Bah. Don’t you have TAs? Just give them extra work until you’re caught up with me, lol.
TA’s? I don’t know what that word means (sigh). The main drain is getting the next issue of the journal to press, and that has been done (yippee!). So next up is time to play with Plato.
TA’s? I don’t know what that word means (sigh).
Teaching Assistant, silly. You know… the grad student minions that have to do all the grunt work while the professors read Plato in their office.
I find it challenging to defend Protagoras against Plato’s representation and opposition. I have no other knowledge of Protagoras, and don’t particularly want to defend him, but Plato is also attacking some very important elements of a proper epistemology. It’s important, therefore, to distinguish to good from the bad in his arguments.
Central to the argument from 179 seems to be the contextual nature of knowledge, e.g. the comparison between the vinegrower and the harp-player in judging the sweetness of unharvested grapes. This is expressed in terms of judgments, that the judgments of a person who is wiser in one area are superior to those of a less-wise person, in that particular area. The position that he is validly opposing is that every judgment of reality is as valid as any other. He does not end up rejecting the claim that “Man is the measure of all things”; he concludes ‘that one man is wiser than another, and that such a wise man is a measure’, and 183b “And so, Theodorus, we have got rid of your friend without assenting to his doctrine, that every man is the measure of all things – a wise man only is a measure”. Since a wise man is one who knows, this simply say “He who know, knows”. I would agree with that – it’s hard to disagree with tautologies. The question which seems to go unanswered in his dialogue is whether two men who are wise can reach opposite conclusions.
At 186 he asserts that perception “has no part in the attainment of truth any more than of being” and then “we no longer seek for knowledge in perception at all, but in that other process, however called, in which the mind is alone and engaged with being”, viz. having an opinion. Reason also cannot be knowledge for reasons that are well-known: the most significant error I see here is the conclusion that perception is not a part of knowledge.
Anyhow, I’m at that transition to “true belief” theory, so I halfway feel caught up.
I don’t really think there is any way to defend Protagoras qua relativist, since Plato is basically right about him in that regard, but there is a huge difference between perception and the relativist use of perception. Plato’s objections to latter are entirely valid, as you noted.
I’m going to disagree with Plato’s statement that “a wise man only is a measure.” A wise man might be one who knows, but that doesn’t make him the standard of what is true. The standard is, of course, reality. The “wise man” view amounts to a sort of elitist subjectivism–that by virtue of wisdom he is able to create truth, rather than learn truth. He who knows, knows, as you said, but he who knows is not the standard of knowing, which is what Plato is saying.
This is really characteristic of Plato. If you’ve read Republic, then you will be familiar with Plato’s notion of the philosopher-king; this is where that comes from, I think (although, I might change my mind as we read further on). You can also really see the Platonic influence on Judaeo-Christian religions here, too, where the clergy is the “wise man.”
If you reject “man is the measure” theory entirely, including Plato’s delimited version, the scenario of conflicting opinions is easily answered.
As far as what’s going on @ 186-187… I have a couple of problems with it. First of all, he fails to completely understand the idea of objectivity, which leads him to the mind-body dichotomy, which leads him to the conclusion, as you say, that perception is not part of knowledge. In his view, it seems, sensation is not part of consciousness at all, but merely a function of the sensory organs. He is enacting an epistemological dualism here. I find it hard to really fault him for this, since I don’t know that their primitive science could have told them that the sensory organs are related to the brain, which is related to consciousness. Hell, the only thing we know about the relationship now, 2400 years later, is that it exists. On the other hand, that relationship should be discernable by a fairly easy bit of introspection, so I find it hard not to fault him, too. That’s the big error here, though–the mind-body split.
Implicitly, he does have to accept that perception plays a role in knowledge, however. He say, “Then knowledge does not consist in impressions of sense, but in reasoning about them…” And he says this in the same context that he says “[perception] has no part in the attainment of truth…” So, clearly we have a contradiction, and it’s not even one of those sneaky ones, but a glaring big eyesore that he just ignores.
Then, there’s also the issue of leaping from the acutal (valid) conclusion that knowledge and perception are not identical, which he says a number of times, to knowledge and perception are completely unrelated. Of course, we know that there are many, many things that are different, but related. Apparently Plato did not.
I’ve read all the way up to then end of the section on knowledge as True Belief (201d).
I have to say, I’m rather confused as to what his point is for the bulk of this section. It seems as though all the way up to 200d, he’s arguing against the possibility of false belief, rather than whether or not true belief is knowledge. The only point I can see to this is if he intends to indicate that it is unecessary to put the qualifier “true” onto the definition at all, since there is no possibility of a false belief. But, this isn’t his intention at all, so I’m not really sure what he’s getting at.
His first argument against the possibility of false belief is flawed. It completely neglects the possibility of having knowledge of some aspects of a thing, but not of others.
In his second argument, he appears to take a complete about-face where the fallibility of sense-perception is concerned. Where before, he regarded it as fallible, he now regards it as infallible, and then ascribes that infallibility to thought as well.
I found the third argument to be extremely unclear, although it seems to have something to do with the impossibility of being able to convince oneself that A is non-A. Of course one can’t (honestly) do this, but it neglects the idea that one might be honestly unsure about what A is.
I think the “wax tablet” section amounts to allowing for the possibility that one might remember something incorrectly, and concedes that a false belief may be possible in the presence of a “mistmatch” between memory and perception. Plato objects to this, however, on the grounds that there are some false beliefs (such as in mathematics) that cannot be conflicts between memory and perception, since mathematics, in his view, is not derived from perception. Of course, mathematics can be objectively grounded in perception, so his objection doesn’t really hold water.
The final section on the aviary is an attempt at explaining how it is that we can have these kind of mismatches. Basically, the big problem with this section is the same problem that he has been facing throughout. He continues to regard concepts as having some sort of actual metaphysical existence apart from the objects of sense perception, almost as though the task of the mind isn’t to learn about the objects of sense-perception, but to “match up” concepts with the objects.
Finally, at the very end of his argument against true belief, he says something worthwhile. Here, he accepts that knoweldge must have an empirical base, and explains that one might be persuaded to believe something without empirical evidence, and that even if the belief is true, it is not knowledge.
Um, so yeah, I totally abandoned the group I created. You guys want regroup via live chat? (Regroup meaning admitting I didn’t read Plato at all.)
Um, so yeah, I totally abandoned the group I created. You guys want regroup via live chat? (Regroup meaning admitting I didn’t read Plato at all.)
I do plan to get re-caught up. I find this stuff tough because on the one hand I want to take it seriously, but on the other hand if anyone submitted something like that to me I would flunk it. It takes a lot of extra time to figure out what he “really” means, especially given about 2400 years of context that has been dropped.
So anyhow, I reserve judgment on the JB section; ultimately, the payoff should be in JTB. I don’t really think that serious discussion of Plato’s epistemology works in a chat room: it takes a lot of reading and thinking “So exactly is the right standard for evaluating these statements?”. After this week’s homework lump, I ought to be able to get to where Dave Z was last week 
I don’t think I could commit to a regularly scheduled chat time anyway. I do a lot of stuff and have a schedule that’s kind of all over the place.