Many thanks for your thread here; I have found reading it very enlightening!
I am starting work on a PhD. in philosophy, and in particular Socrates' Peculiar Notion of Knowledge & which I believe differs to our modern day usage of this word. Without knowledge of Ancient Greek, this task proves difficult & I am hence embarking on some Ancient Greek lessons to arrive at my aim of understanding what Plato's Socrates could have meant.
Based on one philosophical argument (and which I believe to be valid), for Plato "Thinking is Doing, and Doing is Thinking". In other words, Plato deliberately wants to see an activity as "thinking" to be no different than "doing" anything else (i.e. judging something is an action). Like any other action, one needs "skills" & "abilities". The act of riding a bicycle, for example, is no different to the act of forming a judgement - they both require that we have abilities relevant to the action (physical & intellectual). So thinking is no different than doing as they are both an art which involve skills, practice, and experience gained over time (wisdom / mastery).
In modern philosophical discourse (due mainly to Aristotle's work) there's a demarcation between thinking & doing, and which Plato's Socrates does not to wish to make. For Aristotle & the majority of Western Philosophy since, Theoretical Reason is one thing & Practical Reason is another. From this begins an entire enterprise in philosophy which distinguishes the Philosophy of Action from Epistemology (Theory of Knowledge), and "knowing how" from "knowing what" (otherwise known as "knowing that" from "knowing how"). To arrive at a belief or judgement is entirely different than arriving at learning how to do something (like riding a bicycle).
Plato's Socrates wants to challenge this distinction: he wants us to think that "knowing that..." is akin to "knowing of something" - but that this is not complete knowledge of something. It is not "knowledge proper" - which involves doing. This is merely knowledge by the testimony of others. To be more precise, it is a weak form of belief, otherwise understood as opinion "doxa" (since one has a superficial grasp of the concept to which it relates). One can only have a true or sound grasp of something if one has understood it, and understanding it (have true knowledge of it - knowledge proper) entails doing it, or experiencing it for yourself - as opposed to merely hearing someone telling you about it.
Take for example when someone tells you "Do you know what a mango tastes like?” Now you can answer "yes - I've read and heard that it is a sweet tasting fruit, sticky, aromatic, etc." but for Plato this is an "opinion" of something that does not involve you actually doing what's necessary to "know" it. To "know" what mango tastes like, there is no getting around "doing the necessary" - tasting it! Simply memorising the formula of how taste buds work would be "opinion" & not knowledge proper, for the latter necessarily involves "doing". It would be silly to claim that someone knows what mango tastes like because they've heard of it, even if what they've heard & read is true. It is only when one had done something (experienced it) that one has truly understood it, and thereby we can attribute knowledge of the said thing to him/her.
Likewise, if you post a letter, you may conclude "I know it travelled the oceans", but this is merely an opinion since to be said you "actually know" would entail that you cross the oceans with the very letter & experience this for yourself. That your belief, however, is true although it is based purely on the testimony of others, is an accidental truth - it doesn't involve direct knowledge of the postal system.
Plato's Socrates uses this to argue that people who say "I know I'm doing wrong, but I'll continue doing it" have not actually grasped the concepts involved in this statement; they don't actually understand the wrongness of the action (they haven't experienced how it maybe wrong) and hence are unmoved by it. Should they have witnessed the wrongness of it for themselves, they would abandon it; they are therefore only telling us that they've heard from others that this action is wrong, however this holds no claim on them, for it holds the status of "opinion" in their judgement. Only "knowledge" of something can move one to the direction of the said thing. So when people claim they know donating money to charity is good, but withhold from donating themselves, one reason maybe that they have never experienced / known the true benefits of donating to charity. Their claim to knowledge here amounts to nothing - according to this interpretation of Plato - other than saying "I've heard it's good (doxa), and I believe this opinion (doxa) to be true, but I haven't learnt this for myself (techne), so I don't - really - have knowledge (episteme) of its goodness".
The idea behind this interpretation of Plato's Socrates & my PhD topic is to challenge the so-called Socratic Paradox "Virtue is Knowledge; No One Does Wrong Knowingly"; and one way of doing this may be to say that it is not paradoxical at all if we understood "knowledge" in the strict sense, as outlined above.
Kindly let me know if your Greek reading of the texts supports such a philosophical interpretation of Plato's Socrates, as it would be of great benefit to my research in this subject & I would be very much obliged to you both.
Since you are in the start of your studying, many opinions you will change. One of them perhaps will be what you say first about knowledge in Plato. Think of Plato's example, that a physician may know by experience how to cure a person, yet without knowing exactlty what he is doing. This physician, according to Plato, does not have knowledge. Therefore, as you rightly say, knowledge is different from simple opinion, but it is not to be identified with just experience.
To your second remark. Socrates' claim, that no one is evil willingly, is a tough subject. Let me not reveal my interpretation on this, but just say that you need to study a lot before you draw a conclusion, because Plato knows about hate, i.e., that there is a particular cause of evil going beyond self-interest or mis-judgment.
Best wishes for yor project. I'm sure you'll learn a lot. As you'll see below, I wouldn't approach issues in the way you apparently have in mind. But that's OK. There are lots of valid ways to do Plato.
1. One common gambit in academia apparently is to select some neatly formulated thesis from Plato's writings, to lable it a Platonic or a Socratic doctrine, to review criticisms of this alledged doctrine registered by others, and then to wind up with criticisms by onesself. The crucial point is the claim that one is dealing with a 'Platonic doctrine'. If instead we only were discussing a straw man of your construction, interest would quickly flag.
But it is difficult to identify such doctrines, especially when one is talking about Plato. The man is forever reconsidering, trying out new approaches in different individual dialogues. And (as this conversation with George has shamed me into realizing), Plato evidently uses his language loosely. One would think, for example, that after he made such a point of distinguishing 'doxa' and 'episteme' in the Meno, and after that same distinction appears again in the Republic, that those might be technical terms for Plato, which always mean the same thing. But no, it turns out in fact that Plato uses these terms and others pretty loosely. And I am forever supposing that, if I understand Plato corrrectly, his use of 'knowledge' in this or that particular passage will be 'episteme', or 'gnosis, or perhaps some variant of 'phronesis' - only to discover, when I ask George to fill in the brackets, that Plato has used some unexpected term and that my understanding was completely wrong. It's humiliating.
The upshot for your paper may be that you actually should be limited to discussions within individual dialogues - e.g., "Whether Thinking is Doing in the Protagoras" - rather than trying to come up with some thesis concerning all of Plato's thought.
2. Plato's treatment of knowledge in the Theaetetus seems inconsistent with the views you attribute to him. As you know, Plato in that dialogue identifies and rejects three hypotheses as to what knowledge is - that it is perception, that it is true judgment, and that in is "true belief with an account". According to my own interpretation of the Theaetetus (which I only state here, to avoid extensive argument), Plato is not really rejecting these hypotheses. Rather he is laying groundwork later to affirm them all together as elements of knowledge. (I think he may have planned to do this in the 'Philosopher', which he evidently envisioned but never wrote.) Now then, this third hypothesis in the Theatetus is vaguely stated; but if we take a look at Socrates' introductory development at 201a-b, we see that he is talking about lawyers in courts who frame arguments that enable juries to infer correctly what may have happened in the case under consideration, even though immediate evidence might not be available to the juries. 'True belief with an account' thus consists, I believe, in a kind of inferrential knowledge - the kind of knowledge where one apparently could know 'the taste of mangoes' or know that 'letters travel the oceans'.
3. Though you don't explicitly say so, it appears you want in your thesis to address Socrates' famous "refutation of akrasia", stated in the Protagoras at 352b-58e. But your approach seems dubious. First, while it's clear that Socrates took this line of argument in this dialogue, it's not clear that it reflects a 'Platonic doctrine' or a 'Socratic doctrine' that one can see in all the dialogues. Rather it might simply be one hypothesis that Plato is currently causing Socrates to consider, but which neither Socrates nor Plato ever committed to. Second, the paradox that some people ascribe to this line of argument does not really seem to result from any special treatment regarding issues of thinking and doing. Rather, the alleged paradox seems to result from peculiarities invovled in the main hypothesis - that good and evil, naturally based, reduce to pleasure and pain. Plato's treatments here of pleasure and pain seem very similar to his treatment of sense perception; and Socrates' argument seems to follow from assumptions that pleasures are immediate and utterly compelling, just as perceptions are. And this in turn leaves open the loophole - which I suspect is Plato's main point - that it is a mistake to suppose that goodness consists only/only in pleasure (just as it also is a mistake in the Theaetetus to suppose, per the first hypothsis, that knowledge consists only/only in perception).
Gnosis and Episteme in Plato
Posted - 08 Sep 2007 : 04:39:06
