Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 021 - We Don't Need No Education - Plato's Meno.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode? We don't need no education. Plato's Meno. Here on the History of Philosophy podcast, we're proud of our listening audience. You the listeners are obviously distinguished by your good taste in podcasts and your interest in the great ideas that animate the history of philosophy itself. An informal survey has shown that you are slightly above average height and good looking in a mysterious, thoughtful kind of way. You are kind to children and animals, and gladly give up your seat to pregnant ladies and the elderly on public transport. You are, in short, a wonderful specimen of humanity, and we can hardly say how glad we are to have you tuning in. But being philosophers, we have to wonder, how did you get this way? How did you get so darn virtuous? Were you born like this? Did you inherit it from your parents, so that virtue comes to you naturally, the way it comes naturally to dogs to turn around in circles for no reason before they lie down? If not, then somebody must have taught you to be virtuous. But how would that work? Is virtue even the sort of thing that can be taught? This very question begins Plato's dialogue, the Meno, one of his most popular and most frequently studied writings. If you've taken an undergraduate course which touched on Plato, chances are pretty good that you were asked to read the Meno, and for good reason. It's not terribly long, it's kind of funny, and it's got at the center of it a memorable scene and a memorable theory about learning. At the risk of giving away the punchline, the theory is that we don't ever actually learn at all. Rather, when we seem to be learning, we are in fact remembering, or recollecting. We are recollecting knowledge not from some point earlier in our lives, but rather from a time before our lives began. Before we were born, we knew everything that can be known, and the apparent process of learning is just a way of jogging the memory to give us access to this knowledge. It's an eloquent proof of Plato's genius, that a dialogue with this fairly zany-sounding theory right in the middle of it has made it onto practically every undergraduate philosophy syllabus in the English-speaking world. When I teach Greek philosophy to first-year students at King's, I build the Plato part of the course around this dialogue. So what is this much-studied dialogue, the Meno, about? It presents itself as a dialogue about virtue. The main characters are Socrates, who is, as usual, ready to shoot down ill-considered answers to philosophical questions, and an interlocutor, Meno. There are also guest appearances by a slave boy and Aenitis, one of the men responsible for Socrates being put on trial and executed. But it's Meno who gives most of the ill-considered answers. He also kicks off the dialogue by asking this question I've been talking about, can virtue be taught? Socrates responds predictably by protesting that he can't say whether virtue is teachable because he doesn't know what virtue is. Perhaps Meno can help him out by giving him a definition of virtue, and then they'll be able to figure out together whether it's teachable. You don't have to have read too many of Plato's Socratic dialogues to know what's coming. Meno will propose some definitions of virtue, Socrates will show that the definitions aren't good ones, and in the end they'll be stuck in puzzlement, what in Greek was called aporia, which means something like an impasse or unsolved problem. This in fact is exactly what happens in the first part of the dialogue. Meno is confident that he can say what virtue is because he is a student of the sophist Gorgias, whom we've seen in previous episodes. Meno recites a version of what he's heard from Gorgias, saying that each kind of person has their own kind of virtue. For instance, the virtue of a man is to be capable in politics, whereas the virtue of a woman is to look after the house. Women's liberation was still a few millennia in the future, although as we'll see when we get to the Republic, Plato was ahead of the curve on this topic, as on so many others. Socrates objects to Meno's answer, complaining that this isn't a definition of virtue but rather a list of the types of virtue, what we want to know is what do all the types have in common. This along with several other exchanges between Socrates and Meno in this part of the dialogue, asks us to focus on the question of what would be a good definition. That's typical of the dialogue as a whole. We think we are going to get a discussion of virtue, and to some extent we do, but we get something perhaps more important, namely a reflection on what it would be to know about virtue. Would knowing what virtue is be the same thing as giving a good definition of virtue? If so, what are good definitions like? They aren't just lists, like the one Meno gave. They also aren't circular, like another definition Meno attempts when he says that virtue is getting good things in a just way. But justice is a virtue, so he's effectively saying that virtue is getting good things virtuously. Not very helpful. Notice that these points would apply not just to virtue, but to anything we might want to define. If I am asked to define podcast, it's not much use if I give you a list of podcasts you can download, or if I say that it's something you can download using podcast-catching software. Neither answer would be a proper definition. So, what Socrates and Meno are discussing has implications well beyond just the question of what virtue might be. This is particularly clear when Socrates gives Meno a model of the kind of definition he wants by offering a definition of geometrical figure, which is not an ethical concept. Just as we've seen in previous episodes, Plato uses a discussion of ethics as an opportunity to get into a discussion of knowledge. After several failed attempts to define virtue, Meno admits that he's stumped. He offers an analogy for what Socrates is doing to him. He says that, whereas before talking to Socrates, he felt very confident in discussing virtue, he's now been paralyzed, like someone who's been stung by a stingray. This paralysis is the condition of aporia, or puzzlement, that I mentioned earlier. Socrates remarks that the analogy only applies to him if he's like a stingray who paralyzes himself, since he too is empuzlement about what virtue might be. At this point, one could imagine the dialogue ending. It would be a much shorter dialogue and a much less interesting one, but it would conform to our expectations of a Socratic dialogue. Socrates meets a confident interlocutor, refutes him, the two are puzzled, the end. But in the case of the Meno, the most interesting part of the dialogue is yet to come. It begins when Meno poses a challenge against the possibility of inquiring into what virtue is, indeed against the possibility of inquiring into anything. The challenge is what we now call Meno's paradox. It goes like this. Either you know something, or you don't. If you know it, you don't need to inquire into it, since you already know it. If you don't know it, then you do need to inquire into it, but how can you? After all, you don't know what it is. So how will you go about searching for it, and how will you recognize it if you do come across it? Now, there seems to be an obvious way to steer between the two horns of this dilemma. The paradox assumes that you either know something so well that you don't need to learn any more about it, or you know absolutely nothing at all. But in fact, neither of these is usually the case. After all, I know a fair amount about Buster Keaton. I know that he was a silent film actor, that he made several of the greatest films in cinematic history like his masterpiece The General, that he is famous for not showing emotional reactions in his films and was therefore nicknamed the Great Stone Face. So I'm not completely ignorant about Buster Keaton. But do I know everything about him, so that there's no need for further inquiry? I haven't even seen all his films, because I haven't bothered to sit through all the talkies he appeared in after his time as a silent film comedian. And I certainly don't know, for instance, what his shoe size was, though judging from the shoes he wears in his movies, it was well into the high figures. So that might be a solution to the paradox. We can know something partially in addition to knowing it completely or not at all. But does that really help? After all, you might ask how we ever got to know anything partially in the first place. Basically we start out not knowing anything. And then we are impaled on the second horn of the dilemma, where we know nothing and have no basis for inquiry. So there is still a problem here. How in short do we get started when we are trying to get knowledge? Perhaps for this reason, Socrates does not try to give the solution I just suggested. He does something more surprising. He tells a kind of religious myth, which he says he's heard from some priests and priestesses. According to this myth, our souls are immortal. They will always exist, and they always have existed. Before our current earthly lives, our souls have already existed for an endless time, and during this endless time, they have learned all there is to know. Thus, we are never in the position of knowing nothing. On the contrary, we always know everything. It's just that we've forgotten most, if not all, the things we knew in our previous existence. It follows that when we seem to be learning new knowledge, we are in fact only being reminded of things we already knew. Now I know what you're thinking. As promised, that does sound pretty zany. Mino isn't immediately convinced either, so Socrates proceeds to demonstrate his theory. In one of the more famous scenes in the Platonic dialogues, he summons a slave boy, whose only intellectual qualification is that he knows Greek. Socrates takes the slave boy through a discussion of a geometrical problem, namely finding the length of the side of a square whose area is 8. He gets the boy to guess, and then to see that his guesses are wrong. This induces puzzlement in the boy, the stingray effect. Then Socrates gets the boy to see the right answer, namely that the side of a square of area 8 is the same length as the diagonal of a square whose area is 4. The nifty part is that he does all this only by means of asking questions. It's the most famous example of the famous Socratic method, teaching by asking questions instead of directly imparting information. Though people often complain that Socrates is asking leading questions throughout the scene, it's true enough that he never asserts anything. The slave boy has to figure it out for himself, albeit with the help of Socrates prompting him. Since the boy is able to get to the right answer in this way, without being given the answer from the outside, Socrates concludes that he must have had the knowledge in him all along, just waiting to be brought out by expert questioning. This slave boy sequence ends the presentation of the so-called theory of recollection, probably Plato's most famous doctrine apart from the theory of forms. It's not clear how strongly Plato is committed to the doctrine, though. For one thing, he doesn't exactly work it into every dialogue he writes. It turns up here in the Meno, and occasionally elsewhere, especially in his dialogue The Phaedo, as we'll see in a later episode. Some people, maybe slightly embarrassed by the religious trappings of the doctrine, don't want to take the mythic story about the soul very seriously. They think that Plato is just trying to set out what we would now call a theory of innate knowledge. In other words, he's saying that humans are born with a great deal of knowledge already built in, so to speak. Theories of innateness are still current in contemporary philosophy, for instance in Noam Chomsky's theories about how babies learn language. A lot of linguistic structure, according to him, is already hard-wired into our brains from birth. So this way of understanding Plato could help to show that he is relevant to our philosophical concerns today. Now I'm the last to deny that Plato is relevant. For example, in a minute we'll see that this very dialogue, the Meno, introduces a distinction that is still fundamental in philosophy today, the distinction between knowledge and true belief. But I don't really think it's right to take the theory of recollection as metaphorically expressing a theory of innateness. For one thing, in The Phaedo the recollection theory is introduced specifically to argue for the immortality of the soul. So at least in that dialogue, the whole point would be ruined unless the theory really does require the souls existing before we were born. If the theory really asks us to buy into an immortal soul which knows everything and pre-existed our birth, we might wonder whether there is some other, less extravagant way of solving Meno's paradox. Let's go back to a suggestion I made earlier when I was talking about Buster Keaton, that it's possible to have partial knowledge instead of complete knowledge. We saw that that doesn't really help because you need to explain where the partial knowledge comes from. But let's try another solution of the same kind. Could there be some other state which falls between ignorance and knowledge? So, for example, could I fall short of knowing what virtue is, while still doing better than total ignorance of virtue? Plato sees that the answer is yes, I could have mere beliefs about virtue. And if those beliefs were true, then that would be better than ignorance, but not as good as certain knowledge. We might even think that Meno himself fits the bill here. He has true beliefs about virtue, for instance that justice is a virtue, but he doesn't know what virtue is. Socrates introduces this idea at the end of the slave boy scene when he says that his questioning has brought out only true beliefs from the boy, but not yet knowledge. To have knowledge, the boy would have to be questioned many times and in different ways. Now it might be our turn to be a bit puzzled. What exactly is the difference between true belief and knowledge? Actually, if I've got true belief, why do I need knowledge? Suppose I have a true belief about who will win tomorrow's horse race. That is just as good a way to win my bet as if I knew the winner for sure. But you might disagree. You might say that if I knew for sure, I'd put down more money on my horse than if I only had a true belief. That seems wrong though. After all, people can be incredibly confident in their beliefs without having knowledge. Plato as usual sees this point, and deals with it later in the dialogue. He has Mino raise exactly the puzzle I just mentioned, namely that true belief is just as good as knowledge. Socrates agrees that it seems like a puzzle, giving the example of knowing how to get to another Greek city called Larissa. If I have a true belief about the right way to get there, that will get me there just as well as knowledge. But then he seems to change his mind, and decides that true belief really is inferior to knowledge. The problem with true belief is that it isn't grounded in a good reason for the belief. Like I just said, it's our ability to give a good reason, and not our degree of confidence, that makes our true beliefs into knowledge. In another famous image, Socrates compares true beliefs to magical statues which run away unless tied down. In the same way, our true beliefs are unreliable unless they are tied down by finding the reason for their truth. One aspect of this unreliability is that people who only have true belief and not knowledge may be unable to impart the truth to other people. That's suggested at least by some further reflections in the Mino on the subject of whether virtue can be taught. That was, after all, the initial question of the dialogue, and it remains important throughout. In between the slave boy scene and the discussion of true belief, Mino and Socrates speculate that virtue would be teachable if it were a kind of knowledge. This rings some Socratic bells. As we've seen in previous episodes, Socrates was notorious for thinking that virtue is knowledge. But if virtue were knowledge and were thus teachable, shouldn't there be people around who teach it? This is the cue for the entrance of Anitis. As I said earlier, he is one of the men who had Socrates indicted for corrupting the youth and introducing novel gods. In this scene, we get a glimpse of why he might have done so. Socrates asks Anitis whether he supposes that there are people who can teach virtue. The obvious candidates are the Sophists. As we saw in another episode, some Sophists claim to teach virtue in return for money. But Anitis has nothing but scorn for the Sophists. He says one is better off asking any Athenian citizen if one wants to learn virtue. Socrates counters by reeling off a whole list of famous Athenian statesmen, like Pericles, who were clearly virtuous, but had vicious sons. If being virtuous makes you able to teach virtue, wouldn't these men have taught virtue to their own sons? That's enough to make Anitis furious. He makes the none-too-subtle parting remark that Socrates should watch his step, since the city is apt to mistreat him if he doesn't mind his manners. But this, of course, is no answer to Socrates' latest puzzle. If virtue is knowledge, as Socrates typically claims, then why are there no teachers of it? Here, true belief might come to the rescue. The virtuous men might be the ones who have true beliefs about what to do, rather than knowledge. Socrates even suggests that such men are given their beliefs by divine dispensation, given that they haven't done the philosophical work required to ground their beliefs in good reason, or whatever it is that makes a true belief knowledge. Now, here in the Meno, Plato doesn't say in any further detail what you would have to do to turn true beliefs into knowledge. But we should give him credit for discovering a problem that still obsesses philosophers today. He's right that true belief is not the same thing as knowledge. After all, suppose I just believe anything anyone tells me. That would get me a lot of true beliefs, but also a lot of false ones. And it seems obvious that none of the beliefs I got this way would count as knowledge. On the other hand, it seems equally obvious that true belief has some close relation to knowledge. If I know something, then I must believe it, and it must be true. The question is then what you need to add to true belief in order to make knowledge. This question dominates the Platonic work we'll be looking at next, a dialogue that takes up the problems of the Meno and carries them a good deal further. So don't forget to tune in for Plato's Theaetetus next week on the History of Philosophy without any gaps.