Day 59: Sophist 256d-261b (pgs. 280-284)

Very tough reading today. We finish the main discussion of the relationships between the tricky "higher-level" forms, and then near the end of the reading move on to an application (I think) of the discussion, which is that some things that are _do_ (contra Parmenides) share in not-being, so that false belief and speech are possible. There are a few comments, doubtless developed in the last part of the dialogue, applying this conclusion to the puzzle of what sophists and sophistry are.

I'd love to have some original things to put here, but the reading is really quite detailed, and this philosophy of mind paper isn't going to write itself...

Happy reading!

Day 58: Sophist 252d-256d (pgs. 275-279)

Today: lots of detailed argument about the relationships between the forms being, change, rest, same, and different.

1. I'm sure lots could be said about why those five items consist of two pairs of (what we would think of as) opposites and being, and does not include not being. I'm not entirely sure why that's so.

2. Note to self: figure out the details of the arguments at 255a-b and 256a-b.

Happy reading!

Day 57: Sophist 248b-252d (pgs. 270-274)

If I were really clever, I'd have made another post titled "Hiatus!" that contained an in-depth analysis of the state of the stylometry literature.

Today's reading is roughly two-thirds of the way through the long discussion of _is_, _being_, _not-being_, and related items/predicates/names. At 251b and following we get a famous (I think) argument against the "Late-Learners'" view that, because "it's impossible for that which is many to be one and for that which is one to be many," there are no strictly accurate predications of the form "X is Y" whenever Y is a different name than X. (Key example at 251c: it's wrong to say that man is good; what is proper is to say that man is man and that good is good.) The problem is that their view presupposes that _being_ (and--see 252c--_separate_, _from others_, _of itself_, "and a million other things") is predicated of things (in the X-position above) that are not _being_.

There's a funny connection between this whole discussion of being and not-being and Parmenides and modern philosophy: if I'm recalling correctly, people get really worked up on the issue of what the empty set refers to; perhaps they're combining causal theories of reference with sensible worries about the causal efficacy of nonexistent things. (I really should reread Russell's "On Denoting" if I want to get this stuff right.)

Finally, in Sunday's reading I encountered a new favorite line in Plato, at 239b-c:

VISITOR: "[...]Try to say something correct about that which is not, without attaching either being, one, or numerical plurality to it.
THEAETETUS: I'd have to have a strangely large amount of enthusiasm for the project to try it myself after seeing what you've gone through.

Happy reading!

Hiatus!

Spring breaks have kept us from posting on the blog, but we'll be back soon. Tomorrow will be the eighth day of the _Sophist_, and I'll write a post (or comment on someone else's post) about it (though it might be short).

Greetings from the mast.

Happy reading!

Day 48: Theaetetus 204d-208d (pgs. 227-231)

Today: technical discussion of the relationship between elements and complexes, and the beginning of a suggestion that knowledge involves a distinctive feature.

Happy reading!

Day 47: Theaetetus 200c-204d (p. 222-226)

A short note today about the ATB analysis of knowledge (knowledge = true judgment/belief + an account (logos)):

I found the notion of an account, here, to be rather difficult to make out. Socrates makes two suggestions, neither of which seems much connected to the idea of an account as giving a 'reason why,' much less a justification:

1. One of Socrates's suggestions is that that merely stating a proposition about something can constitute a logos of it, in the sense that someone would have in mind when she says that knowledge = true judgment + a logos. This strikes me as quite strange.

2. The second suggestion is that listing something's elements can be necessary, and might even be sufficient, for giving a logos of it. This seems to lead to a dilemma: either the supposed knowledge that we gain from composing these elements is suspect (we have no knowledge of the basic constituents, so how could they, alone, generate knowledge?), or our supposed knowledge cannot be given an account of (because it constitutes some kind of simple whole over and above its parts, and this simple whole will be, itself, unaccountable in virtue of its simplicity).

Clearly, some of these notions of logos reach back to the Cratylus, especially the comments about names and the relationship between names and accounts. But it struck me that this interpretation of ATB is quite different than what we are given in, e.g., Plato's Meno. So one question is: Is this the same ATB account of knowledge here as in the Meno? Even if it is, why exactly would Socrates think that these notions of logos somehow elevate true belief to the status of knowledge? (Notice that (2) above doesn't even require specifying a relation between the elements.) In any case, it seems to me that adopting a more sophisticated notion of a logosin this context would save the ATB account from the dilemma described above.

Happy reading, everyone!

Day 46: Theaetetus 196a-200c (p. 217-221)

Today we have yet another famous attempt to describe false judgment without falling into the problem of claiming that someone does not know what they know: namely, Socrates's aviary. One wonders how much Aristotle had this image in mind when developing his distinction between first and second actuality. After all, Aristotle's own distinction is frequently made in terms of knowledge, and knowing in different senses ...

Happy reading!

Day 44: Theaetetus 178a-191a (p. 207-211)

Today's highlights include many interesting, failed attempts to describe false judgment, and the account of thinking as talking to yourself.

Happy reading everyone!

Day 43: Theaetetus 182c-186e (pgs. 202-206)

No lack of things to write about today. I wonder how much scholarship has been based on these five pages...

(1) At 182c-d we get an interesting argument about flux, involving the insight that there is a problem in saying that X is in flux because constantly changing from F to G to H, etc.--the problem arises from the observation that F, G, and H themselves are in flux and thus cannot be identified / thought about / referred to any more than X can. (Am I getting this right?)

(2) At 183a-b we get the famous discussion of "thus and not thus"--famous in part because Aristotle echoes it repeatedly and prominently in Met. Γ 3-4. An interesting question is what kind of linguistic entity the "thus" there is supposed to be. If it is something like what we would call a "demonstrative," there are interesting questions about what objects and our mental states have to be like in order to apply demonstrative concepts to them. (I'm also reading this guy tonight.) But perhaps "thus" is rather just a placeholder for a noun?

(3) There's also a longer argument that perception could not be knowledge because it doesn't grasp the right kind of features. Truth depends on being, and knowing the truth depends on knowing being, and only the soul itself (not the soul through perception) can grasp being. When Socrates is introducing the idea that there are things (predicates? aspects?) that are only graspable by the soul, he draws from the special list of Forms from the Sophist and mentions being, one, same, and different (and possibly being two together, if that is a different thing [185b2]). But he eventually focuses on being for his argument that knowledge couldn't be perception. I'm curious whether and how well the argument would go through if he had substituted other items from that list for being, in the argument. (My gut reaction: it would still go through.) Also: is it possible to read that passage without thinking of M. Descartes and his wax?

Happy reading!

Day 42: Theaetetus 178a-182c (pgs. 197-201)

Two major parts of today's text: (a) Socrates draws out the impossible consequences of combining a Protagorean epistemology with the insight that knowledge ought to put us in a certain kind of state with respect to the future, and (b) more discussion of who holds "flux-y" views of the world, and how to adjudicate between those views and Parmenidean ones.

I'm not sure how much a devout Protagorean would be moved by Socrates's (a)-related arguments. Perhaps one could simply bite the bullet and say that we never know things about the future.

Small note: is it weird to classify alteration as motion (181d)? Doesn't Aristotle claim that other alterations reduce in some sense to motion?

Sorry for the scattered post. Happy reading!

Day 41: Theaetetus 172d-178a (p. 192-196)

Again, nothing profound today, just a confusion:

176a-177a: In this piece of text, Socrates seems to slide between two different conceptions of good and bad.

(1) "It is not possible, Theodorus, that evil should be destroyed - for there must always be something opposed to the good" (176a).

(2) "There are two patterns set up in reality. One is divine and supremely happy; the other has nothing of God in it ... This truth the evildoer does not see; blinded by folly and utter lack of understanding, he fails to perceive that the effect of his unjust practices is to make him grow more and more like the one, and less and less like the other" (176e-177a).

(1) appears to claim that badness is the positive opposite of the good, and this is why badness cannot be destroyed: where there is good, there will always also be badness. (2), however, suggests strongly that badness is a lack of goodness, of knowledge, of divinity. In this latter case, badness is not the actual opposite of goodness, and there is no reason why badness should always accompany goodness (i.e., goodness need not always bring with it a lack of goodness).

I don't have a diagnosis of the slide between these two views; I just wanted to point it out as we move into talking about relativism about goodness and badness. One of these two views might have more to offer a relativist than the other.

Happy reading!

Day 40: Theaetetus 168b-172d (p. 187-191)

I don't have anything profound to post today, just what is probably an obvious reflection on Socrates' objection to Protagoras at 169e-171c.

In this passage, Socrates accuses Protagoras's "man is the measure" doctrine of being self-contradictory. Because this purports to be a general claim about truth and falsity (that what is and is true for each person is just what appears to her to be and to be true), Socrates says that Protagoras must be committed to the following contradiction: His own Measure Doctrine will be both true and false, since it is true for him, but he admits it will be false for at least some others, and their view that it is false is equally true relative to them and their own appearances. So Protagoras will have to admit that both he and others are correct in their conflicting views about the Measure Doctrine.

Unless I'm missing something, this is a bad argument. If you're careful about relativizing each claim to the proper individual's perspective, there is no contradiction here. From Protagoras's perspective, he is right about the Measure Doctrine, and others are wrong. Of course, from the others' perspective, they are right that the Measure Doctrine is false, and Protagoras is wrong. But at least on the surface, relativism is entirely consistent with a certain kind of absolutism, even intolerance: Protagoras can vigorously assert and argue for his own general, relativistic theory (if that's what it is) without pain of contradiction precisely because, as a relativist, he acknowledges that he is bound by his own perspective on these things. If there is really no way of making someone else's truth your own, because we are each bound by our own "measure," then it must be that Protagoras means for his theory to be understood as being true for him. He can of course recognize that other perspectives might exist, but by his lights, these other perspectives are all incorrect. What is true in these other perspectives is true only for those people, and false for him, but by his own lights, he's right. So I don't think the self-refutation objection here is entirely successful.

(Note also that this meta-relativistic move doesn't threaten the generality of the Measure Doctrine: Protagoras can continue to claim that, by his (Protagoras's) lights, each person is the measure of his or her own truth and reality. And anyone who thinks differently is wrong.)

Happy reading!

Day 39: Theaetetus 163d-168a (pp. 182-186)

163d-164b: The argument from memories to the coming apart of perception and knowledge seems pretty weak. Socrates seems to be leaning heavily on a common notion of knowledge, i.e., when you remember something you know, you still know it. But couldn't Protagoras just swallow the result that you do not know things that you remember? Or, couldn't he just say that you know something different from the object that was the basis for your memory when you remember it? The second option would seem to mesh well with the relativistic account of perception from yesterday. I guess Socrates recognizes that in what follows, though, when he mimics Protagoras defending himself from 166b ff.

166d: The wise person is the one who can make good things appear for others rather than bad things. One might ask, "What determines if something is a good thing?" I suppose Protagoras might reply, "Well, the one having the appearance judges that it is good." So the wise person would be the one who, for someone experiencing something bad (where bad is cashed out as that person judging that the experience is bad), causes that person to have different appearances. Namely, ones that are good, where good is cashed out as that person judging that her experiences are good. Or does that not work?

167a: "...because the other state is better". Well, maybe Socrates' Protagoras has a different notion of good and bad in mind than the one I just proposed.

167c: "Whatever in any city is regarded as just and admirable is just and admirable in that city and for so long as that convention maintains itself; but the wise man replaces each pernicious convention by a wholesome one, making this both be and seem just." This is an absolutely baffling passage. Is Socrates' Protagoras bringing in the analogy/metaphor of the city-soul by saying that cities are merely people writ large, and that is why a city can have appearances and judgments? If man is the measure of all things, then shouldn't each individual in the city be the judge of what is just and admirable? Also, it seems that Socrates' Protagoras believes in an objective perniciousness, which does not seem to be coherent given the position sketched thus far.

Happy reading, everyone.

Day 38: Theaetetus 159a-163d (pp. 177-181)

160b: "yet we are tied neither to any other thing in the world nor to our respective selves". Is he saying that Socrates at T1 is not tied, in any respect, to Socrates at T2? I take the point he has been making earlier that, for example, in a strict sense, Socrates-ill and Socrates-well are two different people. But can they not be related in any way on this picture?

160b-c: Explicitly introducing the relativism inherent in the view.

161c-d: Animals are percipient. Things appear to animals in certain ways. Thus, the things are those ways for the animals. Thus, no man is a better judge than a tadpole. This seems to be the first counterargument against the view.

161d: "only the individual himself can judge of his own world". Is Socrates saying that people live in their own private worlds if Protagoras is correct?

161e-162a: "To examine and try to refute each other's appearances and judgments, when each person's are correct--this is surely an extremely tiresome piece of nonsense". I had an undergraduate professor who said this (quoted it, that is, as I learned a little later) to a student who was pressing relativism about truth. I have always liked it.

162b: Again, we have Socrates stating that good people should want to show off when he tells Theodorus that if he went to visit Spartan wrestling-schools, he should get naked and "take your turn of letting people see what you look like". It was their minds a couple days ago, and now it is their bodies. Theodorus, champion of modesty, is wonderful in his response.

Day 37: Theaetetus 154b-159a (p. 171-176)

A continuation of the "knowledge is perception" discussion.

156b: "For the perceptions we have such names as sight, hearing, smelling, feeling cold and feeling hot [oops: someone forgot taste!]; also what are called pleasures and pains, desires and fears"

I'm curious about what pleasure, pain, desire, and fear are doing here under the category of perception. This is neither an obvious classification, nor is it obviously Platonic doctrine (I'm thinking of pleasures and pains of anticipation in the Philebus, the pleasures of reason in Republic, and desire and fear as motivational states in Republic as well). So: why group these items together here?

One option is that the specific instances of these phenomena that Plato has in mind are perception-dependent states in one way or another: some desires and fears might have a perceptual component or a perceptual source, and some pleasures and pains could be very closely associated with certain perceptual experiences (say, the taste of chocolate). But then why not include other perception-dependent states as well, like perceptual beliefs whose content is derived from actual experiences? Or is some other criterion of "perception" or "perceptible" at work in creating the list?

Another problem is that, at least at this stage, it is not even clear that all of these items are truth-apt in the same way. If desires and fears, for instance, cannot be evaluated as true or false, we might rightly wonder: What are Plato's grounds for grouping them together with sense-perceptions in a dialogue about epistemology? Given the context, it seems especially strange to include these items in the claim that knowledge is perception.

Happy reading!

Day 36: Theaetetus 150a-154b (pgs. 167-171)

Big day. Midwifery, the what-is-knowledge question, and the beginning of Socrates' development of the knowledge-is-perception claim.

Anyone who has a more substantial post to make: please feel free to make it, and I'll delete this one. Happy reading!

Day 34: Theaetetus 142a-145d (pp. 157-161)

(1) 144a: "Along with a quickness beyond the capacity of most people, he has an unusually gentle temper; and, to crown it all, he is as manly a boy as nay of his fellows". This reminded me of Republic III, 410b and following in which Socrates describes the nature of a potential guardian.

(2) 145b: "And oughtn't the other [i.e., the person whose soul was being praised] to be very willing to show himself off?" Socrates says that someone with a good soul will be itching to have it examined. I guess I'm not immediately clear what the reason for this is.

Happy reading.

Day 33: Cratylus 440c-e

By now, we all know not to expect too much from Socrates' interlocutors. So I'm not going to belabor the point. But if Cratylus does indeed accept a Heraclitean metaphysics, why does he think there are natural names for things? If things have no stable natures, shouldn't we either (1) have an equally fluxy language, or (2) determine names by convention, and focus on the usefulness of names rather than their adequacy at corresponding with nature?

Day 32: _Cratylus_ 434e-440c (pgs. 151-155)

(1) We have a decision to make. The guidelines currently in place would have us reading half a page tomorrow and then continuing to the _Theaetetus_ Sunday. If people generally want to just finish off the _Cratylus_ today and start _Theaet._ tomorrow, that's fine with me. But unless I hear otherwise, I'll assume we'll stick with the first arrangement.

(2) 436d is very interesting. Our translator (Reeve) has: "The name-giver might have made a mistake at the beginning and then forced the other names to be consistent with it. There would be nothing strange in that. Geometrical constructions often have a small unnoticed error at the beginning with which all the rest is perfectly consistent." A few notes:

(i) "Geometrical constructions" here translates "tôn diagrammatôn." If I'm recalling correctly, Aristotle also refers to geometry this way--that is, Reeve is very right to treat "the diagrams" as a metonym of "geometry."

(ii) "Error" translates a form of "pseudos." Which is interesting because it restricts what Plato could mean by "consistent" (homologein). Falsehoods aren't consistent with anything, on many modern notions of consistency.

(iii) Socrates will follow this with a stern reminder to examine one's arkhai for acceptability.

(iv) Then he'll say that "if they [the arkhai] are adequately examined, the subsequent steps will plainly follow from them." We need to do at least a little work to make sense of this, because on a natural reading of what Socrates has just said, the very danger we're trying to avoid is that subsequent steps will follow from good and bad arkhai alike. We might just read 'follow' here to mean 'follow and be correct/true,' but that leaves the textual difficulty in place, because it looks like Socrates has just said that falsehoods can homologein with each other. Is Socrates introducing some kind of homologein / hepomai distinction here, or am I overlooking something obvious, or can one of you supply something clever?

(3) 435c: the sticky-ramp metaphor returns! Can we edit the old post to include the "sticky ramp" tag?

Happy reading, everyone.

Day 31: Cratylus 429d-434e (pp. 146-150)

431e-432a: Cratylus again says that if a name is altered slightly it becomes an entirely different name.

432a-c: Socrates' reply is that names are a type of image, which have sensory qualities. And images with sensory qualities admit of slight alterations without becoming an image of an entirely new object. This is because if an image duplicated all of the qualities of the thing of which it is an image, it would be a qualitatively identical copy of that thing and not an actual image of it.

433a-b: "I think we had better accept this, Cratylus, or else, like men lost on the streets of Aegina late at night, we, too, may incur the charge of truly seeming to be the sort of people who arrive at things later than they should" -- Uh, what? Anyone want to help me out with this?

Day 30: Cratylus 424a-429d (pp. 141-145)

Not much to say today. I just thought I would post to keep track of where we are.

428d: Self-deception is the worst thing of all, apparently.

429b: It seems like Cratylus is saying that a name either belongs to something totally or not at all. So it can't be the case that an object with the name X partially picks out the object's nature and partially does not. This doesn't seem right if names are simply images or imitations of the nature of an object. Images can be poorly rendered. No name will ever precisely match the nature of an object, or else it would simply be that object's nature.