The "Theaetetus" on How We Think

Author(s): David Barton

Source: Phronesis, Vol. 44, No. 3 (Aug., 1999), pp. 163-180
Published by: BRILL
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 The Theaetetus on how we Think

DAVID BARTON

ABSTRACT
I argue that Plato's purpose in the discussion of false belief in the Theaetetusis
to entertainand then to reject the idea that thinking is a kind of mental grasping.
The interpretationallows us to make good sense of Plato's discussion of 'other-
judging' (189c-190e), of his remarksabout mathematicalerror (195d-196c), and
most importantly,of the initial statement of the puzzle about falsity (188a-c).
That puzzle shows that if we insist on conceiving of the relation between thought
and its objects on the model of holding or grasping something in our hands, we
will be unable to account for the possibility of false identity judgments: For no
one who is literally grasping two things in his hands would seriously entertain
the idea that one of the things is numerically identical with the other.

At Stephanus page 187 of the dialogue bearing his name, Theaetetus pro-
poses his second definition of knowledge, that it is true belief (a&XniO
50'a). He contrasts this with the proposal that all belief counts as know-
ledge, which he says cannot be right since there are, of course, false
beliefs. But Socrates professes not to understand how there could be such
a thing as falsity, and he suggests that they pause to discuss the problem.
He then lays out a brief and puzzling argument which allegedly shows
that there can be no such thing as false belief. Plato takes this argument
seriously, spending twelve pages and considerable ingenuity and imagina-
tion in an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to answer it. Yet it is not at all
clear how we are meant to understand the key moves in the argument, and
consequently it is not clear exactly why or how it is thought to threaten
falsity. Recently, scholars have suggested that we can understand Plato to
be concerned with a serious and philosophically interesting problem
if we take him to be making implicit use of a principle about judgment
that Bertrand Russell was also known to have held.' According to that
principle, judgment is possible only when we are acquainted with every
term of the judgment. I think that this recent turn of scholarship is helpful
and points us in the right direction, but I do not believe that Russell's

Accepted March 1999

' John McDowell presses the point in "Identity Mistakes: Plato and the Logical
Atomists,"pp. 181-96 of Proceedings of the AristotelianSociety N.S. 70, 1969-70, and
more briefly in his commentaryon his own translationof the Theaetetus. See Plato:
Theaetetus(Oxford:ClarendonPress, 1973). Myles Burnyeatflirts with the idea in his

X Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 1999 Phronesis XLIV13

164 DAVID BARTON

principle is in play in Plato's argument. I shall argue, nonetheless, that

Plato is working with a principle similar in some respect to Russell's,
and that attention to this fact shows that there is a philosophical point of
the first importance to be gleaned from the discussion of falsity in the
Theaetetus, a point about the nature of the relationship between self and
world.
Here is the crucial stretch of text:

Socrates: Well now, aren't there just these possibilities for us, in the
case of everything and with each individual thing: either to
know it or not to know it? Because at the moment I'm leav-
ing out learning and forgetting, as being in between these
two: at this stage they aren't at all relevant to the argument.
Theaetetus: Well, Socrates, there's no other alternative, in the case of
each thing, besides knowing it or not knowing it.
Socrates: Now it follows immediately that if someone thinks, he thinks
either something which he knows or which he does not know.
Theaetetus: Yes.
Socrates: And it's impossible for someone who knows something not
to know that same thing, or for someone who doesn't know
something to know that same thing.
Theaetetus: Of course.
Socrates: Well now, take someone who thinks false things. Does he
believe that things he knows are not these but some other
things he knows, and knowing both he is ignorant of both?
Theaetetus: No, that's impossible, Socrates.
Socrates: Well, is it that he supposes that things he doesn't know are
some other things which he doesn't know? Is this possible: that
someone who knows neither Theaetetus nor Socrates should
grasp into his mind (ri; tiiv 68avouav kappIiv) that Socrates is
Theaetetus or Theaetetus Socrates?
Theaetetus: Of course not.
Socrates: But surely it isn't that he believes that things he knows are
things he doesn't know, or that things he doesn't know are
things he knows.
Theaetetus: That would be monstrous.

commentaryon M.J. Levett's translation.See The Theaetetusof Plato (Indianapolis:

Hackett, 1990), esp. pp. 73-7. I shall be concentrating,however, on Gail Fine's "False
Belief in the Theaetetus,"Phronesis, 1979, pp. 70-80.
 THE THEAETETUSON HOW WE THINK 165

Socrates: Well then, how can it still be possible to think falsely? Because
outside of these situations it's surely impossible to think, since,
in the case of everything, we either know it or don't know it.
But it doesn't seem to be possible to think falsely anywhere
within these situations. (188a-c)

This is a puzzling argument, and it is unlikely to convince any modern

reader that there is a serious problem about falsity. One of its curious (and
often noticed) features, which I mention only so that I can set it aside, is
that although it seems to be concerned exclusively with a small sub-class
of false beliefs, cases of false identity judgments, Plato takes it to show
that all false beliefs are problematic. This does seem to be a mistake on
Plato's part, perhaps originating in a hope that if he could get clear about
falsity in a restricted domain of cases he would thereby shed light on other
kinds of cases as well. That would be a reasonable hope, especially in
light of Plato's view, articulated in the Sophist, that identity statements
are really not fundamentally different in kind than statements which
attribute some property to a subject. Both kinds of statement get cashed
out in terms of participation relations: To say that Socrates is identical
to Socrates is to say that Socrates participates in Sameness, one of the
Sophist'sfive great kinds, with respect to Socrates.2
Another curious feature of the argument, which I shall not simply set
aside, is that it relies on the undefended and unelaborated principle that
one either knows an object or does not. Plato clearly wants the reader to
understand that the principle is at the heart of the argument: He has
Socrates secure Theaetetus' assent to it explicitly, and in his conclusion
he states the principle again. There is also a second principle indispens-
ably at work in the argument, that a thing cannot figure in one's thoughts
if one does not already know the thing. I'll call the first of these principles
P and the second Q. The argument can be reconstructed as follows:

1. P: "There's no other alternative, in the case of each thing, besides

knowing it or not knowing it."

2 Another interestingpossibility (I am grateful to the editors of Phronesis for bring-

ing it to my attention) is that Plato finds it natural to understandall mistaken judg-
ment as, at bottom, a matterof mistaken identity: In judging falsely we mean to pick
out some actually existing thing or state of affairs, but what we actually end up
picking out is something different- and so in effect we mistake the first for the sec-
ond. This would clear Plato altogether of the charge that he is falsely generalizing
from the problematiccharacterof one class of false beliefs to the problematiccharacter
of all of them.
166 DAVID BARTON

2. Therefore, when someone thinks, he thinks either something he knows

or something he does not know.
3. Someone who thinks falsely must think either (a) that things he knows
are other things he knows, or (b) that things he doesn't know are other
things he doesn't know, or (c) that things he knows are other things he
doesn't know, or finally (d) that things he doesn't know are other things
he knows.
4. (a) is impossible because it implies that he both knows and does not
know the same things.
5. (b), (c), and (d) are impossible because (Q) it is impossible for some-
thing to figure in one's thoughts if one doesn't know that thing.
6. Therefore it is impossible to think falsely.

This is a valid argument, but as it stands it is really just a shell of an

argument, partly because we lack any understanding of what the real
content of P and Q is. For the moment I shall concentrate on P. The most
obvious interpretationsof P render it false or else leave us without a gen-
uine puzzle about falsity. We could take the import of the principle to be
that one either knows everything about a thing or else one knows nothing
about it. If this principle were true, it would indeed be difficult to see how
we could ever make false identity judgments; but of course no such prin-
ciple is true, or even tempting. Alternatively, we could understand P to
assert that one either knows something about a thing or one does not. This
principle has the advantage of being true, but it leaves us without a puz-
zle: For if I know something about Socrates (but not that he is distinct
from Theaetetus) and I know something about Theaetetus (but not that he
is distinct from Socrates), nothing prevents me from judging, incorrectly,
that Socrates and Theaetetus are one and the same. Finally, we might think
that P claims that one either knows what a thing is or one does not. I
don't know whether P, so interpreted,would be true or not - that depends
on what is involved in knowing what a thing is - but it again leaves us
without a puzzle. Perhaps in my childhood I knew a person, call him Joe,
quite well. I played with him regularly, knew a lot about him, and could
easily pick him out of any crowd. In short, I clearly knew who he was.
Suppose now that later in my life I meet another Joe, and I come to know
him quite well: I talk with him regularly, know a lot about him and can
easily pick him out of a crowd. Even in a case like this, it is perfectly
reasonable for me to ask myself whether this Joe whom I know as an
adult is the same as the Joe whom I know from childhood, and even to
conclude incorrectly on the basis of the available evidence that he is.
 THE THEAETETUSON HOW WE THINK 167

There really is no puzzle here at all. It might be objected that in a case

like this I don't really know who either Joe is, since ex hypothesi I don't
that they are distinct from each other. But this certainly won't do: For
now we have strengthened P to such a degree that the whole force of the
argument at 188a-c is lost. Plato is certainly right if he is claiming that I
will not think to myself, "x is identical with y" when I know already that
x and y are distinct, but that truism hardly counts as a puzzle - and it has
no tendency to show that there is anything puzzling about the kinds of
mistaken identity judgments that people actually do make.3

Gail Fine's Theaetetus

How then are we to understand Plato's argument? Gail Fine and others
have sought help in a thesis about judgment that Russell held at one stage
of his career. The thesis employs his notion of acquaintance, which he
understands as a kind of direct awareness of an object. In "Knowledge by
Acquaintance and Knowledge by Description," Russell states the thesis
this way: "Whenever a relation of supposing or judging occurs, the terms
to which the supposing or judging mind is related by the relation of sup-
posing or judging must be terms with which the mind in question is
acquainted."4Earlier in the same work he formulates what is evidently the
same principle somewhat differently: "Every proposition which we can
understand must be composed wholly of constituents with which we are
acquainted.""Russell thought that this principle was self-evident if prop-
erly understood - for "it seems scarcely possible to believe that we can
make a judgment or entertain a supposition without knowing what it is
that we are judging or supposing about."6 The principle is nicely suited
for application to Plato's argument: First, on Russell's view, acquaintance
is an all or nothing matter; one either is or is not acquainted with a thing.
Thus Plato's principle P comes out true, at least according to Russell, if
we understand it as follows:

I If the fact that I knew the one Joe early in life and the other later in life is thought
troublesome here, it is easy enough to construct examples where this kind of time
difference plays no role. I may wonder whether the coffee cup on my desk is mine or
Sarah's, and then conclude incorrectly on the basis of good evidence that it is mine.
And here I of course know what my coffee cup is and what Sarah's coffee cup is.
I "Knowledge by Acquaintanceand Knowledge by Description,"in Mysticismand
Logic (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1918), pp. 220-1.
5 "Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by Description,"p. 219.
6
"Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by Description,"p. 219.
168 DAVID BARTON

P* There's no other alternative, in the case of each thing, besides being

acquaintedwith it or not being acquaintedwith it.

Second, it is clear that one of the key steps of the argument, step 5,
depends upon at least something like Russell's thesis aboutjudgment. Plato's
idea here is clearly that we cannot have a thought in which a particular
thing figures unless we already have knowledge of, or on the current
hypothesis, acquaintance, with that thing. Thus Q comes out true as well,
on the following reading:

Q* It is impossible for something to figure in one's thoughtif one is not already

acquaintedwith it.

Fine then attributes to Russell the implausible view that if one is ac-
quainted with a thing one "knows all there is to know about it."7 In fact
Russell did not hold such a view, a point we shall come back to in a
moment. For now, we should simply note that this additional point gives
Fine all the materials she needs to make sense of Plato's puzzle, as follows:

(a) P*: There's no other alternative, in the case of each thing, besides
being acquainted with it or not being acquainted with it.
(b) Therefore, when someone thinks he is either acquainted with the
constituents of his thoughts or he is not.
(c) Someone who thinks falsely must think either (1) that something he
is acquainted with is something else he is acquainted with, or (2) that
something he isn't acquainted with is something else he isn't ac-
quainted with, or (3) that something he is acquainted with is some-
thing else he isn't acquainted with, or (4) that something he isn't
acquainted with is something else he is acquainted with.
(d) (1) is impossible, because anyone who is acquainted with both things
knows everything there is to know about each of them, including that
they are distinct from each other.
(e) (2)-(4) are impossible because, by Q*, it is impossible for something
to figure in one's thought if one is not already acquainted with it.
To put the point of the argument more briefly: I cannot think falsely that
A is B unless I am acquainted with both A and B, but having this ac-
quaintance is a sufficient condition for knowing that A and B are in fact
distinct. No one, therefore, would ever mistake one thing for another.
If this is Plato's puzzle, it is easily solved. All we need to do is reject

I "False Belief in the Theaetetus,"p. 72.

 THETHEAETETUSON HOWWE THINK 169

the model of knowledge on which it is founded. Fine thinks that this is

precisely the moral Plato wants his readers to draw. On her view, Plato
intends the discussion of false belief as a reductio ad absurdum of what
she calls the 'acquaintance model of knowledge' - a model according to
which knowledge is a kind of "grasping or hitting"8 that confers total
knowledge of the thing grasped.
We may still wonder, however, why Plato would expend so much philo-
sophical energy and imagination in discrediting the acquaintance model.
What point would Plato have in demonstrating the obvious point that
knowing a thing doesn't imply knowing everything about it? Here Fine
reminds us that the discussion of falsity occurs in the context of Theae-
tetus' claim that true belief is knowledge. Her idea is that the acquaint-
ance model supports Theaetetus' definition by dissolving any distinction
between true belief and knowledge: I cannot believe truly, say, that
Socrates is snub-nosed unless I know everything about Socrates, including
that he is snub-nosed - thus any true belief turns out also to be a piece
of knowledge:
On thatmodel [the acquaintancemodel], any graspof a thing amountsto knowledge
and so true belief, since it involves a grasp of a thing, is knowledge. But of
course Theaetetus should welcome this result, since he suggests that there is no
distinction between knowledge and true belief. Thus, the underlyingacquaintance
model, although it precludes a satisfactory explanation of false belief, supports
Theaetetus' suggestion, by obliterating any distinction between knowledge and
true belief.9

By refuting the acquaintance model, Fine claims, Plato has successfully

removed one line of support for Theaetetus' definition. This allows Fine
to conclude that the long discussion of false belief is not a mere digres-
sion, but an indirect argument against Theaetetus' claim that knowledge
is true belief.
Such, in broad outline, is Fine's reading. I find myself in agreement
with much of what she says, but I also think that there are some serious
problems in the details of her analysis. I want now to identify these, so
that I can clear them away and find a common core of agreement on which
a satisfactory reading of the Theaetetus can be built. I shall be concerned
mostly with the acquaintance model of knowledge and the role Fine
assigns to it. That model is certainly central to Fine's account, for her ver-
sion of Plato's argument will not go through without the claim that

8 "False Belief in the Theaetetus,"p. 70.

9 "False Belief in the Theaetetus,"p. 70.
170 DAVID BARTON

knowing a thing confers knowledge of everything about the thing (step

(d), above, is essential to her reading). But this idea is sufficiently implau-
sible to rob Plato's puzzle of any independent philosophical interest, so I
would be disappointed to find that the puzzle turns on it. Fine tries to mit-
igate this disappointment by alleging a connection between the acquaint-
ance model and Theaetetus' claim that knowledge is true belief. I shall
try to show, however, that there is no such connection. This will remove
the temptation to read the acquaintance model into Plato's puzzle about
falsity and pave the way for a fresh interpretation.
First, it should probably be noted that Fine has seriously misunderstood
Russell's notion of acquaintance. Of course, nothing in her interpretation
of the Theaetetus requires that the concept of acquaintance she finds there
should be in Russell as well. But her attributionof the acquaintance model
of knowledge to Russell does give that model a certain aura of respect-
ability, which then makes it seem more likely that a great thinker such
as Plato would take an interest in it, even if his interest lies mostly in
refuting it. So it is perhaps not gratuitous to point out that Russell never
thought, as Fine claims, that acquaintance with a thing confers knowledge
of everything about the thing. For Russell, knowledge by acquaintance is
a kind of direct mode of cognitive access to objects, to be understood in
contrast with an indirect mode of access, knowledge by description. I am
acquainted with an object "when I have a direct cognitive relation to that
object, i.e. when I am directly aware of the object itself."'0 I know an
object by description, on the other hand, when I know that there is one
and only one object that satisfies a certain description. I know, for exam-
ple, that there is one and only one object who is the author of the
Theaetetus, and thus I know this object, Plato, by description. Without tak-
ing a stand on whether the distinction Russell is after is a real one, we
may express it as follows: To be acquainted with an object is to know the
object itself, whereas to know something by description is to know some-
thing about it.
Because knowledge by description and knowledge by acquaintance are
fundamentally different modes of access to objects, they are in Russell's
view "logically independent."" This means that it does not follow logi-
cally from the fact that I am acquainted with a thing that I have any
descriptive knowledge of it at all, though Russell claims it would be

10
"Knowledge by Acquaintanceand Knowledge by Description,"p. 209.
11 BertrandRussell, The Problems of Philosophy (London:Oxford University Press,
1952), p. 46.
 THE THEAETETUSON HOW WE THINK 171

"rash" to suppose that one is ever in fact acquainted with a thing without
also knowing something about it.'2
Russell, then, acknowledges at least the logical possibility that I could
know something by acquaintance and yet know nothing about it at all.
Fine reaches the opposite conclusion, that knowing something by ac-
quaintance confers omniscience about the thing, by conflating Russell's
view that acquaintance is an all or nothing affair, that one either is or
is not acquainted with a thing, with the quite different view that one
either knows everything about a thing or nothing about it. She writes,
"Acquaintance ... is ... a hit or miss, all or nothing, affair. Either one is
acquainted with something, and so knows all there is to know about it, or
else one is not acquainted with it, and so has total ignorance."'3 But if we
keep firmly in mind that knowledge by acquaintance sharply contrasts
with knowledge by description it is easy to avoid this conflation: Russell
does hold that acquaintance is an all or nothing affair in the sense that
one either is or is not acquainted with a thing, but since knowing some-
thing by acquaintance is quite different than knowing anything about it
(having knowledge by description), it does not follow from this that one
either knows everything or nothing about a thing. Fine is tempted to the
conflation by Russell's misleading remark, which she quotes, that when
one is acquainted with a particular color "no further knowledge of it itself
is even theoretically possible."'4 The fuller context of this remark makes
it clear that Russell is referring here to knowledge by acquaintance, and
is claiming only that no further knowledge of this kind is theoretically
possible - for one either is or is not acquainted with a thing. The quoted
remark is immediately preceded by the following: "So far as concerns
knowledge of the colour itself, as opposed to knowledge of truths about
it, I know the colour perfectly and completely when I see it."'5 Thus
Russell does not commit himself here to the view that when one is acquainted
with a thing one knows everything about it. Indeed, in The Philosophy of
Logical Atomism, he explicitly disavows any such view: "When you have
acquaintance with a particular, you understand that particular itself quite
fully, independently of the fact that there are a great many propositions
about it that you do not know .*. .6

2 The Problems of Philosophy, p. 46.

"3 "False Belief in the Theaetetus,"p. 72.
14 The Problems of Philosophy, p. 47.

'5 The Problems of Philosophy, p. 47. Italics my own.

16 "ThePhilosophyof Logical Atomism,"in The CollectedPapers of BertrandRussell,

v. 8, ed. John G. Slater (London: Allen & Unwin, 1986).

172 DAVID BARTON

Now that the acquaintance model has been stripped of its association
with Russell, it is perhaps a little easier to see how deeply implausible
that model is, and how unlikely it is that Plato had any independent inter-
est in it. According to the model, one either knows nothing or everything
about any given thing. To refute this, Socrates need only have pointed out
that they have been assuming all along that he knows Theaetetus (it has
been a favored example), and then add that he plainly does not know
everything there is to know about him, such as the number of hairs on
his head. If, as Fine claims, the ten page discussion of falsity is really a
reductio of the acquaintance model, it is a pointlessly complicated and
lengthy one. To explain why Plato would spend so much philosophical
energy on the refutation of the model - a model he has never previously
shown any interest in, and which is never stated in any Platonic dialogue,
including this one - Fine must lean hard on her claim that Plato's refu-
tation removes one line of support for Theaetetus' definition of knowl-
edge. That claim can now be seen to bear the full weight of her argument.
I do not see how it can bear that weight. One problem, not the most
serious, is that the acquaintance model is less plausible than the definition
it is meant to support. That definition, that knowledge is true as opposed
to false belief, is a promising one, and it represents an obvious advance
over Theaetetus' first definition, that knowledge is perception. It is, I sus-
pect, meant to be a definition that any attentive reader might be tempted
to propose, and to propose at just the moment that Theaetetus does. By
contrast, the claim that we know everything or nothing about an object
does not look very promising, and so it would be at least peculiar to enlist
its support in defense of the new definition.
But the real problem is that the refutation of the acquaintance model
would not in fact undermine Theaetetus' definition. Fine emphasizes that
the acquaintance model dissolves the distinction between having true
belief about a thing and having knowledge of it, but the problem is that
it does more than just that - it dissolves the distinction between having
true belief about a thing and having omniscience about it. On Fine's
acquaintance model, to be acquainted with something is not just to know
it, but to know everything about it. If Plato refutes this view he has
removed one reason for holding the strong view that true belief is omni-
science, but it's hard to see how he's removed any support for the much
weaker claim that is actually in question, that true belief is knowledge.
Plato cannot undermine the weaker view by undermining the stronger
view, at least not by the argument Fine attributes to him, which turns on
just that feature of the stronger view that distinguishes it from the weaker
 THE THEAETETUSON HOW WE THINK 173

one: Plato's argument, according to Fine, shows that false belief is impos-
sible if having a belief about a thing amounts to having total knowledge
of it. (Step (d) is essential in Fine's version of the argument.) Since Theae-
tetus' view is that true belief amounts to knowledge, not that it amounts
to total knowledge, this leaves his real claim untouched. If Plato succeeds
in refuting the acquaintance model, he will have shown that it is possible
to believe truly that, say, Socrates is snub-nosed without knowing every-
thing there is to know about him. But this does nothing to undermine
Theaetetus' claim that it is not possible to believe truly that Socrates is
snub-nosed without knowing, simply, that he is snub-nosed. To put all of
this another way: If the acquaintance model constitutes the foundation
for the claim that knowledge is true belief, then that foundation is much
wider than the structure built on top of it, and since Plato's discussion of
false belief (on Fine's reading) removes just that part of the foundation
that is unneeded, the structure itself stands firm.
So I believe Fine's reading of the Theaetetus cannot be right, at least
not in its details. Russell's thesis about judgment, Q*, does not help us to
recover a genuine puzzle about falsity unless we add to it the implausi-
ble idea that acquaintance confers total knowledge about an object. And
when we do add that idea, thus generating Fine's acquaintance model,
Plato's puzzle turns out to be philosophically uninteresting not only for us
but for him, since its force depends entirely on a thesis that ought to tempt
neither us nor him. Nor can we fix this problem by supposing that Plato's
real interest in the acquaintance model lies in its connection with Theaetetus'
definition of knowledge; for as I've just tried to show, that connection is
not there. Russell's thesis about judgment thus does not seem to provide
the key needed to decipher Plato's puzzle.

Thinking as Grasping
Nonetheless, Fine's approach is suggestive, and there are several strands
in it I want to follow and which I think point us in the right direction.
First, on Fine's reading, Plato's principle P asserts something very general
about the relation between the mind and its objects. P*, Fine's reading of
P, is only incidentally about knowledge, for knowing is just one of the
relations that a mind might bear to an object. This may seem like a strike
against P*, since the Theaetetus is at least ostensibly about knowledge.
But the current discussion is about falsity, and since falsity is at bottom
a kind of malfunction in the relation between the mind and its objects, we
shouldn't be surprised that a puzzle strong enough to cast doubt on its
174 DAVID BARTON

very possibilityshouldrest on a generalprincipleaboutwhat the relation

between the mind and its objects is like. It may be that Plato casts the
principlein termsof knowledgeonly because this makes dramaticsense,
given the subjectof the dialogue.Second, step 5 of Plato's argumentcer-
tainly does seem to make use of somethinglike Russell's thesis about
judgment.Surely Plato's idea here is that if we do not alreadybear some
appropriatecognitive relationto an object we cannot so much as have a
thought about it. Indeed, Plato's remark,in his initial statementof the
puzzle, that someone who knew neither Socrates nor Theaetetuscould
never 'grasp into his mind' (e4; Ti1v Sauvotlcv ka?Eiv) that the one is the
other, leaves little doubton this point.
The question is what cognitive relation to an object makes thought
aboutit possible,if not acquaintance.I believe thatpartof Plato's purpose
in the discussionof falsity is to test a certainnaturalway of understanding
the relationbetweena thinkeror a knowerand the thingsshe thinksabout,
accordingto which contemplatingsomethingis like holdingit or grasping
it. Languagescatteredthroughoutthe Theaetetussuggests that this con-
ception is very much in the forefrontof Plato's mind. There is a particu-
larly strikingexample at 190c, where Plato says that no one wouldjudge
one thingto be anotherwhen he is "layinghold of boththingsin his soul."
aE0 poa vni Tn)
(E'pwanTovo; The whimsicalproposalintroducedat 197d,
that the soul containsa kind of aviary,is somethinglike an enshrinement
of this view: Bringinga piece of knowledgeto one's mind is here likened
to the actual catching of a bird in one's hand, and keeping it there is
likenedto keepingit in one's hands.Plato uses a remarkablyrich vocab-
ulary to describethe processes of holding and laying hold of a thing in
one's mind - variants of kai4a'vo, flpao), 'i%w, and ?pact6o'at all appear
in this context, and in the case of kapavw, they appearfrequently.
If this is right, then we should read P as follows:
P** There's no other alternative, in the case of each thing, besides mentally
'grasping' it or not mentally 'grasping' it.

Notice that, if mentalgraspingis to be understoodon the analogy of lit-

erally grasping things with one's hands, then P** is true, since it is true
that in the case of each thing one is eitherholdingit in one's handsor is
not. Suppose now that we recast the Russellianthesis aboutjudgmentso
that it concerns the notion of mental graspingratherthan the notion of
acquaintance.It then reads:
Q** Every propositionwhich we can understandmust be composed wholly of
constituentswhich we mentally grasp.
 THE THEAETETUSON HOW WE THINK 175

If this thesis is in play in Plato's statementof the problemof false belief,

we can at last recovera genuine puzzle from it: We cannotthink that A
is B, where A and B are distinct,unless we grasp both A and B (by the
modified Russellian thesis, Q**). But if grasping is understoodon the
model of literalgrasping,then clearly anyonewho graspedboth A and B
would know that they are distinct,for it is difficultto see how someone
who was literally holding two objects in his hands could think that one
of them is identicalwith the other.Thus false identityjudgmentsare inex-
plicable. Somewhatmore formally:
(a) P**: There's no other alternative,in the case of each thing, besides
mentallygraspingit or not mentallygraspingit.
(b) Therefore, when someone thinks, each of the constituents of his
thoughtis either somethinghe is mentallygraspingor somethinghe
is not mentallygrasping.
(c) Someone who thinks falsely must think either (1) that somethinghe
is graspingis somethingelse he is grasping,(2) that somethinghe
isn't graspingis somethingelse he isn't grasping,or (3) that some-
thing he is graspingis somethinghe isn't grasping,or (4) that some-
thing he is not graspingis somethinghe is grasping.
(d) (1) is impossibleif mentalgraspingis understoodon the model of lit-
eral grasping.For someone who was literally graspingtwo distinct
things in his handswould not supposethat the one is the other.
(e) (2)-(4) are impossible,because by Q** it is impossiblefor something
to figurein one's thoughtsif one does not have a mentalgrasp of it.
Notice that this puzzle does not dependon the unpromisingidea that we
must have completeknowledgeof each of the things grasped.It depends
only on taking the analogy between thinkingand graspingseriously."7

1" Ronald Polansky, in Philosophy and Knowledge: A Commentary on Plato's

Theaetetus (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1992), claims that Plato's use of
the concept of grasping indicates that he is operating on the assumptionthat we must
have complete knowledge of anythingwe think about:"ThatTheaetetusstill holds that
we must have complete knowledge of what we think is indicated by the reference to
'grasping (?paxrt6jsvo;) both things by the soul' (190c6-7) and by the speaking of
opining 'in no way' (o,qa4i - 190d7-8), because this latter suggests that we either
have a knowledgeable grasp of things or none at all." (p. 183, n. 18) But when we
speak, in the ordinaryparlance of English or of Greek, of having a mental grasp of
something, we certainly do not imply that we know every last one of the infinitely
many things that are true of it, so it seems to me quite clear that Plato's talk of grasp-
ing underminesrather than supports the idea that Plato is making use of this strong
assumption.As for Plato's use of 'in no way' at 190d7-8, here Plato is simply noting
176 DAVID BARTON

If what I have been saying is right, then the puzzle at 188a-c can be
read as a reductioad absurdumof the idea that thinkingabouta thing is
like holdingit or graspingit, only with one's mindratherthanwith one's
hands. The thinkingas graspingmetaphoris worth refuting,for unlike
Fine's acquaintancemodel it is a view that has real intuitivepull, even
now. Indeed,this conceptionof thoughtis latent in our everydayspeech:
We speakof holdingsomethingto be true,of graspinga concept,of being
unable to get a handle on an idea. In the Theaetetus,Plato has done us
the valuable service of showing that these metaphorscannot be pressed.
If we insist on conceivingof the relationbetweenthoughtand its objects
on the model of holdingor grasping,we will be unableto make sense of
false identity judgments:For no one who literally grasps two distinct
thingsin his handswill supposethatone of the thingsis numericallyiden-
tical with the other.'8
One key piece of evidence in favor of the currentreading is that it
enablesus to make good sense of the otherwisepuzzlingpassageat 189c-
190e, in which Plato proposesand then quicklyrejectsthe idea that false
belief may be understoodas a kind of 'interchangedthinking'(CaXo&otEiv
or XTepo6oteiv).The proposal,to put it as vaguely as Plato does, is that a

that if someone does not think about a thing at all he could not mistakenly suppose
that it is something else. The full sentence reads, "But surely he who thinks the one
thing only, and the other in no way, will never think the one is the other." This is
pretty close to a logical truth, and it needs no support from any strong assumptions
about knowledge.
18 To all of this it might be objected that a person could grasp one end of a thing
with his left hand and anotherwith his right and mistakenly suppose (because his eyes
are closed, perhaps) that he is holding two distinct things. But this would not be a
counterexample:Plato's puzzle is not about the possibility of thinking that one thing
is two distinct things, it is about the possibility of thinking that one thing is identical
with another.Significantly,whenever Plato gives an example of the kind of judgments
he thinks are problematic, he cites a case of this kind. And here it is substantially
more difficult to construct a counterexample.If I am holding a pen in my left hand
and a coffee cup in my right, I will not make the mistake of thinkingthat one of these
things is numericallyidentical with the other. (Notice that the descriptionunderwhich
I think of these objects does not matter:I will not think to myself 'this pen is identi-
cal with this coffee cup,' nor 'this thing in my left hand is identical with this thing in
my right,' nor 'this light thing is identical with this heavier thing.')
A couple of other cases: I might grasp a part of one thing, x, with my left hand
and a part of another thing, y, with my right and still mistakenly suppose that these
parts belong to the same object. In such a case I might be said to mistake x for y (or
y for x, depending on how the case is furtherdescribed). But here I am inclined to
say that what I grasp in each of my hands, in the sense of 'grasp' that Plato has in
 THE THEAETETUSON HOW WE THINK 177

person may think falsely that a thing, x, is what it is not, y, by somehow

exchanging, in his mind, x for y. In this way "he misses what he was aim-
ing at" (189c) and thus it is, apparently, possible "for the mind to set up
something as another and not as itself." (189d) But Plato then dismisses
the proposal, reasoning as follows: Someone who thinks that x is y, where
x and y are not identical, "must necessarily think either one or both"
(189e) of x or y. But if he thinks only one of them, then it is not possi-
ble for him to have the thought that this one is the other - for he is not
even thinking of the other. To think that the one is this other it would be
necessary, Theaetetus says, "to lay hold of" (?paitsa) this item "which
one does not think." (190d) This is a direct application of the principle
Q** - Theaetetus' claim is that one cannot have the thought that x is y
unless one grasps, somehow or other, both x and y. If, on the other hand,
someone does lay hold of both x and y, then he will not have the false
thought that the first is really the second: "no one who thinks both and
lays hold of (?pranT6gvoq) both with his soul could say and think that the
one is the other." (190c) If Plato is understanding the act of laying hold
of something as anything like literally laying hold of something with one's
hands, he is right: no one who grasps two things in his hands would ever
say or think to himself that the one is really the other. Thinking that one
thing x is another thing y is thus impossible whether one thinks (grasps
hold of) both x and y or whether one grasps hold of just one of them. So
Plato concludes that "anyone who sets out to define false thought as inter-
changed thinking would be saying nothing." (190e)

mind, is not a whole object, but a part of an object, for each hand is enclosing only
a part. (Plato speaks of taking or grasping things into the mind, ci; tiiv 6ulivotav XaP;iv
(188b), suggesting that the kind of grasping he has in mind is a kind of enveloping
or enclosing.) The relevant question, then, is whether I would mistake the part I grasp
with my left hand for the part I grasp with my right. And clearly I would not do this.
Finally, I could easily make the mistake of supposing that I am grasping one object
in one of my hands when I am actually grasping two: If I am holding two neatly
stacked coins in my left hand, I might mistakenly judge that I am holding just one.
But this is, again, not a genuine counterexample,for here I would be making the mis-
take of supposing that two objects are one, but I would not be making the kind of
mistake Plato has in mind - I would not be mistaking one of the coins for the other.
To construct a genuine counterexample,we'd need to find a case where a person
has his hands wrapped around two distinct objects and still manages to mistake one
of the objects for the other. I cannot show that it would be impossible to construct
such a counterexample, but surely the extreme rarity of such cases would still be
enough to show that the thinking as grasping metaphorhas to be rejected, since cases
of false identity judgments are not extremely rare.
178 DAVID BARTON

The current reading also renders Plato's remarks about mathematical

error intelligible and even compelling. Plato notes that people often make
errors in addition, thinking, for example, that the sum of seven and five
is eleven, but he claims not to understand how such a thing is possible.
The worry comes in the context of the proposal that the mind contains a
kind of wax block on which impressions of thoughts and perceptions are
stamped, and Plato takes the worry to be grounds for the rejection of that
model of mind. It is nonetheless possible to abstract from this context and
to retrieve from Plato's discussion the following worry about mathemati-
cal error: If I think that the sum of seven and five is eleven, then I seem
to think that twelve is eleven, since the sum of seven and five is, in point
of fact, twelve. But surely, Plato worries, no one would ever think that
twelve is eleven. Now, to the modem mind Plato's worry will seem to
depend on a gross fallacy, a willful flouting of the rule that intentional
contexts are opaque - the rule that says that in intentional contexts sub-
stitution of co-referential terms does not always preserve truth value. From
the fact that John believes that Cicero is a great orator it does not follow
that he believes that Tully is, even though 'Cicero' and 'Tully' in fact refer
to the same person. If John happens to be ignorant of the co-referentiality
of these terms, nothing prevents him from believing one thing of the per-
son he knows as Cicero and another of the person he knows as Tully. Just
so, from the fact that John mistakenly believes that the sum of seven and
five is eleven it does not follow that he believes twelve is eleven, even
though 'the sum of seven and five' and 'twelve' are co-referential terms.
For here John is obviously unaware of the co-referentiality, else he would
never have made his mathematical error. It appears, then, that Plato is
guilty of a none too subtle fallacy. But we are now in a position to acquit
him of the charge.
The key is to see that terms like 'grasp' and 'lay hold of' do not intro-
duce opaque contexts. In these contexts, the principle of the substitutivity
of co-referential expressions salva veritate is actually preserved. If it is
true that I am laying hold of Cicero - literally grasping him - then whether
I am aware of it or not, it is also true that I am laying hold of Tully, for
that is who Cicero is, and in grasping the one I cannot help but grasp the
'other'. Now, if we are operating with a conception of thought according
to which thinking of something is understood as a kind of grasp of it, then
we shall have to say that intentional terms do not introduce opaque
contexts either. From the fact that I am thinking of, laying hold of, the
sum of seven and five it will follow that I am thinking of, laying hold of,
twelve - for that is what the sum of seven and five is. It will then be
 THE THEAETETUSON HOW WE THINK 179

genuinely mysterious how I could think that seven and five is eleven, for
this can no longer be distinguished from the thought that twelve is eleven
- a thought nobody would have. Plato is not guilty of a fallacy; he has
in fact confirmed the result of the argument at 188a-c, that mistaken judg-
ments of identity become incomprehensible if we understand thinking of
a thing as a kind of mental grasp of it.
There is an obvious solution to Plato's puzzle, and the fact that Plato
does not articulate it in the Theaetetus has sometimes been taken to show
the depth of his confusion. Plato seems to be unaware that when we think
of a thing we think of it under one or more of its aspects. We do not think
of a thing, so to speak, full stop, we think of it, rather, as having some
quality or other, as being beautiful, or ugly, or small - we think some-
thing about it. This point immediately dissolves Plato's puzzle about fal-
sity: For it is simply not true that thinking of two things is tantamount to
the awareness that they are distinct. Since we think of things under
aspects, it is quite possible to think of x under one aspect and y under
another and yet fail to realize that it is the same thing that presents these
different aspects. Why does Plato ignore such an obvious point?
The answer, I think, is not that Plato is confused, but that the point is
incompatible with the conception of thought that Plato is testing in the
Theaetetus. If thinking is to be understood on the model of touching or
grasping, then it is hard to see how we could think of something under
one of its aspects rather than another. When we grasp something in our
hands, we do not grasp it under one of its aspects, we do not grasp it as
beautiful or as small, we simply grasp it full stop."9 (Of course, I may
grasp a beer in my hands as a thirsty person, but here 'thirsty person' is
an aspect of me, not of the beer.) If Plato is indeed testing to see how far
the metaphor of grasping can be pressed, then it is hardly surprising that
he does not press it farther than it will go. Incidentally, this explains an
otherwise puzzling feature of the discussion of false belief - Plato's tendency
to attach direct objects to verbs of thinking, to speak simply of 'thinking
a thing' rather than of 'thinking something about a thing.' (One example

'" Of course, we could grasp something by a part, but this is not usefully analo-
gous to thinking of something under an aspect. This is not only because there are
aspects of things (like their beauty) which are not parts of them. It is also because the
logic of the expression 'grasping by a part,' is unlike the logic of the expression,
'thinking under an aspect'. To take a silly example: If I literally grasp Socrates by his
nose it follows that I grasp him by his snub-nose. But if I think that Socrates has a
nose (if I think of him under his nasal aspect, as it were), it obviously does not fol-
low that I think of him as having a snub-nose.
180 DAVID BARTON

is found at 188a in the original statement of the puzzle, and there are
numerous examples at 189a-b and in the discussion of interchanged opin-
ion at 189c-190c.) This is just the way Plato ought to speak if he is tak-
ing the grasping metaphor seriously. If thinking is grasping, then some-
how or other we are able simply to think a thing (full stop), just as we
are able simply to grasp it (full stop).
There is a closely related point that I want to emphasize here. The fact
that we do not grasp things under aspects can serve to highlight just how
mysterious it is that we do think of them under aspects. It shows us that
thought is unlike anything we are familiar with from our bodily interac-
tions with everyday objects. If we look at things in this way, we come to
realize that Plato would not think that a mere statement of the fact that
we think things under aspects would be sufficient to solve his puzzle about
falsity. This would be to explain one mystery in terms of a still greater
one. This sort of solution will be intellectually unsatisfying until we have
some account of how it could be that thought, unlike grasping, picks things
out under some aspects rather than others - or, to put it another way,
under some concepts rather than others. Significantly, just such an account
is developed in the Sophist, the sequel to the Theaetetus, where Plato
abandons the grasping metaphor in favor of a new one which he intro-
duces explicitly and defends in detail, the thinking as 'weaving' metaphor.
The idea is that thinking is an activity in which a subject is 'woven'
together with a predicate in such a way that the predicate says something
about the subject, that is, picks it our underone of its aspects. The metaphysics
needed to underwrite and explain such a picture is not yet in place in the
Theaetetus, and one of the central tasks of the Sophist is to supply it.
The task of the section on false belief in the Theaetetus is, by contrast,
a more limited and destructive one, but Plato accomplishes it brilliantly:
He shows us, decisively, that thought cannot be understood as a kind of
mental holding or grasping.

Department of Philosophy
Swarthmore College