Knowledge and Assumptions in Plato\'s

Knowledge and Assumptions in Plato's Meno

Man's unquenchable thirst for knowledge has spurred our species' rapid ascendency within the physical realm, while guiding the refinement of our moral spectrum, but throughout history the role of assumption in shaping knowledge has been the subject of intense philosophical debate. Among the celebrated treatises on reason and logic known as the Dialogues of Plato, it is a relatively short discourse between Socrates and the sophist Meno which today stands as the most lasting monument to the ancient Greek tradition of pedagogically examining the true nature of knowledge. Plato's Meno is an artfully constructed depiction of an intensely logical dialectic between the sober and systematic master of the Socratic method, and his companion Meno, who claims to possess conclusive knowledge as to the definition of virtue (Rist). In systematically deconstructing Meno's preexisting views on the meaning of virtue, Socrates inspires Meno to postulate his famous paradox when the rhetorician asks "how will you aim to search for something you do not know at all?" (Grube). Socrates' own interpretation of this paradox holds "that a man cannot search either for what he knows or for what he does not know ... (as) He cannot search for what he knows -- since he knows it, there is no need to search -- nor for what he does not know, for he does not know what to look for" (Grube), and it is this singular observation, that knowledge is nothing but assumption extrapolated to form greater meaning, that has since captivated the minds of philosophy's greatest thinkers.

The paradox illuminated in Plato's Meno provides the basis for the study of epistemology, which concerns the differences between a priori knowledge, or that which is learned through the faculty for reason, and a posteriori knowledge, or that which is known through experience (Ichikawa & Steup). A primary objective of epistemology is to identify the source of a posteriori knowledge, as Plato seeks to do during his dialogue with Meno, and later the geometry examination directed toward Meno's ostensibly ignorant slave (Gulley). Plato attempts to answer the fundamental question of how one may know a thing one has not yet learned, a conundrum which would consume the thoughts of future epistemologists such as Rene Descarte. While Socrates uses the sudden comprehension of geometric rules by Meno's slave as proof that the paradox of learning is false, Descartes remains unconvinced as he authors his revolutionary contribution to the philosophical pursuit of knowledge, Discourse on the Method. Seeking to strip his conception of knowledge to the bare minimum by removing all notions which can subject to reasonable doubt, Descartes differentiates between assumptions and true knowledge because, in his estimation, any perception based solely on sensory input is inevitably flawed, as the human sensory system is known to be fallible (Collingwood). By rejecting the role of assumptions in forming knowledge, Descartes devises perhaps the most well recognized philosophical postulations ever formed: Cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore I am).