(a) At 385 I wondered whether that definition would leave some statements as neither true nor false; the 408 passage makes me want to resist coming to that conclusion about 385.
(b) It is very hard to read 408 without thinking about Forms versus participants (unless, perhaps, one is not in the grip of a two-worlds reading of Plato). There is at least prima facie plausibility to the idea that if X fails somehow to be really real, it fails to license any true statements about it. But this gloss on 408 does not go well with 385, where both true and false statements are "of things that are."
(c) Why translate logos as "statement" at 385 and "speech" at 408? Surely, for Plato as well as for us, there are many kinds of speech that are not truth-evaluable (or are there?). I could be missing something obvious here--I haven't looked at the Greek carefully. And of course this is not a big deal: English has a sense of 'speech' that is narrower than all speech-acts. I'm just not entirely comfortable that I understand the basics of what is being talked about in these passages.
Happy reading!
Like Nate, I am not sure that I understand what is going on in these passages. I am not sure that I understand what is going on in this dialogue.
ReplyDeleteSome quick thoughts.
First, is there a limit to the analysis of names? If they functioned like, e.g., elements, then there would be a limit--the four elements. I am just thinking of elements because we find the names of elements being put under the dialectician's scrutiny (410a).
But, on the other hand, Socrates quickly disposes of pur, etc., as being foreign. Is it possible for foreign languages to have correct names, or is this only possible for Greek?
PS. I have caught up with the readings.
PPS. Have you read the novel, The Secret History, by Donna Tartt? (Not the work of the same name by Procopius.) In it, the narrator says that he thinks that pur shows how quintessentially different the Greek mindset it--the words for 'fire' in other European languages are all somehow familiar, and familial, but pur is alien. I presume that you've all read it; I remember reading an essay once by Oswyn Murray (formerly a Classics Tutor at Balliol) which starts with a long quote from the book. Ha!
Nate: Good questions! I'm going to have to think more about them ...
ReplyDeletePryio: I'm also curious about what the basic semantic "elements" or components are supposed to be. At 393d-e, Socrates admits that not every letter of the alphabet is a semantic unit, and maybe none of them is by itself. But I'm still quite in the dark about what the "element" is supposed to be.
(And sadly, no, I haven't read the novel.)
Just one more obvious point: Socrates clearly suggests us that the rule-setter messed up the naming of the virtues. For surely it is *not* the case that "the things they name [i.e., the virtues themselves] are moving, flowing, and coming into being" (411c). This, then, gives the dialectician an important job: repairing the names of the virtues, and possibly thereby instituting a kind of ethical reform.