Preface
PI. The Aim of This Book
In this book, I offer a partial interpretation of Plato’s Republic by characterizing it as having education as one of its principal aims. It is not just a work that is about education, though it certainly contains many passages and arguments that are about education. My purpose in this book is to show, rather, that the Republic is a work intended most of all to play a role in educating its readers. This claim, by itself, is perhaps not especially controversial. Perhaps more controversial would be my claim that this educational role is at least a focus—if not, as I actually suspect, the main focus—of the work as a whole.
The Republic has received intense critical and scholarly attention. One of its first critics was Plato’s own student, Aristotle, who subjects a version of the Republic to a series of thoughtful criticisms in Book II of the Politics 1 More recently, interpretations of the Republic have run the gamut from characterizations of it as serious political theory to assessments that it was, instead, intended for comic effect. Since Plato himself never reports directly what his intentions were in writing the work, and since the work continues to be tantalizingly tricky to interpret, it is not surprising that scholars have expressed such a diversity of general views. My own contribution herein will simply add to this diversity by suggesting a somewhat different overall appraisal of what Plato intended to achieve in writing the work. I claim only that this focus will help to shed light on some of its most puzzling and difficult aspects.
As I said at the very beginning, however, I intend herein only to offer a partial interpretation of Plato’s greatest work. In case it is not perfectly obvious to anyone who has read the Republic, there is a good deal more to this work than just the topics I will discuss in this book, and by leaving the others in soft focus I do not at all intend to imply that they are not important. I wrote my doctoral dissertation on Plato’s Republic (completed in 1975), and have spent the rest of my career hoping that someone (not I) would have the gumption and the skill to complete a truly comprehensive study of the work, comparable, say, to the four-volume treatment of Aristotle’s Politics by Newman (1887). Perhaps the closest anyone has come to that goal remains James Adam’s edition with commentary and notes (Adam 1963; first published in 1902). At any rate, this book is not such a project.
In announcing my focus in this book as a focus on how Plato aims to educate his readers, however, I risk starting my own readers right out with several very serious false expectations. To explain this comment completely, I will need the rest of the
1 I say “a version of the Republic,” because there is evidence that Aristotle’s criticisms were actually aimed at an earlier version of the Republic—one that lacked what are now the middle books of the work. For discussion, see Nails 1995: 116–22 and Nails 1998: 393–4.
chapters of this book to make my case, but as a start, I mean that the way in which we tend to think of education would already put us on the wrong foot for understanding what Plato is doing. Increasingly (and to me, distressingly), we think of education as a matter of transmitting information to people who don’t already know it, and more importantly, we think that what they need to come to know are the sorts of things they can use to make a living. I suspect that Plato would have found such a notion of the value of education to be not only brutally reductive, but also ethically useless. If even the most casual readers of the Republic remember nothing else about the work, they are at least likely to recall one of Plato’s most controversial proposals: to deny the rulers access to private property or any opportunity to amass personal wealth. It is true that the rulers will “make a living” in some monkish sense, but it can hardly be further from Plato’s intention that by giving his future rulers the most rigorous program of education ever proposed, his goal was to ensure them thereby an advantage with respect to the aim of amassing wealth. This small example gives perhaps a vivid reason why we do well to guard against our own anachronistic impulses when we read and try to understand Plato’s work. Unfamiliar treatments of many of our most basic concepts are everywhere in Plato. Indeed, it was my experience of the alienness of Plato’s vision that first attracted me to it. Like it or not, we are not going to get anywhere as thinkers by reading only things that we agree with, or that express our own most fondly cherished views of things. Reading Plato—for reasons I hope to explore in detail in this book—is extremely unlikely to produce such experiences of comfortable familiarity. Even so, I think we can achieve a fruitful and interesting understanding of his work.
So while I do think that the Republic is an educational work at heart, I also think that what Plato understands education to consist in and how it is best achieved does not align with what we normally consider when we think about this subject. Moreover, while Plato also connects education with knowledge, the connection that he makes is, I claim, radically different from the one we would typically find in our own explanations of or approaches to either education or knowledge. I give a sketch of my case for these claims in Chapter 1. Before I am able to explain what I regard as the most central feature of the Republic, then, I will need to explain just what education and knowledge are, for Plato, so at least we can be in a better position to understand what he thinks he has to offer to us, as his readers. I start with a discussion of what he says about knowledge in Chapter 3. But before I get to that, I will try to show my readers (in Chapter 2) that the very way in which Plato presents his thoughts in the Republic needs special attention. Briefly, I look carefully at two famous and controversial claims that Plato has Socrates make, in Books II through IV, and show how they are presented as images of what Plato wants us to think about. This kind of use of images, I will claim, is one of the core features of the educational program in which Plato wishes to engage his readers. Once I have discussed these issues, I then turn in the remaining chapters to what Plato actually tells us about education—with an eye always to comparing what he says about this subject to what we can see of what he is actually doing in the work itself.
P2. My Own Intended Readership
Anyone who hopes to gain anything from reading this book will have to have already read Plato’s Republic, but should also probably be ready to look back at various parts of the work again and again as part of the process of understanding and evaluating my claims about it. But I am also hoping to explain things in ways that will make my arguments accessible to readers who have only done this much, that is, who have read the Republic and are prepared to look more carefully at it again at times along the way. I will, for sure, often be addressing or at least noting the works of other scholars, and it is part of scholarly writing that such attention is usually more for criticism than to express approval. One of my own scholarly mentors, however, explained this process in a way that is worth quoting. When explaining his own continuing criticisms of Terence Irwin’s Plato’s Moral Theory (1977), Gregory Vlastos explained, “only those who are strangers to the ethos of scholarly controversy will see anything but high esteem in my critique” (Vlastos 1994, 39 n. 2). Just so—the criticisms of other scholars’ works herein are the clearest indications of how much my own thinking has been moved (even pushed around!) by the challenges I confronted in these works, and as all scholars know, it is often by setting our own views off against those of others that we are able to make fully clear what it is that we have in mind. Accordingly, I hope other scholars will find value in reading this book—if only (or perhaps especially) for taking up and challenging their own works.
The scholarly literature on Plato’s Republic is beyond vast, however. It is, indeed, so voluminous and appears in so many different languages that no single human could ever hope to engage more than a tiny fraction of it. It is not my aim here to achieve even as much of that as I might. I cannot doubt that there remain innumerably many excellent works of scholarship that might well have allowed me to improve the argument I offer here—or possibly, which would have inclined me to abandon it altogether. I certainly expect that other scholars will notice these lacunae and hope only that if they do, they will assist me by calling my attention to important works and arguments that I have missed, as well as correcting any other errors I have made.
Even so, the readers I hope most of all to reach are not other professional scholars. Instead, the ones I have in mind as my own intended readership are those seeking to engage in the kinds of processes that are my focus in this book: teaching and learning. My main aim is to help those who feel they would like some assistance in understanding what Plato’s greatest work was all about, how it was intended to work, and most of all, why Plato said so many things that readers inevitably find strange, or even outrageous. The “ethos of scholarly controversy” that I have been talking about actually has a very long and distinguished history, one that I hope to illuminate as part of Plato’s own technique in writing the Republic. Did he really mean all the things he has Socrates2
2 I will not be especially careful in this book about how I present the notorious problems involved in Plato’s authorial relationship with the character of Socrates. In brief, it is my general view—and one that I acknowledge is controversial—that when Plato has Socrates say something, he means for the reader to
endorse in the work? My answers to such questions will always be in something like the form, “Yes and no.” In ways that I hope to explain in several chapters of this book, Plato was, I claim, intentionally provocative, because he thought that certain sorts of provocations were of the utmost importance for intellectual and moral achievement. Most of the main arguments I offer in this book are revised versions of arguments I have already offered in various scholarly articles or chapters published elsewhere. I acknowledge these below. The revisions have been made with an eye to making things easier for the readers I am trying to reach, and one effect of this effort is that in many places where scholars reading this book might expect dense annotation and citation of other scholars’ works, they will instead get only some few citations, including some to my own earlier works—works in which I did make the effort to cite other scholars’ works much more extensively. I have tried herein to engage more explicitly with works that have appeared since the publication of my own earlier articles and chapters. I have also sometimes elected not to duplicate extensive citations that appeared in my earlier works, and have rather simply noted here where these may be found.
P3. Texts and Translations
Throughout, when I cite passages from the Republic, unless noted otherwise, I will be citing the most recently published Oxford Classical Text of the Republic (Slings 2003) in the standard form of Stephanus page, section letter, and line number of the Greek text. My citations of passages from other Platonic texts will also be from the Greek texts given in the Oxford Classical Texts
Any good contemporary translation of the Republic should suffice for my readers to follow my arguments, and serious readers should always avoid translations that do not at least provide the Stephanus page numbers and section letters in the columns, so that these can be used as guides when discussing the texts with (or reading scholarship by) others who may not be using the same translations, or may rely entirely just on the Greek. Because it is the most widely used collection of English translations of Plato’s works, my own quotations will usually be those given in Cooper 1997 (by G. M. A. Grube and revised by C. D. C. Reeve), but I often found I could not always use these without some revision, and have noted it when I did revise this translation.
I have tried not to talk about the Greek in ways that would make it difficult for those who have not learned the language to follow what I say. When I thought it would be useful, I have given transliterations of relevant Greek terms, so that those who do
take what Socrates says to be worthy of serious philosophical consideration. As for whether Plato himself accepts everything that he has Socrates say, my readers will find that my view of this is more equivocal: he means for us to take what Socrates says seriously and thoughtfully enough to consider it as a candidate for philosophical acceptance or for philosophical revision or refutation. My own readers should by all means take the same point of view when they read the things that I say: perhaps they are right, but if they are wrong, please show me why they need revision or refutation.
know the language can see how I am understanding the term. I have avoided using untransliterated Greek.
It should be clear from what I have already said that my focus in this book is entirely on the Republic. I have actually avoided any comparisons to other Platonic texts, because I am not inclined to think that the points of view I find in the Republic are always the same as those to be found in his other works. Those looking for a broader account of Plato’s entire philosophy should look elsewhere.
Acknowledgments
I have been writing about Plato’s Republic from the time I was an undergraduate, and my doctoral dissertation and most of my earliest professional publications were on the Republic. Most of my earliest works do not now seem to me to have been well enough conceived or argued to include in any way herein, though in several of them I made my first attempts to wrestle with things that I now think I managed to explain better in later writings. But even in my later writings, I have often changed my mind about how some text or argument was to be understood, and that processes continued as I was working on this book. Some of these later writings, accordingly, have been revised (sometimes substantially) and incorporated into various parts of this book, as follows:
Sections 1.2.1–1.2.6 are revisions of “Plato’s Book of Images,” in Philosophy in Dialogue, edited by G. A. Scott. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2007, pp. 3–14. Copyright © 2007 by Northwestern University Press. Published 2007. All rights reserved.
Section 1.2.7 is a revision of “Preface: Paradoxes of Platonic Imagination,” preface to R. Jenks, How the Images in Plato’s Dialogues Develop a Life of Their Own. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellon. 2011, ix–xviii. Reprinted content with permission by Edwin Mellon.
Section 2.1 is a revision of “Plato’s Analogy of Soul and State,” The Journal of Ethics 3: 1999. Reprinted by permission from Springer Nature. Copyright © 1999 Kluwer Academic Publishers .
Section 3.1 is a revision of “Plato on Knowledge as a Power,” copyright © Johns Hopkins University Press. This article was first published in Journal of the History of Philosophy 38.2 (2000), 145–68. Reprinted with permission by Johns Hopkins University Press.
Section 3.2.1–3.2.3 are revisions of “Plato on the Power of Ignorance,” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy suppl.: Virtue and Happiness: Essays in Honour of Julia Annas, ed. R. Kamtekar (2012): 51–73. Reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/virtue-and-happiness-9780199646043.
Sections 5.2.1–5.2.4 are revisions of “Plato’s Divided Line,” Ancient Philosophy 16 (1996): 25–46. Reprinted content with permission from Ancient Philosophy
Sections 5.2.6–5.2.7 and 7.2.1 are revisions of “Unclarity and the Intermediates in Plato’s Discussions of Clarity in the Republic,” Plato Journal 18 (2018): 97–110. Reprinted content with permission from the Plato Journal.
Section 6.2 is a revision of “How the Prisoners in Plato’s Cave Are ‘Like Us,’ ” in J. J. Cleary and G. M. Gurtler, eds., Proceedings of the Boston Area Colloquium 13, 187–204. Reprinted content with permission by Brill.
Section 6.3 is a revision of “Return to the Cave,” in M. McPherran, ed., Plato’s Republic: A Critical Guide. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2010): 83–102. Copyright © 2018, reproduced with permission.
My professional work on Plato’s Republic now spans over four decades, and along the way I have been helped and influenced by far too many other scholars to name here. Again, even when I am making clear how I disagree with some other scholar, I am very much indebted to those whose works have seemed to me to merit such responses. I have also benefited from detailed comments on an earlier draft of this book, which were very generously given to me prior to submission by Hugh H. Benson and Damien Storey, and then, as referees for Oxford University Press after submission by Rachana Kamtekar and Debra Nails, both of whom agreed to come out from anonymity, since I was so very pleased and impressed by their thoughtful, detailed criticisms and suggestions. I cannot adequately express my gratitude to these wonderful colleagues for the time and effort they put into responding so graciously to my many confusions. It is not at all their fault that so many confusions still remain herein. Had I followed every one of their many suggestions, the book would no doubt be much improved . . . but still unfinished! Hugh agreed to read the book because we have done this sort of thing for each other so many times in the past. Although I have not yet met Damien in person, he and I have now been corresponding and exchanging our written works for a few years, and our lengthy discussions have been exciting and challenging for me. Rachana and Debra are professional colleagues from whom I have learned a great deal over the years. Every time I have read any of these fine scholars’ works or criticisms of mine, I have been persuaded to abandon, amend, or at least clarify considerably my own thoughts. It is relationships like these that have made my life as a scholar so very satisfying. Three other people deserve special mention for the help they have provided to me over my career. The first of these is Keith Lehrer, the man who taught the very first course in philosophy that I ever took, as a somewhat unready seventeen-year-old freshman in college. His recent work in what he calls “exemplarization,” or “exemplar representation,” by which we generate our conceptions of things, puts into the clearest theoretical terms a notion that I had been trying to articulate about Plato’s epistemology for many years now. In a forthcoming work (Lehrer forthcoming), he applies what he has been working on more generally to the interpretation of Plato, and it has been a joy and very educational for me to discuss this with him along the way. My own use of his ideas appears throughout this work, but I seek to explain it especially in Chapter 3. Keith has also always been extraordinarily supportive throughout my career, and I can never possibly repay all of my debts to him.
As for the other two, I met both of these for the first time at a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar at Princeton University, in 1976: the director of the seminar (on “The Moral and Social Philosophy of Socrates and Plato”), Gregory Vlastos, and one of my fellow seminarians, Thomas C. Brickhouse. Gregory became a significant mentor (and, following the “ethos of scholarly controversy,” an important source of criticisms of my work, and whose works I have frequently targeted in my own criticisms). Tom quickly became a lifelong friend and collaborator, with whom I have now written several books and scores of articles on Socrates. What few now realize about our long collaboration is that it formed around the sharing of two projects. The
one that led to so many further collaborations was about Socrates’ counterpenalty offer in Plato’s Apology (Brickhouse and Smith 1982); but the other project, with which I still mostly agree and which I have revisited and cited again herein, was on Plato’s Republic (Brickhouse and Smith 1983). The work Tom did for Vlastos’s seminar in 1976 later appeared as Brickhouse 1981 and seemed to me at the time (and still seems to me) to be one of the best things ever written about one of the most interesting problems of interpretation of the Republic. I discuss this important work, and indicate my minor dissent from it, in Chapter 6. To these three fellow travelers and to everyone else I cite herein, but also to all of the inquisitive undergraduate and graduate students I have had in my classes and seminars on the Republic, I will always be indebted.
1 Introduction
1.1 Plato’s Unfamiliar Conceptions of Knowledge and Education
1.1.1 What education does and how it works
Let us start with a few commonplaces about knowledge and education. These commonplaces are so familiar to all of us that they end up very much getting in the way of our understanding of Plato. They get in the way because Plato, I will claim, does not actually accept any of them, whereas we tend to begin the process of interpreting Plato with these commonplaces already assumed. If I am right that Plato does not actually accept these basic assumptions, and that we presuppose them in our interpretations of Plato, then it follows that our interpretations of Plato go wrong right from the start So, to begin:
C1i: Education gives students access to new information, of which they were (at least mostly) unaware, prior to being taught the new information. Learning, accordingly, means learning new information.
This, as we are often told, is the ‘information age,’ and what learning and education (whether formal or informal) achieves is a net gain in information—allowing a successful student to go from a condition in which he or she mostly or even wholly lacks some information (information about some subject matter, such as biology or economics, for examples), to a condition in which he or she has learned that information, and now knows it. Before I took that class in biology, I had never heard of prions, and didn’t know such things could cause diseases. But now I know it, because I learned it in that class. Now, some educators insist that providing new information to students is hardly all that happens in education, and some would even go so far as to say that it is not actually the main aim of education. But to most people, such claims would seem either very controversial and provocative, or perhaps might even sound like a kind of special pleading by so-called ‘educators’ who really are not delivering to students what they are supposed to be delivering. To be fair, however, we should remind ourselves that there really is something else to education than mere transmission of information. When one takes a class in accounting, for example, part of what is supposed to result is not just that the student comes to know things about accounting that he or she did not know before (the informational aspect), but also that the student becomes more nearly
able to be an accountant, that is, to do accounting. If the commonplace in C1i is aptly called the ‘informational’ assumption about education, then this further goal would be what might be called the ‘skill’ assumption:
C1s: What students get, from education, is not just new information but also new skills—skills they did not have before getting the education.
By the time a student graduates with a degree in accounting, he or she should be able to do accounting, to be an accountant—at least to a sufficient degree as to be able to get a job and work effectively in that area. Before taking any of the classes in the curriculum, the student would not have been able to do much, if any, actual accounting. He or she went from having no skill to having (ideally) considerable skill, in accounting.
C1i and C1s seem like two very different models of education, and educators have strongly debated which of these two models is really the most important, and which should do most of the ‘driving’ when it comes to planning educational curricula. But the two models indicated in C1i and C1s have at least one thing in common: education is supposed to give the student something that he or she lacks prior to the education, whether the lack is one of information or one of skill.
In Book VII of the Republic, just after offering his memorable image of the Cave, Plato begins to talk about the curricula by which the best students of the kallipolis (Plato’s word, meaning ‘fine city,’ for the community he creates in the work; see 527c2) can be brought to the point where they can actually rule the state. I will talk in more detail about each of these curricular steps later, but for now, it is worth looking carefully at what Plato has Socrates say to Glaucon about education:
Education isn’t what some people declare it to be, namely, putting knowledge into souls that lack it, like putting sight into blind eyes.
They do say that.
But our present discussion, on the other hand, shows that the power to learn is present in everyone’s soul and the instrument with which each learns is like an eye that cannot be turned around from the darkness to light without turning the whole body. This instrument cannot be turned around from that which is coming into being without turning the whole soul until it is able to study that which is and the brightest thing that is, namely, the one we call the good. Isn’t that right?
Yes.
Then education is the craft concerned with doing this very thing, this turning around, and with how the soul can most easily and effectively be made to do it. It isn’t the craft of putting sight into the soul. Education takes for granted that sight is there but that it hasn’t turned the right way or looking where it ought to look, and it tries to redirect it appropriately. (518b8–d7)
Before getting to this point, Plato has already covered a lot of philosophical ground, and we will not well understand what is going on until we look a lot more closely at a number of important passages that come before this one. But even the most cursory reading of this passage should make it clear enough that one of the things Plato has Socrates emphatically reject in this passage is the very point shared equally in C1i and C1s,
which is that education puts something into the student that is not already there, whether information or skill. Now, to be sure, Plato was obviously aware that people could and did learn new information or skills, and the education that Plato promotes will also certainly have these effects. But this passage shows that such acquisitions are not what Plato thinks should be the primary aims of education. Instead, Plato recognizes a ‘power’ in the soul that he likens to the power of sight—powers that all of us already have, but which need to be aroused, focused, and strengthened if they might best achieve their proper results. As I will show (especially in Chapter 3), it is these goals, with respect to our innate cognitive power to know, that education should be designed to achieve. New information and skills will come, when they do, as by-products of this arousing, focusing, and strengthening of the cognitive power already in our souls.1 In this book, I propose to explain not only the theoretical grounds that Plato gives for this view of education, but also to expose the specific ways in which he is actually engaging in this process with his readers, by ‘summoning,’ as I put it in the title of the book, the readers’ ‘power to learn.’ At any rate, I hope it is clear enough that what Plato has in mind is different from what we would get if he were starting out with assumptions C1i and/or C1s.
1.1.2 Knowledge as an educational goal
Everyone who is interested in the topic of education—including Plato—also recognizes that there is some connection to be made (at least in ideal circumstances) between educational advancement and also advancement in knowledge. We might encode this into another commonplace:
C2: Education, at least if successful, produces knowledge in the student.
But the passage just quoted above already shows what is wrong with this commonplace when it comes to understanding Plato: Plato had Socrates make very plain that education, at least as he is discussing it in the Republic, is not about putting into people what is not already there, but is instead about reorienting what is already there. So education does not produce knowledge, but instead takes what is already in the soul and redirects what is there in a way that allows the goals of education (which are not identified in this passage) to be gained. So if we begin with the assumption that something like C2 must be what Plato has in mind, we will start the process in a way that hinders, rather than helps, the process of interpretation and understanding.
Almost certainly, one of the reasons we will get off on the wrong foot has to do with what we tend to think about knowledge, what it is and what it requires. Contemporary theory of knowledge is an area of continuing significant controversy among epistemologists, and as a result there is actually very little that can be said, in
1 A very clear discussion of this aspect of Plato’s view of education may be found in Reeve 2010. The account that I offer in this book is similar in many ways to what Reeve argues therein, though I will note occasional differences in our views as they become relevant.
general, about precisely how we should understand knowledge. But at the risk of some misrepresentation of these debates, there are some basic features of contemporary theory of knowledge that are common across all—or at least most—of the extant views in the field.2 What I propose to offer is the merest template of what such a theory would include, but it will hopefully be enough to show how terribly misplaced any of the many varieties of such theories will be as a way to understand what Plato intends.
Epistemologists, I claim, generally agree that whatever the right theory of knowledge turns out to be, it must have at least four necessary features. The first of these is generally called the ‘truth’ condition. Some epistemic agent (S) knows something (p) only if what S knows is true. No one can know that whales are big fish, because whales aren’t fish—they’re mammals. Now, someone might think they know that whales are big fish, but they’d be wrong, because no one can know what is false. Epistemologists have found some reason to tinker with the ‘truth condition,’ but the main idea behind the condition seems to be generally accepted; you can’t know it if what you supposedly know is wrong.
Now, there are some differences among epistemologists about precisely how this condition is supposed to be formulated, but it is worth noting that whatever we say about this, the basic thought seems to be that what is known is in some sense informational. As noted above, not all information is true: the information that whales are big fish is false information. In some theories of knowledge, the information itself is said to be propositional, which is to say that it is the kind of information that is expressed as the meaning of a declarative sentence. There may be different ways to actually expressing the same information (in English, for example, or in Spanish), but what is known, no matter what language is used to express it, is the same (at least in theory).
We might think of the relevant information as at least propositionalizable, even if not actually propositionalized by a given knower at a given time. So, for example, we might think we know, as we are driving a car, that another car is approaching us at a roughly 90° angle as we enter an intersection, but not actually have, before our minds, as it were, this information actually encoded in some propositional form. We might have access to such information in such a way as to know it, even if we are not actually thinking in whole sentences, as if saying to ourselves: ‘There is another car approaching the intersection from that side street.’ But we need not worry about whether the information is actually propositionalized in the way we manage it in any given case, in knowing; it matters only that such information is of a sort as to be propositionalizable, which is why contemporary theories of knowledge are said to analyze what is called ‘propositional knowledge.’ This sort of knowledge is sometimes compared and contrasted to other kinds, such as ‘knowledge by acquaintance’ (I know your Uncle Jim!) or know-how (Mary knows how to ride a bike). But it is safe to say that the primary focus of contemporary theories of knowledge is on propositional knowledge.
2 I offer my own version of such a theory in my book with Ian Evans on the theory of knowledge (Evans and Smith 2012).
One thing we can immediately notice about propositional knowledge, however, is that it is most certainly the kind of thing that we can fail to have and then (if the right things happen, perhaps) come to have. Accordingly, propositional knowledge fits the model of education provided in our second commonplace (C2) extremely well: one way of understanding the connection between education and knowledge is to understand that education produces (propositional) knowledge, by taking students who do not know certain information and getting them to the point that they do know it. But we have also already seen some reason to think that whatever Plato has in mind when he has Socrates talk about education in Book VII of the Republic, it is not the sort of thing that can be put into the student who starts out by lacking it. Hence, we already have some reason to think that whatever Plato has in mind as ‘knowledge’ is not likely to be ‘propositional knowledge’ of the sort we attempt to analyze in contemporary theories of knowledge, since that sort of knowledge is something we can lack and then acquire. Propositional knowledge may certainly be gained along the way in Plato’s model of education; but it seems unlikely that such knowledge will be the focus of an education that is not aimed at the acquisition of what the student does not already have. And yet, it is fair to say that this model of knowledge—‘propositional knowledge’—is precisely the model that philosophers and scholars are the most familiar with and are thus likely to assume when they begin the process of interpreting Plato’s Republic. As we will soon see, variations of this model are endorsed as the right way to understand Plato’s theory by a number of scholars, and I have already given one indication of why I am very skeptical about such interpretations and find them wrongheaded. In addition to this reservation, however, there is at least one other, of at least equal weight.
In the case of ‘propositional knowledge,’ what is known is some information about the world, perhaps encoded in some proposition or perhaps in some other way. But the basic idea is that it is information, and information of a sort that at least can be encoded in propositional form. When we talk about the relationship between knowledge and the known, in this model, we say that the knowledge is ‘of’ or ‘about’ the known, as subject matter, which indicates what philosophers call an ‘intensional’ relation. This aspect of ‘propositional knowledge,’ however, already creates some difficulty as a lens through which to understand Plato’s conception of knowledge. In Book V, arguably the main discussion of knowledge in the Republic, Plato makes a distinction between knowledge (epistēmē or gnōsis), opinion or belief (doxa), and ignorance (agnoia). Each one is characterized as a power (dunamis; see 477b4–6 and 477c1–e4, 478a13–14), and such powers, he tells us, are to be distinguished in virtue of what they are related to, and what they accomplish (477d1–2). In the case of knowledge, we are told that it is related to ‘what is’ (to on), and while scholars have offered different accounts of what that might mean, I think the text makes clear enough that what Plato has in mind as ‘what is’ are the forms of his famous metaphysical theory. So, in Plato’s theory, what is known are the forms. Unless forms are propositions, or consist in propositionalizable information of some sort, the idea that Plato’s relation between knowledge and the known is the one we find between ‘propositional knowledge’ and the known is mistaken. On the
face of it (and despite some very sophisticated pleas by interpreters who nonetheless think this is the right way to understand Plato), it looks rather like forms are abstract objects that are not linguistic in the appropriate way. Forms give the names of predicates (e.g. the good itself, where ‘X is good’ predicates goodness of X), and thus are not true or false in the way of propositions (such as we find with ‘there is a car approaching the intersection from the right of me,’ or ‘whales are big fish’). Now, Plato does say that the forms possess the highest degree of truth or reality (alētheia), and one might take this as an indication that there really is, after all, the right kind of connection between knowledge and truth to understand Plato’s theory as explaining some version of ‘propositional knowledge.’ But even here, a problem arises. In contemporary sentential (propositional) logic, sentences or propositions are said to have only two truth values (provided, of course, that they are actually well formed so as to be propositions or declarative sentences at all): a sentence or proposition is either true or it is false. Truth, as it applies to propositions, is what philosophers call a ‘threshold concept’ (like being tall enough to ride on the roller coaster)—there is no such thing as one thing being more true or truer than something else that is true; something is either true (or tall enough to ride on the roller coaster) or not. Once the threshold has been reached, there are no further degrees of achievement in the relevant domain. If the threshold for riding on the roller coaster is being at least four feet tall, then someone who is six feet tall is no more allowed to ride on the roller coaster than someone who just barely makes the four-foot minimum. Tallness comes in degrees, of course, but being tall enough to ride on the roller coaster does not. The same is true of being a true proposition; it is a matter of ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ We will be looking at several passages that make this point clearly, but for now, I will just insist that for Plato, whatever he means by ‘alētheia,’ the qualification comes in degrees; forms have the highest degree of this qualification, but other things also have some, but to a lesser degree. So whatever Plato’s ‘alētheia’ measures, it does not seem to measure the kind of truth that is achieved (or fails to be achieved) by propositions.
To be clear, then, both for Plato and in contemporary epistemology, knowledge engages truth. But what Plato means by truth (which is part of what I explore in Chapter 2) is the degree to which something completely or unambiguously exemplifies the kind of thing it is (or appears to be). In other words, if we say of some specific thing, X, that it has the property or quality of being F, or being an example of F-ness, then Plato’s conception of truth will be the measure of the degree to which X really is F—as opposed to being only somewhat, partially, or equivocally F. Famously, Plato argues (with consequences that I will explore in the remaining chapters of this book) that items in the sensible world are never entirely, purely, or unequivocally F, for at least most properties or qualities we might substitute for F. The only things that are purely, wholly, and unequivocally what they are, are the forms. To say that this metaphysical theory impacts everything he says about knowledge and education is no overstatement. But at the very least, it also has very important consequences on what he spends so much of his time talking about in the Republic. When he imagines a ‘noble state’ and describes
the characteristics that make it just, this same metaphysical theory blocks any chance that Plato might suppose he has actually conceived an ideal. There is only one thing that is perfectly just, and that is the just itself, the form of justice. So it is not entirely true, in Plato’s sense, to call the kallipolis ‘just’; it is only more or less true. It is more or less true because the kallipolis is only more or less just—it is, as Plato tells about the kallipolis and so many other things to which he calls our attention in the Republic, an image and not the reality (the form) that it images. This same equivocal feature is one I will call my readers’ attention to often in this book, because it seems to me to be critical that we bear it in mind when we read Plato’s words. In brief, I will claim that the Republic is a work that presents images of reality (or truth)—and not reality/truth itself—to its readers. This process, as we will discover, has an important place in Plato’s conception of education. But it also means that we must continually remind ourselves that Plato should not generally be taken as ‘telling us the truth’ or announcing something like a philosophical doctrine about what he discusses, because he thinks that real truth can only be achieved when the subject of our attention is the forms. Plato certainly wants us to attend to the forms, what they are, how they are, and how they are imaged by the things in the world around us. But most of what Plato talks about in the Republic does not belong to the world of the forms. Instead, it belongs to the world we inhabit and engage through perception (or imagination), whose contents, as Plato insists, both are and are not everything whatever they seem to be. So, too, the Republic, which is rich in details about ethics and politics, provides us with images of what is really good and really just. But since Plato has given us images only, we need to be alert to their limitations and not assume that Plato supposed his images to be without flaws. Part of what I claim in this book is that the readers’ being alert to these flaws will bring him or her closer to comprehending the real truth, which is the only domain where knowledge, fully realized, can come into contact with what is flawless.
The second condition that appears in virtually all contemporary analyses of knowledge is the so-called ‘belief’ condition. S knows that p only if S believes that p. There are any number of theories and explanations about what is required, or what it means, for something to be a belief, but all that is needed is the basic intuition, which is that knowledge is a cognitive state of some sort. To say that it must be cognitive is to say that it is some kind of mental representation of the world (or whatever the subject matter happens to be) as being a certain way. Being in this state—representing the world (or whatever the subject matter happens to be) as being a certain way—is one of the conditions for knowing, and each case of knowing will be a case of being in such a state. There are, obviously, other conditions that must be met, and we have already seen one of these: the representation of the way the world is has to be correct and not incorrect (the ‘truth condition’ must also be met, that is).
So there can be true beliefs and also false beliefs, and those that count as knowledge will never include the latter, only the former. There can also be true beliefs that are not knowledge, because they do not satisfy still other requirements (about which, see below). But it is enough for us to see at least this much: in contemporary theory of knowledge,
knowledge is a species of belief. Not every instance of belief will be knowledge, but every instance of knowledge will also be an instance of belief.
Here, too, we should quickly begin to suspect that this model of knowledge will be a poor fit for the account of knowledge we get in the Republic. In Book V, Plato has Socrates distinguish three cognitive powers (again, knowledge, opinion, and ignorance), and none are said to be included in the other as species of the other, in the way that we regard knowledge as a species of belief. Many translations try to avoid this problem by having the distinctions made in Book V be between knowledge, opinion, and ignorance (so our generic term for a cognitive state, ‘belief’ might be supposed to apply to all of them), but few scholars would really be willing to say that in Book V Plato was explaining how knowledge was a kind of belief. Plato does have Glaucon say that one difference between knowledge and opinion is that the former is infallible whereas the latter is fallible (477e7–8), and so it might easily look as if the distinction between true and false is being employed, in such a way as to assure that knowledge is always true whereas opinion is sometimes true and sometimes false, which would map onto contemporary analyses of propositional knowledge rather well. In chapter 3, below, however, I will argue that even this appearance is misleading. For now, it is enough to note with concern that, at least in Book V, he does not seem to be making the sort of genus/species categorization that we would expect if what he had in mind is our conception of knowledge as a species of belief.
In contemporary theories, as I said, there are four general features, and I have now mentioned two of these—the ‘truth condition’ and the ‘belief condition.’ The third condition epistemologists have required is what is called the ‘justification condition.’ It is not enough, we are told, for someone to have a true belief about p. To know that p, one must not just believe that p, where p is true; one must also be justified in holding that belief. It is obviously possible to believe something that is true without knowing it, if, for example, the way in which one comes to believe it is at all faulty, or if the reasons why one believes it are simply not adequate to support the belief as real knowledge. Suppose I believe some scientific claim because my very dear (but not very scientific) grandmother told me that it is true. Suppose, further, that her reasons for believing it were that she used a Ouija board and asked if the claim in question were true, and received the answer ‘yes.’ No one would be willing to say that my belief counts as knowledge even if (bucking the odds, one might think!) the scientific claim in question actually turned out to be true. In such a case, one would satisfy both the ‘truth condition’ and the ‘belief condition’ for knowledge, but not satisfy the ‘justification condition.’
Precisely what we are to make of justification and what kind or degree of justification is required for knowledge is a matter of considerable controversy among epistemologists. These, however, need not concern us. Of greater moment, for our purposes, is that we can find abundant evidence that Plato was very interested in questions of justification, generally, and characterizes Socrates as someone who is always interested in finding out how well his interlocutors are able (or, as we usually discover, are unable) to justify
claims that they make. What should worry us is not that the evidence of Plato’s interest in justification might be somehow misleading, but rather (again) that there is another feature of this criterion of knowledge that does not seem all that well suited to the way Plato has Socrates talk about knowledge and opinion in Book V. Modern treatments of justification all note that the relation between knowledge and other kinds of true belief will co-vary in terms of the degree or kind of justification that the agent has. In effect, the difference between knowledge and other types of true belief is a difference in terms of degree of justification. To put it bluntly, this is simply not how Plato has Socrates explain the difference between knowledge, opinion, and ignorance in the important discussion in Book V of the Republic. Instead, we are told that the way to distinguish the different kinds of cognitions is in terms of what kinds of things they are related to (‘set over’) and what they accomplish (477d1–2). I am not claiming that Plato’s stated criteria could not possibly be understood in terms of degrees or kinds of justification (though I certainly do think that any such attempt would produce a misunderstanding); rather, my claim for now is only that such an understanding is anything but obvious when we read the passage itself. So my intention is simply to express some reasons for thinking that our commonplace preconceptions about the topics we encounter in Plato are not necessarily good guides for interpretation.
The final feature of contemporary theories of knowledge is not likely a matter of much concern, because it was generated by a problem first articulated in a famous paper in epistemology published in 1963 (Gettier 1963)—the so-called ‘Gettier problem,’ named after the author of that famous paper, Edmund Gettier. The gist of this problem is that even justified true belief will sometimes not count as knowledge, if something has gone wrong in the justification (such as part of what justifies one in believing turns out to be false, despite the person having very good reasons to think that it is true). The Gettier problem has generated an impressive and controversial literature, but there is no reason (that I know of, at any rate) for thinking that Plato anticipated any part(s) of this literature by well over two millennia.
When we encounter philosophical works from another language and another era, it can be comforting, perhaps, to think that their authors really did think about things in a way that is very like the way we tend to think of them. I have now indicated a few reasons why we should resist the charm of the familiar as we try to make sense of what Plato has to say about knowledge and education. I do not believe that Plato intended to explain these things in ways that would track our own commonplaces about them, nor do I think the sophistication of contemporary epistemology will provide us with the right tools to interpret Plato, since they are tools that are designed for a different purpose than what Plato’s seems to have been. I will continue to defend these reservations in much more detail in the following chapters of this book, so I hope that even readers who remain unconvinced by the notes of caution I have sounded will be prepared to look at the more detailed arguments that follow. Before going into the details of what Plato actually does have to say about knowledge and education, however, it will
