7, 104 not possible for Theaetetus 184
i.e types not tokens 20, 21, 63, 65–8, not required for knowledge 162, 163–5, 257
89, 92–4 not sufficient for knowledge 250
but does it come from true doxa? 84–5, 96–7, but symptomatic of knowledge? 114, 164,
98, 101, 103–6 169, 257
what advantage does it convey? 66, 81, 93–4, not the content of knowledge 114, 163, 169
94–7 explanatory priority? 164
can there be knowledge of tokens? vi, 4, 13, in the dream theory 250
62–5, 66, 89, 104–5, 253 in the TDL definition in Theaetetus 174–5,
does not consist of a definition or 184–7
proposition 57, 74, 82, 113, 150, three suggestions 251–4
162, 163, 169, 203, 270 is that all? 254–5, 256
does not require ability to give a Lorenz, Hendrik 176n.27, 199n.10, 205n.33,
definition/logos 58, 62, 82–3, 113, 206, 209n.44, 212n.57
162, 163–5, 257 Lott, Toomas 199n.9, 204n.24, 205nn.29, 33
knowing what happened 244–7 Lyons, John 5–7
first-hand/eye-witness 246–7
or by testimony? 244–6 McCabe, M.M. 48n.52, 214n.61
bogus problem of first-person ascriptions 191 McDowell, John 15–16, 17, 22, 34n.1, 177n.30,
ante-natal and recollected knowledge 57, 62, 194, 198–9, 201, 202n.21, 204n.24,
74, 100n.45, 229, 258 209n.44, 228n.95, 234n.10,
cannot be defined 275 238n.21, 241n.28, 247n.50,
failed compositional definitions, in the 254n.74, 255nn.76, 78, 258
Theaetetus 170, 189–90, 220, 221, McKirahan, Richard 41n.23
229, 252n.68 madness 172
294 index
Mann, Wolfgang-Rainer 122n.22 Netz, Reviel 33n.64

maps viii, 32, 40, 62 Newman, John Henry 37n.7
mathematics 33n.64, 57, 99, 155, 182, 183, Nightingale, Andrea Wilson 47–8
223n.83, 230 see also geometry Nuchelmans, Gabriël 49n.56
mathematical objects 155 numbers 57
Matthews, Gareth B. 170n.5, 183n.14
Matthews, Gwyneth 13n.25 objectivity 33, 47
meaning v, 19 objects v, 16, 17, 37n.6, 60, 62, 82, 162n.65,
Megarian school 182, 236 200n.12, 261–3
paradox-mongering 236, 239 ontology 19–20, 43, 123
Meinwald, Constance 12n.21 Plato’s threefold ontology 123, 227
memory 44, 102, 172, 176n.23 see also opinion see doxa
recollection orators 245
devices for storing memories 237, 239, organs 232
258, 267 used in sensory perception 176,
Merricks, Trenton 36n.4 208–9, 212
‘Metaphysical Reading’ of Plato’s Theaetetus and in sensory enquiry 211
11–12, 15 not the perceiving subject 209, 210, 212n.56
metaphysics vi but tools for perceiving with or
transcendental 50 through 209–10, 212n.56
methodos 143n.2 Osborne, Catherine see Rowett, Catherine
midwifery Osborne, Robin 182n.12
Socratic 171–5, 192, 193, 195, 229, 232, 251, ousia vi, 177, 228, 233, 252, 262 see also being
256, 267 Owen, G.E.L. 14
a two-stage process 171, 195, 232, 235,
237–8, 238n.22, 250 paradeigma 52, 125–6
Platonic 14n.27, 223n.83, 238n.21 a maquette, not a Form 126
Miller, Mitchell 113n.5, 145n.8 paradigm cases 25, 84, 185, 191, 192, 208
mind 13, 47 Parmenides 40, 41
ancient theories of 201 particulars, knowledge of vi, 4, 13, 62–5, 66, 89,
assimilated to what is perceived 47 104–5, 253
as bearer of truth 47 Penner, Terry 113n.2
mental imagery 50 Peramatzis, Michail 45n.40, 49n.56
mind’s eye 50 perception 15–16 see also aisthesis and
mistakes 174, 239, 264 see also falsity sensory perception
misidentification 236, 237 with or without organs 232
occur in the presence of conceptual is non-propositional 193, 213
knowledge 239–40 of the particular or trope 31, 193, 194, 261
Modrak, Deborah 204n.24, 262n.2 like doxa 31, 225
Moline, Jon 8n.8 and parasitic on grasp of types 229
Moravcsik, J.M.E. 8n.8 distinct from enquiry, as answer to
Morris, Michael 22n.49 investigation 213–14
Morris, Sarah P. 95n.30 as a failed definition for knowledge 170–3,
Morrison, Donald R. 126n.32 192–5
Morrow, Glenn R. 182n.7 persuasion 45, 244, 246
mysticism 50 phronesis (knowledge) 221
pictorial reasoning see iconic thinking
Nails, Debra 182n.12 pictures 40, 50 see also icons, images, and
names 42, 238, 258, 263 representations
knowledge of 31 pistis (credence) 10n.14, 156
truth in 42, 48, 49, 261, 273 Plato
belong properly to Forms 123, 266, 272 as topic of this book v–vii
derivatively applied to tropes and middle dialogues 11–23, 46n.44, 66
individuals 123, 193n.53, 272 later dialogues 11–23, 46n.44
Nehamas, Alexander 70n.8, 72n.13, 73n.17, developmental vs. unitarian readings 11–23,
75n.21, 80n.32, 187n.35, 229n.97, 46n.44
234n.10, 252n.68, 256n.81 unitarian readings 12–13
index 295
developmental readings 13–14, 46n.44 in rejecting the Socratic demand for

his methodology 52, 69, 111–13, 118, essential definitions 55, 70, 83,
124, 169 138, 140, 149, 169, 187n.37, 189,
including genealogy method 118, 140n.67 228n.93
hypothetical method 58–9, 74n.20, 76–80 Cratylus 40n.17, 48, 261–2, 272–3
iconic method 27, 49–52, 68, 91n.23, Euthyphro 121, 122
111–12, 124, 140–1, 142–66, Gorgias 86n.6, 223, 241n.29
169, 229 Meno 14, 55–68, 69–83, 84–107, 111, 116–17,
rubbing sticks 112, 122, 124–5, 140 117n.8, 120, 139n.63, 156, 170,
method of division 274 181, 185, 186, 192, 208n.40, 227,
use of definitions 23, 27, 111–12, 115–18, 228, 230
148–9, 267 opening exchange 85–7
use of images 113, 268–9 knowing who Meno is 62–5, 228
his realism 11 Meno’s paradox 58, 71–3, 75, 191
interest in moral and aesthetic concepts 51, slave boy/geometry episode 56–8, 64,
267 72–3, 74–5, 80–1, 83, 84, 87, 90,
interest in conceptual competence 17n.41, 92, 99–103, 103–7, 120, 181,
20, 21, 51, 65, 177, 185, 203, 184n.20, 229
205n.33, 206, 223, 235, 264, road to Larissa 64, 68, 81, 86, 87, 88–92,
266, 273–4 247
with open or context-dependent Phaedo 62, 122, 156, 189, 221–4, 225, 228,
concepts 51, 138, 257, 267, 274 230, 258
attitude to poetry/art 52, 113, 151, 269 on knowledge and sense
his threefold ontology 123, 227 perception 221–2
and corresponding epistemology 227 relation to Theaetetus 221, 224, 226
words for knowledge in Plato 5–7, 6–8, clearer about type/token distinction 225,
62n.21, 65n.25, 81, 84n.1, 87n.9, 238
100n.44 but saying the same thing 228, 230
and for the forms 47–8 Phaedrus 62, 258, 276
their visual connotations 47–8 Politicus 52
use of the word ‘be’ v, 3, 20, 41 Republic 13, 14, 51, 62, 66, 69, 98n.39,
and ‘true’ 46n.44, 48, 161–2, 202n.21, 105n.57, 109–14, 115–41, 170, 181,
274 186, 210n.47, 223, 224, 228, 269
Plato distinguished from Socrates 26–7, 55, methodology 52, 111–12, 123–8, 140–1,
59, 69–70, 71, 87, 128n.39, 140, 229, 142–66, 169, 229, 269
250, 257–8, 269 Book 1 111–12, 116–17, 138, 140, 162,
having different methods from 185, 227
Socrates 26–7, 69, 70 hunt for the city’s justice 115–18, 118–20
rejecting Socratic essentialism 55, 56, 69, value of inner justice 128–34
83, 138, 140, 228n.93, 267 education 118, 144, 182, 183
and being not confused when Socrates is lovers of sights and sounds 52, 114, 120,
confused 71, 187n.35, 189, 221, 141, 146, 156, 164, 268
237, 257–8, 269 Sun 121, 144–6, 148, 150, 152, 165
shows Socrates failing 117, 140, 169, 178, Divided Line 49, 113, 121, 147, 150–62,
187n.37, 189, 190, 206, 221, 229 166, 170, 181, 185, 248, 268, 269
or engaged in midwifery 171–5, 192, Cave 52, 97n.37, 121, 150, 151, 152, 155,
193, 229 161–2, 241n.29, 269, 276
to support failing proposals 171, 195, on art/poetry 52, 113, 269
232, 235, 237, 238, 250 imaginary city 52, 111, 114, 117, 121, 123,
Plato is not struggling 237–8 141, 146, 147, 159, 166, 208n.40
does not lack the requisite logical tripartite soul 143, 144
tools 238, 266–7 soul/state analogy 112, 123, 134–40, 142
but rather displays the need for them 238, longer vs. shorter way 112–13, 142–6
266–7 use of images 113, 118, 121, 146, 147
and transfigures the “what it is” question Sophist 13, 14n.27, 15, 16, 17, 39, 48, 214n.61,
117, 140, 228n.93 237, 252n.68, 261–2, 273–5
anticipates Wittgenstein 55, 267 Symposium 62, 160
296 index
Plato (cont.) reductionism 131–2, 135, 138, 139, 149, 170,

Theaetetus 6n.4, 11–23, 36, 38, 39, 48, 61, 66, 190, 238, 250–1, 275
69n.2, 105n.57, 167–80, 181–96, Reeve, C.D.C. 159n.57
214n.61, 197–230, 231–58, 261–5, reflections 151–2, 251, 268
273, 274–5 relativism 172
dating 170, 180, 183n.13 representations 4 see also icons and images
ways of reading it 11–23, 178, 180 as truth bearers 49n.56
frame dialogue 170, 182–3, 236 convey truth 49, 51
narrated conversation 170, 183 Ricoeur, Paul 37n.7
midwifery 171–5, 192, 193, 195, 229, 232, Rijk, Lambertus Marie de 45n.38, 48n.55,
235, 237–8, 250, 251, 256, 267 49n.56
geometry 170, 181–96, 221, 228, 231, 249, Robinson, Richard 77n.26, 159n.57
265–6 roles 21, 63–4, 64n.24, 253
EA definition 170–4, 175, 192–5, 237n.18 roots 57
Digression 223–4, 225, 246–7 Ross, W.D. 12n.20
Interlude 175–8, 197–230 Rowe, Christopher 69n.1, 113, 145n.8,
ETD definition 174, 175, 231, 232, 234–48 147n.13, 254
wax block 175, 236n.13, 237, 239, Rowett, Catherine (and/or Catherine
258, 267 Osborne) 9n.11, 25n.53,
aviary 175, 237, 239–40, 242, 258, 47n.51, 51n.58, 52n.60, 58n.8,
267, 275 60n.14, 70n.7, 151n.31,
jury 178, 237n.17, 241–8 152n.34, 172nn.8, 13, 174n.18,
TDL definition 174–5, 231, 248–57 175nn.21, 22, 178n.34, 185n.25,
Dream 165n.73, 190, 199n.10, 250, 193n.54, 195n.59, 205n.29,
251n.61, 256 210n.52, 214n.61, 236nn.13, 16,
wagon 190, 251–2 237n.20, 267, 272n.10, 273n.14
Platonism v, 12, 15, 17–18 rule-following 9n.10, 31, 62, 267
pleasure 148 Runciman, W.G. 238n.21
poetry 44, 45, 51, 52, 113, 252n.64, 269–70 Russell, Bertrand 14, 193n.52, 238, 258, 272
poion esti questions 30 Ryle, Gilbert 13, 170n.5, 199n.10
Polansky, Ronald 6n.4, 183n.14, 252n.68
Politis, Vasilis 70n.8 Sachs, David 112, 116n.4, 128–34
Popper, Karl 114n.8, 115n.1, 119n.12 Santas, Gerasimos 72n.13
pragmatism 11, 12 sapheneia 151n.30, 153, 154n.35
predication 21, 179, 202, 203, 204, 213, 215 see also clarity
Price, A.W. 20n.44, 21n.46, 28n.58 Sayre, Kenneth M. 36n.4, 39nn.13, 15
Prodicus 88 science vi, 5, 182, 186, 189, 190, 230, 235
proof (using diagrams) 33n.64 see also episteme
propositional knowledge see knowing that must be true (but in what sense?) 233–4
propositions 60, 164n.69, 273 and capable of rational explanation 249
as bearers of truth values 34, 41–2 episteme 5, 170
revealing the truth 43 Scott, Dominic 26, 61n.19, 65n.26, 71n.10,
about something 35–6 74n.20, 78n.28, 86, 94n.28, 101n.46,
characteristic of reports of cognitive 103n.50, 113, 141n.70, 143n.5,
states 37, 39 150n.28
in belief descriptions 38n.8, 39n.16 Sedley, David 13, 14n.27, 17, 96n.35, 126n.32,
characterize enquiry but not 147n.13, 170n.5, 175n.22, 176n.29,
discovery 213–15 179, 183n.14, 186n.29, 188n.40,
Protagoras 40, 236n.11 199n.9, 212nn.56, 57, 223n.83,
in the Theaetetus 171–4, 184, 194–5, 218 236n.11, 238n.21, 247nn.48, 50,
“Man is the Measure” 172, 173, 175–6, 254n.74, 255n.78
194–5, 218 seeing as 32, 108, 179, 196n.60, 207, 258
his Aletheia 40 self-refutation 172
Sellars, Wilfrid 22
realism 11, 12, 43, 47 semantics 5–7, 10, 19, 179, 203
reality 171, 202, 204–5, 219, 270 semeion (sign) 252
recollection 57, 61, 74–5, 97, 98, 99, 102–3, 229 stamp/mark 253
index 297
senses Sophists 236n.13 see also Gorgias, Prodicus,

not the perceiving subject 209 and Protagoras
not the way to attain being 221–5 Sorabji, Richard 201n.19
sensory features (List A) 208, 209, 211, 212, soul, as subject of awareness 210, 212n.56
234n.8 or unitary perceiver 176, 209, 210
accessed through bodily organs 208, 211, 212 perceives non-sensory features “itself by
include common sensibles 208, 209, 212 itself ” 215, 222
not confined to one sense each 209 disembodied 13
sensory perception (SP) 177, 198, 227 pre-existent 13
takes direct object construction 198, 213–14 spectator model of knowledge and truth 46–7
contrasted with doxa (in Interlude) 48, 174, speech 251
175–6, 197–230 Stahl, H.-P. 77n.26
but only for its use of organs 176, 177, Stern, Paul 183n.13
208, 212 Stoics 37n.7
includes second order enquiries and Stokes, Michael C. 69n.1
comparisons 211, 212 stories 50, 52
and common features 211, 212 Strauss, Leo 11n.18
and use of the copula 212 Straussian readings 16–17
is standardly true (in folk sense of sun (Sol) 63–4, 252–3
“true”) 218, 233 syllables 252
its mental and bodily components 210 Szaif, Jan 46n.44
does not ‘touch on truth’ 200, 233
does it use concepts? 205 teaching 26, 77–80, 82, 86, 103
can it apply labels? 205, 207 without knowledge 88
sentences 50 did Socrates teach the boy? 100
truth in 42, 49 Protagoras as teacher 172
shadows 150–2 in the lawcourts 244, 246
in the Cave 161–2 techne 5
their value 150–1, 268 Teiresias 97
due to a degree of clarity 151, 153–4, 161 Terpsion 182, 236
and iconic relation to originals 152, testimony 90, 244–6
154–6, 161, 268 requires original first-hand knowledge 246
Sharples, Robert W. 89n.16, 101n.46, Theaetetus (mathematician) 249n.53
103n.53, 106 his mathematical prowess 182, 183n.13
signifier/signified distinction 179 his premature death 182–3, 258
Silverman, Allan 175n.22, 199n.9, 216n.63 things 227
Simonides 45 Travis, Charles 30n.59
Simons, Peter 18n.42, 193n.51 trial-and-error method 241–8, 256
skepsasthai 213 for fording rivers 242–3, 248
Socrates 246 tropes (features/attributes) 18–19, 67n.32, 122,
a character in Plato’s dialogues 55, 59, 185, 193n.51, 194, 200n.12
69, 70–1 as stand-alone components in Plato 193n.51,
who is ironic 87 194
disclaims knowledge 257 and Heraclitean flux 194
generates perplexity 70–1, 72 the tallness of Simmias 122
seeks definitions 26–7, 51, 55–6, 70–3, 83, the justice of the city 122
111–12, 116, 139n.61, 140, 148, trust 45
169, 186, 187n.35, 267 truth v–vi, 4, 34–52, 270
loves poetry 269–70 what is it? 40–9
plays midwife 171–5, 192, 193, 195, 229, coherence theories 11, 12, 43, 44
232, 237 correspondence 43, 44
changes his approach in response to Greek words for 40, 154, 218
challenge 55, 56, 59, 69, 75, 83, degrees of 4, 42, 161, 270
140, 162, 186, 267 ontological truth 45, 46n.44, 47–8, 274
but remains barren in the Theaetetus 178, in the mind-independent world 42, 270
225, 267 in things 34–5, 41–4, 45–6, 154n.36,
Socratic fallacy 72n.13 165n.72
298 index
truth (cont.) types with one token 62–8, 253, 263

and (derivatively) in names 42, 261, 273 including roles 21, 63–4, 64n.24, 253, 263,
or other representational structures 35, 272, 273
40, 41–2, 45, 47, 49n.56, 270 the idea of Meno 63, 263
including propositions 13, 16, 34, of the road to Larissa 91–2, 247
35–6, 41, 42, 43, 205, 206, of ‘the sun’ 253
233n.7, 261–2 of the shuttle 273
and also perceptions 194 middle terms 63
relation to knowledge 20, 34–5, 38, 39n.13, and types treated as tokens of other
200n.14 types 264, 275n.19
equates to ‘clarity’ 154, 161 tropes as tokens 122, 185
in Aristotle 45–6, 48 iconic relation of token to type 84, 113
in Plato 46n.44, 48, 161–2, 202n.21, 274
two senses of truth 218–19, 232–3 understanding 8–9, 9n.10, 22, 30, 31, 50, 51
(a) folk sense, simple veracity 218–19, unity of perceiving subject 176, 206, 209–10,
232–4 universals 18, 19
as used in EA 218, 233 univocity 115–41, 139n.60
includes many true sensory does not require unitary definition 112, 124,
perceptions 218, 233 138–40
(b) sophisticated senses of ‘truth’ 219, 233 utterances
belongs only to Forms 233 propositional form of 37, 39, 67
which of these in ETD and TDL? 231–5 truth in 45, 48, 49
relation to being 20, 46, 200, 218–20,
233, 270 Vendler, Zeno 36
esp. the veridical sense of ‘be’ 41–2, Vidal-Naquet, Pierre 43
45–6 virtue, an open-ended concept 59
or rather ousia 200, 270 what is it? (Socrates’ question) 58, 59, 70, 75
i.e. the sophisticated sense of truth 233, is good? 78
234 is knowledge? 77–8, 82
alias conceptual truth 4 is teachable? (Meno’s question) 58, 59, 70, 75,
perceived quasi-visually 47–8 77–9, 80, 87
‘touching truth’ (or hitting it) 200, 218–20, knowing what virtue is 67–8, 69–83, 272
222, 233 why bother? 94, 97, 108
truth in Protagorean relativism 171, 233 epistemic requirements 86
pragmatic notion of truth 172 successful practice without knowledge 86,
in Heidegger 41n.22, 43–4, 46, 47n.49, 161 94, 108
Tübingen School 11n.18 the advantage of knowledge over habitual
two-world view 12, 18, 22–3 right practice 68, 81, 94–7, 108
types/tokens 4, 272, 273 none for practical purposes 94
crucial contrast between knowledge of types visible vs. intelligible models 113n.4
and recognition of tokens vi, Vlastos, Gregory 41, 45–6, 103n.53, 115n.1,
59–60, 62–8, 179–80, 232 117n.9, 128n.38
required for understanding how episteme
differs from doxa 20–3, 59–60, 89, Weiss, Roslyn 71n.11, 75n.22, 89nn.16, 17,
225, 232, 263, 264, 266 100n.43, 101n.46, 102n.48
doxa being a faculty for token ‘what it is’ (ti esti) 17n.41, 20, 21, 51, 59–60, 63,
recognition 10, 20, 225 65, 103, 108, 111, 116, 146, 185, 191,
and episteme a grasp of the type 32, 225, 202, 223, 226, 270 see also being
230, 231 vs. ‘what it is like’ (poion esti) 60, 70, 71,
which grounds recognition of 116, 126n.30, 147, 191–2, 226,
tokens 56 230, 263
types are not objects 60–1 vs. ‘what species it belongs to’ 63, 65, 263
nor proposition, definition, or single “knowing the F, what it is” 60–2, 262, 263
common factor 61, 203 comes first in order of enquiry 73, 75, 116
nor the set comprising its extension 185 or last? 103, 108
marked with definite article 122n.21 equates to ousia 199n.8, 202, 221, 223, 232
index 299
relation to conceptual knowledge or forms 265 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 9, 9n.10, 14, 17, 27n.57,
relation to sophisticated sense of ‘truth’ 233, 55–6, 187, 258, 266
234n.10 use of iconic method 271
White, F.C. 200n.14 Tractatus 50
White, Nicholas 12, 255n.76 rejection of essentialism 55
Williams, Bernard A.O. 80n.32, 112, 116n.3, family resemblances 25
118n.11, 134–40
Williamson, Timothy 10, 36n.4, 38n.9, 46 Xenophanes 40
Index Locorum
Page numbers in bold type refer to directly quoted text
Aeschylus 11d1 95n.30
Agamemnon 673 198n.4 Gorgias 447d–448a 85n.5
Aetius 5.22.1 188n.41 484c 184n.18
Anon Hippias Major 282a1 95n.30
Theaetetus commentary 2.52–3.25 255n.76 Laws 677d 95n.30
Antisthenes (Caizzi fragments) 893e 120n.15
Ajax Fr 14 247n.51 Meno 70a–71e 85–7
Aristotle 70a1–3 59n.11
Categories 2 a4–10 48n.54 70a1–4 85
De anima 431a8–9 48n.55 70b–71a 71
432a11 48n.54 70b4 85
De Interpretatione 16a9–16 48n.54 70c1–2 85n.5
19a32–9 48n.55 c2 85n.4
Metaphysics Z 1040a27–b4 64n.23 70c4 85
Physics 184a16–17 43n.25 71a 192
Topics 127a3–19 188n.40 71a3–6 87
Augustine 71a6 59n.12, 64n.24, 70n.3, 116n.5
Confessions XI 14.7 70n.6 71a6–7 116n.5
71b3 70n.3
Diogenes Laertius 1.27 151n.33 71b4 116n.5, 230
71b4–7 62, 187n.31
Euripides 71c 86n.7
Orestes 314 198n.4 71e 60
Suppliants 1043 198n.4 71e–72a 59n.10
Troades 347 198n.4 71e1 86
72a 60
Hermogenes 72a6 186
De ideis B399–401 40n.20 72d2 70n.4
Hesiod 74b1 70n.4
Works and Days 454–7 252n.64 75c26 187n.34
75c5 26
Origen 75c8 26
Contra Celsum 4.25 40n.20 75e3 88n.12
79b–e 70n.4
Parmenides Fragments (Diels–Kranz) 80a 70nn.4, 5
1.29 40n.18 80c3–d1 70n.8
1.30 40n.18 80d5–8 71n.9
2.4 40n.18 80e1–6 71n.9
8.51 40n.18 81b–86b 74
8.51–2 40n.18 81b–c 61
Plato 81c8 61n.18
Alcibiades I 121a1 95n.30 81c9–d3 103n.50
Cratylus 384b 88n.12 81d 102
385b–d 48 82e4 78n.28, 80n.32
388c 273 82e12–13 103n.50
389b 273n.12 83e11–84a2 57, 80n.31, 81
Euthyphro 6d9–10 121n.19 84a 100
11c1–4 95n.30 84c–d 78nn.27, 28, 80n.32
302 Index Locorum
Plato (cont.) 97b6–7 93

84c 72n.15 97b7 84n.1
84c11 100 97b9 81n.33, 93n.27
85b–86c 85, 99–103 97b10 84n.1
85b 81 97c1 84n.1
85b8–c8 81n.34, 99–100 97c6–8 94
85c–d 103 97c9–10 95n.29
85c 58, 84 97d4–98a4 95
85c2 100 98a 163n.67, 256n.81
85c4 100 98a1–4 96
85c6 100 98a4–b5 98
85c6–7 84n.1 98a4 97, 99, 102nn.47, 49
85c9–d5 101 98a5 98n.38, 103n.52
85c9 58 98a5–8 105
85c10 103 98a6 106n.60
85d 73 99a7 106
85d1 84n.1 99e4–100a7 97
85d3 78, 78n.28, 80n.32 Phaedo 59c 182n.8
85d4 84n.1 65a–c 203n.22
85d6–9 102 65a9–d2 221–2
85d6 84n.1, 103 65a9 222
85d9 84n.1, 101n.46 65b9 222n.78
85d12 84n.1 65b10 222n.79
86a6–b4 84 65c2 222n.80
86a6–8 105 65c7 222n.81
86a7 103, 105n.59 65c9 222n.82
86a8 84n.1 65d1–2 222n.81
86b 61, 84 73c8 236n.16
b3 84n.1 73d6 185n.25
86c–d 192 74b 155n.42
86d 74n.18 74b–c 138n.59
86d3–e1 75 75a6 185n.25
86e 76, 157n.50 75b 238n.23
86e4–87a7 77 98b–99b 189n.43
87b7 78n.28 100d 165n.71, 272n.9
87c 77 100d5–8 225n.88
87d–88c 78 102b8–c5 122
87d 78 102c10 123n.24
88b 81 103a11–c2 123n.24
88c4–d3 78, 81 Phaedrus 246a–256e 276n.20
89c2–10 79 249b 238n.23
89d1–e3 79, 80n.32 260b–c 30, 39n.14, 74n.19, 230n.98
89d 78n.28 275e1 120n.15
89e 88n.13 Politicus 278eff 52n.59
89e7 80n.32 Republic 33c–1d 117n.7
90c–e 80n.32 331c 138n.58
96c–d 80 331e 138n.58
96d–100a 85 331e–336a 138n.58
96d–97a 81 336c–337c 117n.7
96d4–e5 81n.35, 88 354b 116n.5
96d5–97c11 247n.50 368b6 117n.10
96e4–97a12 88–9, 89–92 368c 117n.10
97a6 84n.1 368d–369a 121
97a9 84n.1, 90 366d5–367a1 129
97b1 86 369a7 121n.18, 127, 142
97b5–c5 92, 93 419a 136
97b5 93n.25 429a5 121
Index Locorum 303
432b4–433a6 118–20 510d 154n.40
432b4–6 118 510d5–e11 157–8
432b8–c2 119 511b 155n.42
432c5–10 119 511b2–d2 158–9, 159–10, 160
432d 120 511b4 159n.54
432d2–e1 119 511b5 159n.56
432e4–6 119n.13 511d 147n.18
433a1–6 115, 119, 122, 146 511d8 147n.18
433b3–4 106n.62, 122n.21 514a–518b 276n.20
434c 124 515b5 161n.63
434e2–435a5 124, 140 515c2 161n.64
435a 147n.16 518c 182n.5
435a–b 142 523b–c 182n.4
435b1–2 134, 135, 139 523c–524b 120n.16
435c9–d5 143 523e1–524c13 224
435d 142, 143 524b3–5 182n.4
435d–e 135, 136 524c13 224
435e 135n.52, 137 524d1–4 182n.4
436a8–b5 144 525a–531d 182n.4
436b4–5 144 527c–531d 183n.14
436b6 144 529d6 95n.30
441c–e 117n.9 532b–c 125n.28
442d–443b 130, 131, 132, 133 533a 160n.59
443b1 132 533b5–c3 160n.58
443b–c 125 533c 157n.51
443c4 159n.55 533c8–d2 160
443c9–d1 132 533d 147n.19, 182n.3
444a 124, 132 533e–534d 151n.32
472c–d 125–7 534a1–5 153
472c4 127n.33 534a8 153
472c6 127n.33 537d 182n.6
472c6–7 127n.34 586b–c 125n.28
475d–476b 164n.70 599b 269n.7
476c–d 114n.9 607b–608b 269n.6
479d–480a 141n.68, 156 611b9–d8 113n.4
479e 120 611d 113n.4
487e xxi Sophist 223b1–6 274n.17
504b1–6 143, 144 224c9–d2 274n.17
504c 144 226a1–4 274n.17
504c–d 143n.4 231b3–8 274n.17
504d4–8 146 261c–264b 48
505a–506d 148–50 262a–c5 273
505b5–c11 148 262e 39n.14
505b8 149n.22 263a10–b7 273n.15
505c8 149n.24 263d 274n.16
505c10 149n.25 263e–264d 214n.61
506c 146n.12 264a–b 205
506c11–e4 144 268c8–d4 274n.17
508b12 148 Symposium 210a–d 160n.60
509d9–510a3 151 Theaetetus 142a–184b 181–96
510a 154n.38 142a–143b 236n.12
510a5–7 152 142a–151c 170
510b–c 156n.46 142a7 182n.12
510b2–9 157 142b–d 182
510b4 154n.39 142c5 182nn.10, 11
510b4–6 158n.52 142d 182n.9
510c2–d3 157, 159 143a3 182n.10
304 Index Locorum
Plato (cont.) 175b8–d2 223, 226

145d1–5 183, 189 175c 247n.48
146a5 184 175c1 223n.84
146b2 183n.14, 184n.18 175c4 223n.84
146c7–d4 186 175c6 224
146c8 186n.27 177b 223n.84
146d1 186n.27 178c 176, 176n.25
146d2 186n.28 178c–d 176n.23
146d–147b 149n.23 178c–e 193n.55
146e7–10 187 178e 176n.25
147a1–b3 187n.32 179a 176
147b7 187n.31 179b6–9 172n.12
147c 192 182a–183a 173
147c–148b 184 183b7–c3 173
147c3–6 188 183c 174, 175, 197
147c4–6 250 183c3 173
147d 228n.95, 243n.32 183d1 174
147d4–e1 249n.54 184–186 16, 48
148a 243n.33 184a–187b 174, 175–8, 197–230
148a6–b4 184, 185n.26 184c–e 209
148b2 183 184c 209
148b3 184n.17 184c8–9 210
148c1–8 183n.16, 184n.19 184d–e 198
148c7–8 183 184d1–5 210n.48
149a–151d 171 184d3 209n.43
150c–d 178n.33 184d4 210n.50
151d–e 194 184d7 210n.49
151e–160e 171 184e–185d 176
151e1–2 192, 192n.48 184e–186d 208
151e2–3 192n.48 184e 208
152c5–6 200n.14 184e6 210n.48
154c 176, 176n.24 185a 208, 227n.90
155en 176n.24 185a8–b5 214, 215, 224, 226
157e 172n.9 185a9 177n.32, 215, 225
160e 171 185b 208, 211–12, 216
162b 184n.18 185b5 222n.79
161c 40n.19, 172n.9 185b6 213n.60
162c–163a 172n.8 185b8 216n.66
163b 172n.9 185b9–c3 211
163c 172n.9 185b10 213nn.59, 60, 216n.66, 222n.79
163d 176n.23 185c–d 198, 208
164c–165e 172n.8 185c 208, 210n.51
165a 184 185c1 210, 210n.50, 212n.56, 222n.79
166a 172n.9 185c1–2 212n.56
166d 172n.10, 176n.25 185c3 212n.56, 217n.67
167a–b 176n.25 185c4 212n.57, 214
167c 176n.25 185c4–8 213, 218n.70, 219n.75
168c–169e 184n.18 185c5 216n.66, 217n.68
171c–d 172 185c6 219
171d9 172n.11 185c8–d3 215, 218n.70, 219n.75
172b–177c 223, 247 185c9 219
172c–e 247n.48 185d–e 210n.52
172d 223n.84 185e 176
172e–173b 247n.49 185e1 215n.62, 216n.66, 222n.81
174a8–b6 223, 226 185e2 222n.79
175b–176a 247n.49 185e3–9 176
175b4–6 223, 226 185e6 222n.81
Index Locorum 305
185e7 222n.79 200d 242
186a 208 200d8–e6 242
186a2–5 218 200e 174n.19
186a4 222n.82 200e7–201a3 242
186a9 208n.41 201a4 243
186a11 213n.60, 222nn.79, 80 201b8–c2 244, 246
186b 208 201b8–9 244n.37
186b6 215 201c–d 174, 232
186c 202 201c7–d3 249
186c–d 177, 218, 219, 220, 228, 234n.9 202c–206c 251n.61
186c3 222n.80 203a 256n.83
186c7 200n.13 206d1–5 151
186c8 218 206d–e 251n.63
186d 208 207a3 252
186d3 222n.80 207c4 252n.65
186d7–187a8 197 207e–208d 252n.66
186d7–e3 176–7 208a2 252n.67
186e1 7n.6, 198 208b8 252
186e2 198 208c6–d3 252
186e4 222n.78 208d 63–4
186e4–10 200 209d1 254n.72
187a 231n.1 209e7 254n.73
187a3–8 198, 226n.89 210a–b 256, 257
187a5 222n.81 210a10–b4 244, 245, 246
187a8 7n.6, 197 210d 182n.10
187b4 198 Timaeus 43c 203n.22
187b4–6 232, 233–4 Protagoras (Diels–Kranz fragment numbers)
187b6 197 87A2 40n.20
187b–210a 231–58
187c–200d 237 Wittgenstein, Ludwig
187c7–200c6 235–7 Philosophical Investigations §66 25n.52
189a6–b5 198n.3 §66–71 271n.8
189d7–e3 214n.61 §67 124n.25
191a 237n.19 §69 187n.36
196c 237n.19 §75 55
196d10–e7 191 §89 70n.6
196d12 192n.46 §143–7 271n.8
196e 191 §146 9n.10
199d1–8 239–40 §150 27n.57
199e1–6 240 §152–4 27n.57
200a 275 §156–71 271n.8
200a3–9 240–1
200b 275n.18 Xenophanes Fragments (Diels Kranz)
200c 174n.19 35 40

Catherine Rowett Knowledge and Truth in Plato

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OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 03/07/2018, SPi

Knowledge and Truth in Plato

I. About the Reader’s Views on Plato

II. What I Am Trying to Do in This Book

III. How to Read This Book

IV. Numbering System for Quoted Texts

Part I. Knowledge, Truth, and Belief

2. Truth and Belief 34

Part II. Plato’s Meno

indefinable side of the double square, is intended to prove that what

Part III. Plato’s Republic

relation, of icon to original, characterizes the higher levels of the Divided

Part IV. Plato’s Theaetetus

an earlier mistake or inventing a unified consciousness); III.iv That the

III. In Which We Examine Why Socrates Concludes the Examination of

Part V. The Bigger Picture

I. In Which We Consider Whether ‘Knowledge’

4 Knowledge and Truth in Plato

Related to this kind of being is a corresponding idea of truth. We shall turn to

Knowledge, Conceptual Knowledge, and the Iconic Route 5

I.ii That Lyons’s ‘structural semantics’ approach to understanding

6 Knowledge and Truth in Plato

Knowledge, Conceptual Knowledge, and the Iconic Route 7

8 Knowledge and Truth in Plato

I.iii Whether ‘knowledge’ is a useful translation for Plato’s knowledge words

Knowledge, Conceptual Knowledge, and the Iconic Route 9

10 Knowledge and Truth in Plato

I.iv That knowledge is not a species of (propositional) belief, and that

Knowledge, Conceptual Knowledge, and the Iconic Route 11

II. In Which We Classify Twentieth-Century

II.i.i The Metaphysical Reading

12 Knowledge and Truth in Plato

II.i.ii The Rylean Reading

Knowledge, Conceptual Knowledge, and the Iconic Route 13

14 Knowledge and Truth in Plato

II.i.iii The Fine Reading

Knowledge, Conceptual Knowledge, and the Iconic Route 15

II.ii Some further options

16 Knowledge and Truth in Plato

Knowledge, Conceptual Knowledge, and the Iconic Route 17

II.iii That my interpretation is a variant of the first type

18 Knowledge and Truth in Plato

Knowledge, Conceptual Knowledge, and the Iconic Route 19

speaks of many just [things] or many beautiful [things], whether he is referring to

20 Knowledge and Truth in Plato

Knowledge, Conceptual Knowledge, and the Iconic Route 21

22 Knowledge and Truth in Plato

our epistemological reflections, though it does have an established place in work on

Knowledge, Conceptual Knowledge, and the Iconic Route 23

III. In Which We Consider Whether it Is a Good

24 Knowledge and Truth in Plato

III.ii That failing to find a definition can be a fruitful part of a philosophical

Knowledge, Conceptual Knowledge, and the Iconic Route 25

Unsurprisingly, a topic that needs investigation is typically one that is by no means

26 Knowledge and Truth in Plato

Knowledge, Conceptual Knowledge, and the Iconic Route 27

IV. In Which We Investigate How Knowing Relates

28 Knowledge and Truth in Plato

Knowledge, Conceptual Knowledge, and the Iconic Route 29

30 Knowledge and Truth in Plato

Knowledge, Conceptual Knowledge, and the Iconic Route 31

See Burnyeat, Theaetetus, 75, discussing Theaetetus 188b–c.

32 Knowledge and Truth in Plato

Knowledge, Conceptual Knowledge, and the Iconic Route 33

2. Truth and Belief 34