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Personal Details

Principal Investigator: A. Raghuramaraju Department of Philosophy, University

of Hyderabad
Paper Coordinator P. R. Bhatt Department of Humanities & Social
Sciences, IIT Bombay

Content Writer John Russon Department of Philosophy, University

of Guelph, Canada

Content Reviewer Former Professor, Department of

T. K. Nizar Ahmed
Philosophy, SSUS Kalady

Language Editor Chitralekha Manohar Freelancer, Chennai

Description of Module

Paper Name Philosophy

Subject Name Epistemology I

Module Name/Title Epistemology in Plato

Module Id 2.22

Pre-requisites

Objectives To introduce students to the core texts and ideas of Plato’s

epistemology.
Keywords knowledge as recollection; existential transformation;
mathematical knowledge; Socratic method; Platonic epistemology
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Plato’s Epistemology
Introduction

Plato (c. 428–c. 347 BC) played a fundamental role in “inventing” the discipline of philosophy, as we
know it today. One consequence of this is that we cannot assume that Plato, in writing his philosophical
works, is doing the same thing as a contemporary scholar who publishes a book of “philosophy”; and it is
of the utmost importance in reading the Platonic writings to recognise that Plato does not write in the
form of a modern philosophical discourse. Almost all of Plato’s writings take the form of dialogues, that
is, they present a conversation between two or more specific characters. They, thus, more closely
resemble works of drama than the argumentative essays that we typically associate with philosophy
nowadays. Plato himself never appears as a speaker in any of his dialogues, and there is, thus, no simple
way to determine what Plato’s own views are. 1 Plato himself was a follower of the Greek philosopher,
Socrates, and in almost all of Plato’s dialogues, the character “Socrates” plays a major role. This character
has sometimes been assumed to represent Plato’s views, though this simplistic interpretive approach has
been heavily criticised. Socrates himself (born c. 469 BC) was a philosopher and a prominent figure in
ancient Athens until his execution in 399 BC on charges of impiety. Though it is not certain whether
Plato’s portrayal of Socrates in the dialogues is historically accurate, and though it seems unlikely that the
views attributed to Socrates in the dialogues can be simply identified with Plato’s own views, the life of
Socrates is, nonetheless, the pivotal focus of Plato’s writings. To understand Plato’s epistemology, one
must first understand the character of Socrates and his distinctive practice. It is within the context of this
understanding that one can then pull together themes from a variety of different conversations about
knowledge that Socrates engages in throughout the Platonic dialogues, such as the distinction between the
sensible and the intelligible, the notion that knowledge is recollection, the theme of “the good” and the
theme of erōs. Overall, what is most striking in Plato’s epistemology is the idea that matters of knowledge
cannot be separated from matters of existential change.

The Socratic Method and the Examined Life

In the Apology of Socrates, Plato presents the speech that Socrates gave in his own defence at his trial for
impiety. 2 Socrates was charged with “corrupting the youth of Athens, not honouring the gods of the city,
and introducing divinities of his own”. To answer these charges, Socrates narrates the story of how he
came to develop the distinctive practice of philosophical questioning that was responsible for his being
put on trial. This (self-)portrayal of Socrates offers the primary context for understanding Plato’s
epistemology.

His philosophising began, Socrates says, when the Delphic Oracle, one of the great religious institutions
of ancient Greece, was asked, “Who is the wisest of men?” and the oracle supposedly answered, “No one
is wiser than Socrates.” Because he did not consider himself to be wise, Socrates was surprised to be
identified in this way. He, thus, began his lifelong activity of questioning individuals who were thought to
be wise, in order to understand and test the meaning of the oracle’s pronouncement. Socrates’ distinctive

1
A small number of letters have also been attributed to Plato. It is certain that some of these letters were not
written by Plato, and there is no strong evidence that any of them are authentic. The seventh letter is commonly
believed to be Plato’s own writing, but this remains uncertain.
2
The ancient Greek historian and philosopher Xenophon also wrote a version of Socrates’ defence speech, and it
differs in significant ways from Plato’s version. It is not known how much Plato’s “Apology” reproduces Socrates’
actual speech and how much is Plato’s own literary invention. “Apology” is the Greek term for a defence speech.
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practice – the so-called “Socratic method” – was not to put forward his own views during these
philosophical discussions with others, but instead, to ask individuals what they believed about a certain
topic, and then, to ask them their reasons for their belief. Socrates believed that such an examination of
one’s beliefs is essential to our existence: “the unexamined life”, he maintained, “is not worth living”
(Cooper [1997], p. 33). His questions were challenging, and, through forcing individuals to reflect
critically upon their own values and opinions, he typically revealed that they did not have good reasons
for their beliefs – indeed, certain aspects of their beliefs contradicted other aspects of their beliefs. This
practice of questioning had two important results: (1) Socrates came to conclude that the reason that there
was no one wiser than he was was because he was wise enough to know the limits of his own knowledge,
whereas others presumed to know more than they did; and (2) Socrates came to be unpopular with many
people, who saw his method of questioning simply as an irritating attempt to make fun of them and as a
challenge to the traditional religious and cultural beliefs upon which people based their lives. Socrates
understood his own practice of trying to make people reflect critically upon their own beliefs to be a
“divine mission” (because of the oracle), but the jury at his trial concluded that he was guilty of
corrupting the youth and not honouring the gods of the city, and he was sentenced to death. Socrates’
characteristic practice as he describes it in the Apology – the practice that cost him his life, and that is
presented here as the very essence of philosophy – presents us with three of the most prominent
epistemological themes in the Platonic writings: (1) The primacy of wisdom; (2) The notion that knowing
is essentially a matter of dialogue; (3) The notion of an “immanent” criticism.

Broadly, Plato’s epistemology is oriented towards the theme of wisdom, a theme which is inseparable
from questions of ethics and behaviour. In relation to this theme of wisdom, the knowledge Socrates is
concerned with is “self-knowledge”, and Socrates’ critical reflections here typically reveal the ways in
which an individual’s words and deeds are at odds with each other. Typically, that is, we do not truly
know ourselves, and Socrates’ practice of questioning suggests that one’s ability to develop an insight
into one’s own nature essentially depends on dialogue with others. (Plato’s dialogic form of writing
would seem to be a reflection of this Socratic emphasis on the primacy of dialogue.) Socrates’ method of
dialogic questioning also emphasises that in matters of wisdom and self-knowledge, knowledge is not a
matter of acquiring general principles of indifferent facts; instead, knowledge comes through the
immanent criticism of one’s own beliefs, that is, it is when one confronts directly and specifically one’s
living commitments that one learns, and it is only in answering to the specificity of the perspective of the
individual in question that learning actually happens. These aspects of Socratic practice that are raised in
the Apology provide the context for the epistemological themes that are richly explored in other Platonic
dialogues.

The Sensible and the Intelligible

The most basic orienting text for the explicit epistemological discussions that run throughout the Platonic
dialogues is found in Book VI of the Republic. Here, Socrates discusses the nature of knowledge with
Plato’s brothers, Glaucon and Adeimantus, and he especially emphasises the inseparability of
epistemological questions from metaphysical questions – questions about the nature of reality. The
pivotal notion is that reality is not something that we apprehend by our senses alone. To show this, he
leads us to notice what is implicitly involved in some familiar experiences of recognition.

To recognise a shadow as a shadow, for example, is to recognise it as something that is derived from
some more basic reality (namely, from the body of which it is the shadow). We do apprehend the shadow
immediately through our senses, but that sensory reality points us to a deeper reality upon which it
depends. If we then turn to the familiar natural bodies of our experience – a horse, a crocodile, a bamboo
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tree – we can notice, there too, that our recognition of those bodies points us to a deeper reality upon
which they depend: we can recognise a body as “a” horse, for example, only because we more basically
recognise the reality of the species (eidos), “horse”. Again, we apprehend the horse through our senses,
but the species as such is not itself visible: the species is a reality – it is because there is such a thing as
“to be a horse” that there can be individual horses – but it is a reality that we can apprehend only
intellectually, that is, we can see a horse, but we understand that there is such a thing as the species,
“horse”.

Socrates proposes that we imagine knowledge as a line, divided into two parts: the lower portion is “the
sensible”, and the upper part, “the intelligible”. As we move up the line from the recognition of shadows
to the recognition of bodies, we remain within the domain of sensory recognition, but we are advancing in
our knowledge to what is more basic from the point of view of reality. As we move to the recognition of
species (eidē, sometimes translated as “Forms”), we again advance in our knowledge to what is more
ontologically basic – more fundamentally real – but we now enter the domain of the intelligible rather
than the sensible. (This idea that the changing world of sensible nature is to be explained by more
fundamental, intelligible realities is referred to by some scholars as Plato’s “Theory of the Forms.”) Our
apprehension of basic mathematical notions, such as “unit”, “point”, or “line”, is similarly an
apprehension of the unchanging intelligible realities that structure the changing world of our experience,
but that never appear sensibly as such: we can never, for example, draw a perfect triangle or a perfect line,
but can only produce imperfect imitations of them, which point to those more basic realities that we can
grasp only through understanding.

Even those realities, though – natural species and the elementary principles of mathematics – are not
metaphysically self-explanatory, and they, like the shadow and the natural body, point beyond themselves
to more basic causal realities that must exist in order for these realities to exist. These intelligible realities
direct us to recognise the very structures that define what it is “to be” in general. Here, we recognise the
basic realities of sameness as such or difference as such or indeed being as such. Finally, at the top of the
divided line, beyond both the sensible and the intelligible – indeed “beyond being” (epekeina tēs ousias)
(Cooper [1997], p. 1130) – is the apprehension of the good itself. In other words, whether we have
realised it or not, philosophical reflection on the nature of knowledge reveals that all of our engagement
with reality points beyond itself to the most fundamental truth, which is our engagement with the good.
Other dialogues explore in more detail further aspects of the epistemology that is sketched out in this
image of the “divided line”.

Knowledge as Recollection

In the Phaedo, (a conversation with young Pythagorean philosophers on the day of Socrates’ death),
Socrates again analyses a familiar experience of recognition that we have in order to show what is
implicit in that recognition. His analysis draws our attention to an important feature of our ability to
apprehend the intelligible truths of mathematics (at the third level of the “divided line”).

We are familiar with the experience of recognising two things to be equal. In fact, those two will never be
absolutely equal – they will, for example, be two bodies that occupy different spaces, though equal in
weight, or two people of different sizes, though equal in age – and thus, just as no drawing of a triangle
can ever truly present a triangle, so will no “equals” truly make equality as such present. This indicates
that we could never learn what equality is from equal things: on the contrary, it is only by virtue of
already grasping what equality is that we can recognise such imperfect instances as instances of equality
(or, for that matter, of triangle). Equality is thus not a notion inductively acquired. Rather, knowledge of
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equality must be intrinsic to us, and the encounter with empirical instances of equality is, thus, only a
reminder of what we already know.

This notion that mathematical knowledge is a matter of “recollection” (anamnēsis) is also prominently
discussed in the Meno. In this dialogue, Socrates and Meno discuss what Socrates calls the “debater’s
paradox”, which purports to show that learning is impossible. “How will you ever learn what you don’t
know?” the debater asks. “If you don’t already know what you are looking for, you will not recognise it
when you find it, but if you do already know what you are looking for, you do not need to look for it”.
This paradox provides the context for a reflection on the experience of learning in mathematical contexts.
Specifically, Socrates has a conversation with a slave in which, by asking him questions rather than by
giving him instructions, Socrates draws out from the slave a basic comprehension of a geometrical
problem (namely, how to find the length of the diagonal of a square). Through the conversation, the slave
apparently “learns” that the length of the diagonal of a square is the square root of the sum of the lengths
of two sides; as with the example of equality in the Phaedo, Socrates here argues that what appears as
learning must in fact be a matter, rather, of “recollecting” what one already knew, but had not noticed.
This theme of recollecting allows us to understand more clearly Socrates’ emphasis on the ultimacy of our
knowledge of “the good”.

Self-Knowledge as Existential Transformation

According to Socrates’ model, then, advancing in knowledge is a matter of coming to an explicit

recognition of something we had already implicitly depended upon, but had not noticed. Knowledge,
therefore, is not so much a matter of acquiring new information as it is a matter of transforming our
relationship to our own experience by “recollecting” realities we were already recognising, but not
explicitly noticing, and thereby, changing the terms through which we relate to the world: it is a matter,
Socrates says, in Book VII of the Republic, of “turning around” (periagōgē) (Cooper [1997], p. 1136) and
examining what is essentially, but implicitly, involved in our everyday experience.

At the beginning of Book VII of the Republic, Socrates uses the metaphor of living in a cave to dramatize
this process of coming to knowledge. In our normal experience, Socrates says, we are like prisoners in a
cave who always face the wall. There are shadows cast upon the wall by puppets that people behind the
prisoners carry in front of fires, but the prisoners cannot see this – they see only the shadows. What we
typically call “knowing” is like the empty guessing that the prisoners would do if they had to make sense
of the shadows without knowing their true causes. Socrates then asks what it would be like if the
prisoners were taken from the cave. They would protest, he says, for looking at the shadows is the only
life they have ever known, and so, even though they are being released, they would think they were being
taken away from what is real. In dragging the prisoner from the cave, the prisoner would not only see the
puppets and the fires that make the shadows, and thus, come to a new understanding of what his or her
former experience had been; beyond this, upon being dragged out of the cave into the sunlight world
outside, the prisoner would see even more the sunlit reality of things that is being imitated by the puppets
and the fire. Upon experiencing this new world, the prisoner would now more fully recognise the
ignorance and illusion that he or she had formerly mistaken for knowledge and reality, and would not
want to return to the cave. Indeed, Socrates says, if the newly enlightened person were to return to the
cave, he or she would try to tell the other prisoners of their ignorance, but the other prisoners would not
believe or welcome these claims any more than the first prisoner did when being initially dragged from
the cave. This metaphor of the cave, Socrates argues, describes our experience of knowledge in general:
we are highly resistant initially to challenging the prejudices by which we normally live, and we are
violent towards those who encourage us to be self-critical and try to lead us out of ignorance. If, however,
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we follow the path of critical self-reflection, we will recognise the greater truth of our insights as we
move up “the divided line”.

This advance in knowledge, though, is not a process that leaves us untouched. On the contrary,
advance in knowledge is inseparable from a change in our values and our behaviours. We can recognise
an isolated instance of this correlation of learning and behavioural change in mathematical learning. To
recognise intellectually a mathematical truth – to advance to the “intelligible” portion of the “divided
line” – is to find oneself compelled to think in terms of that truth; in other words, if I truly understand that
2+3=5, then if I recognise two things joined with three things, I will not be able (honestly) to deny that
they are five. In other words, “learning” mathematics is inseparable from finding oneself compelled to
behave in this norm-governed fashion. In more profound experiences of learning, the behavioural change
involved is more intimate and pervasive. Specifically, to recognise the good – the highest level of the
“divided line” – is to be compelled by it: we recognise the good in experiencing ourselves as answerable
to it; that is, we recognize the good in experiencing ourselves as having to be good.

As we have seen, though, advance in knowledge – advance up the “divided line” – is the
progressive uncovering of the norms that were already operative in our experience without our explicitly
noticing them. The good, then, is not so much something we have yet to discover as it is something with
which we have always already been engaged, inasmuch as our lives are governed by our implicit
assumptions about what is good. Some of us, for example, live assuming that money is the good, or that
fame is the good or that pleasure is the good. “Turning around”, as Socrates says, and critically reflecting
on our own experience precisely requires that we critically reflect on these values that govern our lives.
Just as a horse is not the species horse as such – instead, the species is the fundamental cause of all the
different horses – so is the good as such not any particular good, but rather, is precisely that by virtue of
which any particular good is good. To recognise the good as such explicitly is to be answerable to the
good as such rather than to be a slave to any particular good. In our everyday behaviour, we wrongly treat
a relative good – such as wealth, fame or pleasure – as if it were absolutely good, but “turning around”
and coming to the recognition of the good as such requires that we recognise the limitations of all relative
goods and that we commit ourselves to pursuing the good as such. In this sense, then, knowledge is
ultimately a matter of existential transformation, and questions of knowledge cannot be separated from
questions of ethics.

The Power of Language

In these discussions of the Republic, the Phaedo and the Meno, Socrates emphasises that important
advances in knowledge are typically not an empirical matter of acquiring more information, but are,
instead, matters of changing our relationship to what we already have, and grasping what it is that is
implicitly operative in our experience, but that we have not explicitly recognised. The relationship
between this conception of knowledge and Socrates’ own method of question and answer is made clear in
the Theaetetus, in Socrates’ comparison of himself to a midwife.

Through discussion with the young mathematician Theaetetus, Socrates investigates three ideas about
what knowledge is: (i) that knowledge is perception (aisthēsis), (ii) that knowledge is correct opinion
(orthē doxa) and (iii) that knowledge is correct opinion coupled with an articulate account (logos). In
investigating (i) whether the necessarily limited perspective that characterises our perceptual life
condemns us to a solipsistic relativism in which we can only know our own, private experiences, Socrates
and Theaetetus conclude that perceptual life is intrinsically norm-governed, with the result that, even
within an individual perspective, the distinction between truth and falsity is raised. In investigating (ii)
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whether knowledge is thus simply a matter of taking up one’s perception truly, Socrates and Theaetetus
conclude that the very notion of truth is such that it is only grasped as truth by one who knows why it is
true. The final proposal, (iii) that knowledge is true belief about one’s perception, coupled with an
account of why it is true, leads into a reflection on what is required to give an adequate account, and
specifically, a reflection on the idea that an adequate account is something that is given in a context
shared with others. With this conclusion, we are brought back to the dialogic context of Socrates’ own
philosophical method, and Socrates offers a provocative portrayal of this in the Theaetetus in his image of
himself as a kind of “midwife”.

The task of a midwife, Socrates notes, is to assist in the birth of children, and, using this analogy, Socrates
describes his own practice as an assistant who aids the birth of ideas. The image is interesting because it
suggests that our very ability to grasp our own ideas is a matter of collaboration and dialogue: whereas we
typically imagine that we “know what we think”, Socrates’ image suggests, on the contrary, that we do
not easily know the contents of our own soul. Indeed, as Socrates emphasises in the Apology, self-
knowledge is one of our greatest challenges. Through his image of his “midwifery”, Socrates implies that
the critical reflection of “Socratic method” is what allows us to get clear about our own ideas, and, if
necessary, to reject them; equally, though, a healthy idea will be developed and will grow through such
discussion. Returning, then, to the definition of knowledge as “true opinion with an account”, we can see
that language (logos) is not just a matter of clothing pre-existent ideas in words. Rather, language is
precisely a matter of making our thoughts articulate, and in this sense, speaking is itself a kind of
learning: putting our inchoate thoughts into words is putting ourselves on display for ourselves for the
first time and this “dialogue of the soul with itself” is, thus, a matter of self-transformation.

The idea from the Theaetetus that we have ideas growing within us and an aspiration that needs to be
cultivated connects with our final theme, erōs (erotic passion). In the account of erōs in the Symposium,
the soul is studied in a way that most directly corresponds to the theme of “turning around” that defines
Socrates’ conception of knowledge.

Erōs and Epistemology

Plato’s Symposium portrays a drinking party attended by many prominent cultural figures in Athens.
While they are getting drunk, they decide they will take turns making speeches in praise of erotic passion
(erōs). Each of the speeches reveals a different aspect of erōs, but the richest analysis comes when
Socrates repeats what he was taught by a woman named Diotima. According to Diotima, our erotic
passion is not just the simple desire for sexual satisfaction with which we often equate it. On the contrary,
such sexual desire is only the most familiar manifestation of what is really a much deeper and more
dynamic reality; indeed, erōs, according to Diotima, is the most basic driving force in the human being,
and it is ultimately the source of our highest aspirations.

At root, according to Diotima, erōs is really the way in which the human soul is intrinsically responsive to
beauty (to kalon). The experience of beauty inspires in us the desire to express ourselves creatively – to
“give birth”, as Diotima says. We can experience beauty in many ways, and, correspondingly, we can
“give birth” in many ways. Our most immediate and familiar experience of erōs is, of course, the urgent
desire for sexual coupling that we feel in the compelling presence of a beautiful body; that experience,
however, is itself just the beginning of erotic life. The longing “to give birth in beauty” that defines the
human soul finds its deeper and more rewarding form, for example, in the development of the loving
companionship inspired by the encounter with a beautiful soul. Beyond even the soul of another, we can
experience the beauty in knowledge or in the institutions of human culture, and our recognition of these
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beauties can inspire in us the desire to “give birth” to courageous deeds or to acts of intellectual devotion.
Ultimately, beyond all these “beauties”, we should recognise the reality of beauty itself [auto to kalon] as
that by virtue of which “there is” beauty, and that recognition should itself inspire in us a kind of love or
erotic passion.

Seen in the context of this “ladder of love”, it is clear that knowledge is not to be understood either as
something simply instrumental or as something simply done as a satisfying entertainment. On the
contrary, the pursuit of knowledge should be how we enact our deepest sense of passionate commitment.
Learning satisfies a yearning deep in the soul at the same as it allows one to become responsible to the
demands of the world. 3

Conclusion

What is most striking in all the various accounts of knowledge found in the Platonic dialogues is the
intimate linking proposed between the pursuit of knowledge and our most intimate, personal aspirations.
The pursuit of knowledge is integral to our very being, and indeed, it attests to a fundamental attunement,
intrinsic to our souls, to the nature of reality itself. Because of this intimacy to our souls of the question of
knowledge, learning is, at root, a matter of existential transformation in the context of our intrinsic
engagement with the beautiful and the good.

3
For a fuller account of the relationship between erōs and knowledge, see John Russon, “Erōs and Education:
Plato’s Transformative Epistemology,” Laval Théologique et Philosophique 56 (2000): 113-25.