The Theaetetus of Plato (Hackett Classics) by Plato

Author:Plato [Plato]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781624664212
Publisher: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.
Published: 1990-03-15T04:00:00+00:00

True judgement in the Dream

Closer to hand than any external source of inspiration is the context established for the Dream by its position in the dialogue. I hope that readers enjoyed the discussion of Wittgenstein and Antisthenes and found it instructive. But in each case it became clear that their semantic concerns, though not irrelevant, are marginal to the Dream. Let us therefore turn back to the central epistemological themes of the dialogue. Can these illuminate the aims of a theory of complexes and elements and tell us what the Dream is about?

The chief novelty of Part III, by comparison with what has gone before, is the separation of true judgement from knowledge. There are now three epistemic routes—perception, true judgement, and knowledge are all mentioned in the Dream—instead of the two explicitly acknowledged in Part II. Looking further back, we can see that the dialogue is at last separating out the three elements which the definition of knowledge as perception fused together to make the single epistemic route acknowledged in Part I.

The process has been gradual. In fact it is continuing still. In Part I true judgement was a necessary component of (Protagorean) perceptual awareness. In Part II it was separate from perception but not from knowledge. In Part III we have a choice. Interpretation [a] achieves no more than a nominal separation of true judgement {174} from knowledge; two of its three epistemic routes are in substance one and the same (p. 138). But Interpretation [b] does bring out true judgement as a distinct presence on the stage. It is still a part of knowledge. But it is an independent part, which can and does occur separately in its own right. Neither Wittgenstein nor the imagined Antisthenes had anything helpful to say about true judgement. We must go back to the text and manage for ourselves.

At first reading the theory makes it one of the distinguishing features of complexes that they can be the objects of true judgement (202b). Elements, that is to say, cannot be the objects of true judgement.

If this is correct, the knowable is not just that of which there can be accounts but also that of which there can be true judgement. The two constituents of knowledge, accounts and true judgement, range over the same territory. Both demand a complex object. Of elements, by contrast, there are no accounts and no true judgements either.

This first reading poses no problem for Interpretation [a]. Elements which admit of no statement (= audible judgement) necessarily admit of no judgement (= silent statement) about them. But it does set a problem for Interpretation [b], which maintains that elements are unanalyzable, not that they are indescribable and cannot have statements made about them. If a statement such as ‘e is yellow’ or ‘That is e’ could be true of an element, surely the corresponding judgement that e is yellow, or that that is e, must be possible as well?

One expedient for Interpretation [b] is to argue that Socrates does not in fact commit the theory to the view that true judgement concerning elements is impossible.

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