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!