Discussing "Theaetetus" By Plato

In this episode of Canonball we discuss "Theaetetus," which is one of the dialogues of Plato, who lived in the fifth and fourth centuries BC.

The cover art for this episode is Plato as depicted in a portion of the oil painting The Death of Socrates, which French painter Jacques-Louis David completed in 1787.

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Chapters

• 0:00 The Question "What Is Knowledge?"
• 6:55 Plato's Process In Transcribing Socrates
• 10:07 Geometry As Philosophy
• 12:45 A Clue To Socrates' Appearance
• 13:25 The Quadrivium
• 16:09 Abstraction And Reality
• 17:46 Experience And Skill
• 18:42 Knowledge As Perception
• 20:25 Absolute And Relative Value
• 23:15 The Uninitiated
• 24:28 Steelmanning Protagoras
• 25:30 True And False Or Better And Worse?
• 25:30 True And False Or Better And Worse?
• 28:36 Political Subjectivity
• 29:06 Thales Of Miletus, The Divine Comedy, And The Canterbury Tales
• 30:39 Despot As Stockbreeder, Good And Evil
• 31:30 Justice As The Ultimate Test
• 33:17 Plato Coining The Word "Quality"
• 34:56 False Judgement As Combination Of Knowledge And Perception
• 35:54 Accounts, Complexes, And Names
• 37:53 Aporia And Some Encouragement From Socrates

Transcript

Hello and welcome back. This week, we're going to be looking at Theaetetus of Plato This is one of the dialogues of Plato and it's apparently Plato's only sustained look at the question of what is knowledge and for that reason it's often considered the founding document of epistemology of the branch of philosophy that deals with knowledge and apparently Charles Sanders Pierce 19th century American mathematician logician Philosopher sometimes called the father of pragmatism said that this dialogue Theaetetus was Plato's greatest work and this is a particularly interesting Topic because you'll remember that Plato is writing in the 4th century BC So Rome has only gone from being a kingdom to a republic some hundred years or so before The appearance of Jesus is still four centuries in the future We're talking about a discussion that happened a really long time ago about a very important topic. What is knowledge? how do you abstract from all these different fields this thing that we're talking about when we say that a Craftsman has knowledge of his craft or a poet has knowledge of poetry or an astronomer has knowledge of astronomy What definition of a few sentences can we use to describe? Something that applies in all of these different scenarios where we're talking about knowledge and as we'll see in this dialogue Plato and Socrates have a hard time pinning this down and even today 24 centuries later. It's hard to find a definition of knowledge That is thoroughly convincing and that's surprising and even maybe a little bit alarming given how important Knowledge is in our daily lives and in our worldview, but maybe we can put this beside the difficulty that biologists have in that it is not very easy to define exactly what life is and What is alive and what is not alive? Biologists have a number of criteria that they put forward for something that's alive or not But then there are certain things that either meet the criteria But don't seem like they're alive or they don't meet it But they do and that doesn't keep them from having this mature scientific field called biology That is the study of life the study of this thing that they can't Very precisely define the most straightforward kind of knowledge that we're often talking about is what could be called an awareness of facts if we say that somebody has a very deep knowledge of history what we mean is that they are Familiar with a lot of facts about history and then we have to get into exactly what a fact is But somehow that seems a little bit different from the knowledge of a carpenter For example who might have so much experience that he can Pick up a piece of wood and have a sense in an instant that there's something wrong with that wood It's not quite heavy enough for its size or it's a little bit too stiff He can feel immediately that something is off and lots of fields have something like that in them An intuition that develops over time which maybe has its origin in some knowledge of facts, but it's not solely fact-related It's somehow also related to experience and some people who think about this kind of thing a lot will use Phrases like tacit knowledge and explicit knowledge and explicit knowledge is knowledge. That's recordable transferable You can write it down give it to somebody else teach it to somebody relatively easily and quickly Whereas tacit knowledge is that other kind of knowledge that's not readily transferable and it comes from doing But I'm very interested in this question of what is knowledge because I both feel that knowledge is of course extremely important it is somehow a civilizationally fundamental resource that the right kind of knowledge or Knowledge with its proper definition is a key component in the determination of whether a civilization or a nation is going to flourish and thrive or Collapse and be overrun. It's easy to see how knowledge is Fundamentally important in this way. You could talk about a certain kind of technological knowledge or a certain kind of Military intelligence that some kind of attack is coming or a knowledge of governance About the best way to run a large community of people the most effective policies It's easy to see that you could have for example a lot of money huge amount of money But if you're missing these things that money is not going to compensate for that ignorance that lack of knowledge So on the one hand knowledge is very important But on the other hand, I feel like I don't have a clear definition of what it is Epistemology which when I was younger seemed a bit like worrying about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin is Actually extremely important. You could almost imagine in some ideal state that there might be five or tenpeople paid to work on this problem and to develop ever more precise answers to it. Because so much else of what government does is supposedly based on an answer to this question. If you were to ask somebody near the top of the education system, what are they doing? What is the purpose of this big elaborate bureaucracy that they're running? They would probably, hopefully, give an answer that uses the word knowledge somewhere in it. But unless they know better than Plato and Socrates, they probably don't have a clear, convincing, and thorough definition of what knowledge is. And by the way, I would never want anybody to set up a government department of knowledge now. First of all, that sounds very dystopian, but also it would be far too politicized. But in an ideal state, this is a question among the many other questions that the government apparently has the resources to look into that would be worth some public funding. Or it could be. And it wouldn't necessarily be that this little knowledge think tank would come up with the final definition that everybody thereafter would have to agree with. I just mean that it's a question whose answer has a lot of consequences. It's like determining the precise legal definition of something will then thereafter affect a lot of laws. A definition of knowledge would affect how public institutions would go about, for example, conveying whatever this thing is to children through the public school system. Anyway, I wasn't expecting to wander off the path and start talking about a publicly funded epistemology research center. And it's easy to foresee all kinds of problems with that idea. So I'm not going to sit here and try to defend it at length, but it could contribute something and much dumber things get lots of government money. But I was really just using that to emphasize the importance of the question and its consequences for all kinds of applications in life. Even though it might seem a little bit arcane. But in looking at Theaetetus, one of the first things I want to show you, there's this nice little short passage relatively early on that I think might show a little bit of Plato's process. So you'll remember we talked about this in Euthyphro, the first dialogue that we looked at that Plato wrote these, but Plato is for the most part not in them. The main speaker is usually Socrates, whom Plato knew during his life. Plato was younger. Socrates was older. Plato was a guy who followed Socrates around and listened to him debate with people or talk to people. And then either while Socrates was alive or after he died or a combination of both, Plato wrote these dialogues that scholars think were based on the conversations that Socrates had with other people. And this bit here is not said by either Socrates or Plato, but it might be describing a little bit about Plato's process in doing that. Some of these dialogues have a little bit of a frame story where there's an intro where one person is telling another person, oh, I heard that Socrates had this dialogue with this person. And the other one says, well, tell me about it. And this one is sort of like that. There's this guy, Euclides, who is talking to Terpsion at the very beginning. And like I said, if you hear this as Plato talking, because Plato is writing this, but he has this character Euclides talking. But Plato might be talking a little bit through Euclides here. And this is conjecture. I'm not basing this on anything particularly scholarly, but it seems plausible. This might be Plato saying a bit about how he wrote these dialogues. Euclides says, quote, I thought of Socrates and what a remarkably good prophet he was, as usual, about Theaetetus. It was not long before his death. End quote. I think he must be talking about Socrates's death there. Back to the text. Quote, if I remember rightly that he came across Theaetetus, who was a boy at the time. Socrates met him and had a talk with him and was very much struck with his natural ability. And when I went to Athens, he repeated to me the discussion they had, which was well worth listening to. And he said to me that we should inevitably hear more of Theaetetus if he lived to grow up. Terpsion says, well, he appears to have been right enough. But what was this discussion? Could you tell it to me? And then Euclides says, good Lord, no, not from memory anyway. But I made some notes of it at the time as soon as I got home. Then afterwards, I recalled it at my leisure and wrote it out. And whenever I went to Athens, I used to ask Socrates about the points I couldn't remember and correct my version when I got home. The result is that I have got pretty well the whole discussion in writing. End quote. And so far in the dialogues that we've looked at in the last six weeks or so, that is the first passage like that that I've encountered that describes the process of how somebody would have put these dialogues together, which makes me think that that might be Plato talking there. That Socrates told him about this interesting discussion, and then he wrote down some notes, and then he would go back and ask Socrates about the details, and he would flesh out the conversation further. Though, of course, that would have only been when Socrates was alive, which asAs we talked about in an earlier episode, it seems that Plato would have been about 29 or 30 years old when Socrates was executed. And if we're looking at how people perceived knowledge or categories of knowledge in the past, we can notice that pretty early in this dialogue, Socrates refers to, quote, geometry or any other branch of philosophy, end quote. So apparently Socrates would have thought of geometry as a category of philosophy, which actually makes perfect sense. If we think of philosophy as the love of wisdom, then taking the time to learn geometry to explore it is certainly an expression of the love of wisdom. When you love something, you give your time and your energy to it. You're willing to be uncomfortable or tired for the sake of it. And learning geometry certainly involves all of that, and you gain some very solid wisdom from it. The notion of a proof originally came from Euclid. And Kant apparently viewed geometry as a priori knowledge, though I think it was Poincaré who pointed out that that might be flawed, that even Euclidean geometry cannot be considered a priori knowledge or knowledge that can be derived without sensed experience, but from reason alone, because in the 19th century, they started to develop non-Euclidean geometry. You have these guys like Janos Bolyai and Nikolai Lobachevsky figuring out geometries that don't entirely follow Euclid. I'm going to explain this very badly because I don't pretend to understand it with any depth, but it has something to do with Euclid's fifth postulate, which has to do with parallel lines. And Euclid acknowledges that that is a postulate. He couldn't prove it. But when in the 19th century, people were trying to really exhaustively prove everything that we know in mathematics, they couldn't prove this fifth postulate, which seems self-evident, and that then opened the way to these other forms of geometry somehow. But even granting that and the applications of non-Euclidean geometry in a lot of high-level modern science, I still think that if we are calling wisdom some kind of deep, especially valuable knowledge, which is a very bad definition, but we might say that wisdom is a subsection of knowledge being the best or most valuable kind in some undefined way, I think geometry belongs in that category. And somebody could say, well, so if a seventh grader knows some geometry, are you saying that that seventh grader is wise? No, absolutely not. And I wouldn't say the same thing if a seventh grader had read a bunch of Plato. Being wise and having contact with wisdom are not the same thing at all. But I would say that that seventh grader had had contact with some very deep wisdom, which is maybe part of why it's pretty much standard practice all over the world to try to teach kids geometry. And the three primary speakers in this dialogue are Socrates, Theodorus, and then Theodorus' teacher Theodorus. And Theodorus is talking about Theodorus to Socrates, and he gives us a little clue about Socrates' appearance. Theodorus says, quote, he is not beautiful at all, but is rather like you, snub-nosed with eyes that stick out, though these features are not quite so pronounced in him, end quote. So Theodorus is saying, Theodorus is kind of funny looking, sort of like you are, Socrates, though not as funny looking as you are. But so from that, we can get that Socrates was apparently sort of snub-nosed, and he had eyes that stick out. And at one point later, Socrates is talking to Theodorus about Theodorus, and he's asking him a line of questions, and he says, isn't Theodorus a geometer? And Theodorus says, quote, there's no doubt about him being that, Socrates. And Socrates says, and isn't he also a master of astronomy, and arithmetic, and music, of all that an educated man should know, end quote. And that stood out to me because Theodorus is, of course, first a geometer, he is Theodorus' math teacher, and in the list of all that an educated man should know, Socrates specifically then says, also astronomy, arithmetic, and music. And those four things, as I think we've talked about, geometry, arithmetic, music, astronomy, make up what's called the quadrivium, which are four topics that go alongside or after the trivium, grammar, logic, and rhetoric, that together, from antiquity and into the Middle Ages, made up some kind of comprehensive standard education for a person. And here, Socrates doesn't mention the trivium, grammar, logic, and rhetoric, but he specifically names the quadrivium without calling it that. And this is the oldest and clearest mention of those four topics that I've seen. So we can at least very certainly trace this idea to Socrates and Plato, of arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy as four topics that every educated man must know. And by the way, it's easy to imagine how modern classical music, and I say modern being the last 400 years of classical music, developed as a result of this emphasis. A lot of the modern...musical scales used in European music come from the ancient Greek modes. And they were again emphasized later by Gregory I and the music that came out of the Carolingian Renaissance under Charlemagne in the 8th and 9th century. And so I don't think that it can be granted that if the ancients had not emphasized music in this way, that modern classical music would be as developed as it is. And that's only taking one of those four, nevermind the influence of emphasizing arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy. It's easy to see how the scientific revolution was pretty much kicked off by Galileo, Copernicus, Kepler, and Tocqueville for astronomers. And one could ask whether that would have happened or if it would have happened in the same way if the torch of that emphasis, the meme of valuing these fields had not been carried forward through the Dark Ages and the Middle Ages into the Renaissance. Or maybe to a certain extent, rediscovered after having been dormant for a while. And I can't remember if I've given my very brief summary of the Carolingian Renaissance recently, but it applies here. But I'm worried that I'm getting off on too many tangents. So let's get back to Socrates and Plato. But Socrates asks Thetis what he thinks knowledge is. Not to test him, but in a nice humble way, he says, well, let's get into this question of what is knowledge. And Thetis gives examples of different professions and crafts. He says, there's this kind of craftsman who knows how to do that job. And there's that kind of craftsman who knows how to do this other job. And to get at what he means, Socrates says that to explain knowledge by crafts and professions is like trying to explain clay and saying there's brickmakers clay and potters clay and this other kind of clay. But Socrates is asking what is clay? What is this material that all these different professions use? What is knowledge? What is the thing that is applied in these different contexts? And this is of course what Socrates does a lot. He's trying to abstract something general from many specific concrete examples. And somebody might say that it's misguided to even try to do that, that categorizing in that way is just a kind of self-deception. You are applying something onto a sensed experience that doesn't exist in reality. You are trying to compress reality so that it fits into your human mind. That in trying to make it explicable into something you can articulate, you are losing the nuance and maybe the core essence of what's there. Now that's not a view that I think we're going to find anywhere in Plato. And it's also not how most people live their lives and how European thought has developed over the last 2,400 years. So whether it is valid or true to do that or not, that's what Socrates is doing here. And later Socrates says that Artemis, a Greek goddess, is the one who is responsible for the practice of women who have given birth becoming midwives because, and then Socrates says, quote, human nature is too weak to acquire skill where it has no experience, end quote. So Socrates acknowledges a connection there between skill. He doesn't use the word that the translator translated as knowledge. So he's not talking about the main topic of this dialogue, but he acknowledges a connection between skill and experience, that to get skill in something, you have to have experience in it. And that might seem self-evident, but if someday we get to Kant on this podcast, he talks about the relationship between experience and knowledge. So if we are wondering whether Kant read Plato or how much Plato he read or what he might've been particularly influenced by, we might remember a line like that of Plato and Socrates. So after a while, Thetis ventures a definition of knowledge and he says, quote, a man who knows something perceives what he knows and the way it appears at present at any rate is that knowledge is simply perception, end quote. So they start there. Knowledge is perception. And Socrates says, well, let's look more deeply at this. He brings up Protagoras, another Greek philosopher who is known for his phrase, man is the measure of all things. And this is taken as a subjective view of the world. And an example that Socrates gives, and that I think most people would agree with is that a cold wind is cold to the one to whom it feels cold. If there's two guys standing outside and the wind blows and one of them says, Oh, it's cold. And the other one says, no, it's not. Then it would probably be okay to say that for the one it is cold and for the other, it isn't. But the trouble comes with extrapolating that kind of perception as knowledge principle out to everything. And Socrates disagrees with this idea about perception as knowledge, but he goes into a lot of detail about why he disagrees with it. And he says that this is related to the question of whether things are, or they are always becoming, are there things that are fixed and they stay as they are, or is everything continuously in flux in motion. And he named some people who he thinks would agree.agree with Protagoras about this idea that man is the measure of all things and everything is continuously in flux. And he mentions Protagoras, Heraclitus, Empedocles, and Homer. But he is on the opposite side of this argument, Socrates, and he says that Parmenides, another Greek philosopher, would agree with him, with Socrates. And we don't necessarily have to agree with Socrates' characterization of all those thinkers, but that's how he groups them. And later he gets into this thing about how six is more than four, but less than 12. And he asks Theotitus, what if somebody asked you, what if Protagoras asked you, is it possible for something to become bigger or more in any other way than it being increased? And Theotitus says, well, normally I would say, no, that's the only way it can become more is by being increased. But because you just pointed out the other thing that I'm going to say, yes, there is another way that it could be bigger without being increased. And he doesn't say it explicitly, but what is meant is that something can become more based on what it is in relation to. Six is first less than 12, but then it is more than four. So if you place it next to 12, it's less, but then you place it next to four and it becomes more and you haven't increased the six at all. It stays the same, but it has become bigger. And that might seem like a word game and it might be a word game, but it's an interesting problem as we're trying to look at these examples of knowledge and relativity and the way things are. And this is not what Socrates and Plato are talking about at all, but that passage made me think about relative and absolute value. So you have six is six. It's one, two, three, four, five, six. It's six dots on a die or the abstract notion of six undefined objects, but then it has a relative value. It's less than 12, more than four. And it made me ask the question in my mind of what is the absolute value of a person. And I don't mean the economic value and it might be useful to get away from the word value. We might say the definition of a person or the essence of a person, the way that the definition or the essence of six in absolute terms, unrelated to anything else is that thing that we just talked about. Gottlieb Friega, of course, has a lot more to say about that. If you're interested in the topic of the definition of numbers, I recommend you check out that episode. I really liked that one a lot. But to keep it simple, we could say that six is something like that in its definition or its essence, unrelated to other things. So what is a person in the same sense? Do we not continually see ourselves and other people by their relative qualifiers, older, younger, richer, poorer, smarter, dumber, more and less attractive and lose sight of not only the absolute essence of an individual person, but the absolute essence of all people in the abstract? What is a person? What is the absolute essence of you, of man generally? It's possible that we delude and confuse ourselves and divide our collective strength and energy by thinking about the relative value of ourselves and others rather than some kind of absolute essence, whatever that might be. And that's an incomplete thought, but it's something that came into my mind when I was reading that bit about four and six and twelve. And there's an interesting line that shows a bit about how Socrates and or Plato were thinking. And that's that Socrates refers to the uninitiated as those, quote, who think that nothing exists, but what they can grab with both hands, skipping ahead, who refuse to admit that actions and processes and the invisible world in general have any place in reality, end quote. And he refers to them as, quote, very crude people, so those who think that nothing exists, but what they can grab with both hands are uninitiated and very crude people. And that one stood out to me because I don't necessarily think that nothing exists, but what you can grab with both hands. But I think I'm closer to that thought than Socrates is. I would say, well, we can't be sure that nothing exists that we can't grab with both hands or at least sense in some way or measure or maybe even reason the necessary existence of, but it kind of looks that way. And he would say, or Plato would say, no, there are definitely very real things. The most real things that there are in existence are things that we can't grab with both hands. That's not a quote. I'm trying to guess what he would say in that situation. And that's at least his notion of forms, though it may refer to other things also. But Socrates argues against Protagoras' position for a while. And then he lets Theotidus try to defend Protagoras. But then Socrates himself gives a good steel manning of Protagoras. He argues on behalf of Protagoras against some of the objections that Socrates raised, which shows Socrates or Plato's honesty and interest in really finding what's true and is good for all of us to emulate. We should always be giving the best possible version to ourselves and to others ofthe position we're arguing against. It should be a version of it that the people who hold that position would approve of or articulated even better than they could do so themselves. That's not only good and honest debate etiquette, it's also a way to keep yourself from wasting your own time holding the wrong position on something. It's possible that you have the wrong position and the other side is correct, and so you need to be dealing with the best version of it, not twisting it out of shape and saying, oh, look, my thing is better than this disfigured version of the other position. But arguing against this idea that knowledge is perception, Socrates points out that it's possible to know without perceiving. You can remember what you know, and that doesn't involve an external perception. And he also points out how memories are different from the original sensed experience. But one of the good ways that Socrates steel mans Protagoras is that he says Protagoras would say, don't play with words and verbal traps, but rather attack if you can. My central premise show that each man's perceptions are not his own private events. And Socrates says that Protagoras would say, quote, when a man's soul is in a pernicious state, he judges things akin to it, but giving him a sound state of the soul causes him to think different things, things that are good. In the latter event, the things which appear to him are what some people who are still in a primitive stage call true. My position, however, is that the one kind are better than the others, but in no way truer, end quote. So again, here, we're talking not about what Socrates thinks, but what Socrates says Protagoras thinks. And what we should really do to know that is go read what Protagoras actually wrote. But for now, we will assume that Socrates understood Protagoras thoroughly, probably much better than we could today because he was living in his time and milieu. Protagoras was a couple generations before. It seems that he died about 10 years before Socrates was born, but probably Socrates would have had a good idea of how he thought. And his characterization is that Protagoras would say that the state of the soul, if you're sick or unwell, then you perceive things differently. And if you're well, you perceive them better, but your perception is not necessarily more true, though somebody in a more primitive state would call it that. It's just better. Maybe he would mean that it's more desirable or more pleasant, but it's not necessarily more accurate. And that's an interesting problem because we will grant that if you have a fever and if you look at a certain thing, you're going to perceive it differently than when you are physically well. But most people would assume, even if you're granting that kind of skepticism of the senses, that when you are well, your perception is more accurate, but that's not necessarily true at all. Maybe you're perceiving things more accurately when you have a fever. This is why experimentation and replication are so important because that's one way around this problem, is you design a way of measuring a very specific phenomenon in such a way that you can do it and other people can do it under all kinds of circumstances and you still get the same result. And later, Socrates gets into how this question of subjectivity is congruent with the existence or lack thereof of expertise, that if knowledge is perception and perception is subjective, then there can be no such thing as expertise because everybody's knowledge is correct based on whatever they know. Nobody can know better than they do about any particular topic because their perception belongs to them. It's only accessible by them and they know it best. And this later gets expanded out to a political context. Socrates talks a bit about how the majority opinion does not determine the truth, which is something we've talked about before, but he also gets into political subjectivity, whether a state making its own laws determines its own truths. And there's a long interesting passage that I'm not going to read about the difference between the souls of lawyers or people who spend their lives in the courts and those of philosophers. And later, Socrates mentions Thales, and he's talking about Thales of Miletus, who's a very important ancient Greek thinker, who among other things is known for his theorem, which has to do with the diameter of a circle and any angle drawn from that diameter, the two points of the diameter, any angle whose other point sits on the circumference of the circle will be a right angle. If you can see it visualized, it's very intuitive, but interesting. And Thales is from the sixth century BC, so he's a bit older. And there's also a reference to Thales' theorem in the Divine Comedy of Dante. There's a couple lines that reference it. But anyway, here, Socrates is talking about Thales of Miletus, and he says, quote, they say Thales was studying the stars and gazing aloft when he fell into a well. And a witty and amusing Thracian servant girl made fun of him because she said he was wild to know.about what was up in the sky, but failed to see what was under him and under his feet." And I couldn't find it easily, but I remember that in the Canterbury Tales, there's a short passage that reads kind of like that. And I think there it doesn't mention Thales, but it's possible that that story got passed down and Chaucer put it in there in some form without knowing that the origin of it was this philosopher Thales. And I don't know if that anecdote is recorded in a bunch of other places also, but it's possible that Plato was the source for it originally. But unfortunately, as I mentioned, I couldn't quickly find that passage in Canterbury Tales. Maybe you know what I'm thinking of. And at one point, he says that when a philosopher hears the praise of a despot, a despot being praised, it sounds to him like the praise of a stock breeder, as if somebody were praising somebody who raises cattle, because he says that's basically what a despot is, is they raise up and take advantage of people the way that a stock breeder raises up and takes advantage of cattle. And talking a bit about good and evil, Socrates says at one point, quote, it is not possible that evil should be destroyed, for there must always be something opposed to the good, nor is it possible that it should have its seat in heaven, but it must inevitably haunt human life and prowl about this earth. That is why a man should make all haste to escape from earth to heaven. And escape means becoming as like God as possible. And a man becomes like God when he becomes just and pious with understanding, end quote. And he later talks about how justice is the ultimate test of a man and everything else is a proxy or a substitution for it. Skill or prowess in some other field is a stand-in for this original test, which is whether someone is just or not. And this made me think of how a skilled musician is often called a virtuoso. And that's, I guess, an Italian word, but it must come from the word virtuous, virtuoso. And it's easy to imagine that a skilled pianist could be vicious. They could not be virtuous. I'm using vicious to mean captured by vice as the opposite of virtuous, but still in the history of that word, it might've been that it was assumed that somebody who was skilled in a certain craft was also a virtuous person. There must be some kind of connection there. And later he says something that has a lot of similarity with the monotheistic religions that would emerge 400 and a thousand years later. Socrates says, quote, my friend, there are two patterns set up in reality. One is divine and supremely happy. The other has nothing of God in it and is the pattern of the deepest unhappiness. This truth, the evildoer does not see. Blinded by folly and utter lack of understanding, he fails to perceive that the effect of his unjust practices is to make him grow more and more like the one and less and less like the other. For this, he pays the penalty of living the life that corresponds to the pattern he is coming to resemble. And if we tell him that, unless he is delivered from this ability of his, when he dies, the place that is pure of all evil will not receive him. That he will forever go on living in this world, a life after his own likeness, a bad man tied to bad company. He will, but think this is the way fools talk to a clever rascal like me. End quote. And later Socrates uses the word quality or a word that is translated as quality. And he says, quote, but perhaps quality seems a strange word to you. Perhaps you don't quite understand it as a general expression. End quote. And the beautiful Hackett edition of the complete works of Plato that I'm reading from includes there a footnote that says, this is the first occurrence in Greek of the word Poyotes. It's spelled P O I O T E S quality or what sortness coined by Plato from the interrogative adjective Poyos of what sort. End quote. So the word that he uses there that's translated as quality is apparently the first time that the word quality or Poytas was used in ancient Greek. And it breaks down as something like what sortness. And he later talks about how, if all things are in motion, then perception itself is also in motion and it cannot be knowledge. So they eventually decide that knowledge is not perception. So Thetis tries again and says that knowledge is not judgment generally, but right judgment. They're still trying to find a good definition of knowledge. And then they try to figure out what false judgment is. And Socrates says, maybe it's other judging. It's mistaking one thing for another. You think you're judging one thing, but in fact, you're judging another thing. Quote, when a man in place of one of the things that are has substituted in his thought, another of the things that are and asserts that it is in this way, he is always judging something, which is, but judges one thing in place of another. And having missed the thing, which was the object of his consideration, he might fairly be called one who judges falsely. End quote. But then he disproves that also afterwards. And he later says in summary, quote, in the case of things we do.Do not know, and have never perceived, there is no possibility of error or of false judgment. Skipping ahead. It is in cases where we both know things and are perceiving them that judgment is erratic and varies between truth and falsity." And that's after a lot of elaboration about whether false judgment comes from only knowing without perceiving or only perceiving without knowing. And then he gets to this point where he says, false judgment must have to do with knowing and perceiving together. You know a person and you see somebody far off and you wave at them because you think it's that person, but you are mistaken because it is in fact somebody else. That's false judgment. False judgment occurs with the connection of perception to thought. But then he points out how people can go wrong in thought alone. You can miscalculate if you're doing math. So that doesn't really involve a perception. And then they use these two images for the soul and knowledge. He describes them first as something like a wax block with impressions put in it, and then as an aviary with lots of birds in it, and the birds are things that you've learned before. And then when you remember one of the things that you know, you are going to catch one of the birds in the aviary, but sometimes you might catch the wrong one. And then they get to this next point where they say, true judgment with an account is knowledge. So then what is an account? An account is a complex of names, names or things of which no account can be given. They are the smallest units of thinking. It is a single form resulting from the combination of the several elements when they fit together. So if you give a true judgment and you also have an account of your true judgment, that's knowledge. So if I have a quarter in one of my two fists and I hold them both out to you and you tap on one of my fists and you guess correctly which fist the quarter was in, that's not knowledge because you can't give an account of your true judgment. You guessed right, but you don't know why, unless you can say, well, I saw you put it in that hand. And that account is an explanation of all the different parts, the names, the sort of atoms, the unsplittable items of thought of which no account can be given, the smallest units of thought. But then you get into a problem where if the parts are not knowable, if you can't give an explanation of the names and the complex comprises those unknowable parts, then the complex is equally unknowable, Socrates says. So that account is not knowledge because you haven't succeeded in knowing the complex that you're talking about. And he talks about three different types of account, and one is a vocal image of the thought, that is the thought spoken, I think is what that means. The second one is the way to the whole through the elements, that being using all the elements or the names or the parts in order to explain the whole. And then the ability to tell how an object differs from others. And this dialogue also ends in an aporia, in a state of puzzlement. They haven't arrived at a good definition of knowledge, but Socrates ends on an encouraging note. He says, quote, if ever in the future, you should attempt to conceive or should succeed in conceiving other theories, they will be better ones as a result of this inquiry, end quote. So he tells Thetis that even though we didn't come to a good conclusion, we didn't find an answer to our question. Having gone through this inquiry, we will still be able to develop better theories in the future. And that's an important outlook for the skeptic or for anybody seeking truth or knowledge, because there can be a pull toward a cohesive narrative. Our brains like to have explanations of things. Even a bad one is better than no explanation, or it feels better. And it can be hard to do a bunch of work and stay in a state of suspended judgment to look at a bunch of different things and still say, well, I don't know, I don't have a good answer for that yet. Because you want that reward of ending up with a nice explanation. But Socrates here is telling us, even if you've spent a bunch of time on something and you don't come to an answer, you will still be better off in the future for having done that inquiry. It will still benefit you even if you don't quite get the thing that you are looking for. And the other side of that, which is implied, I think, but he doesn't say it, is to accept a bad explanation would be much worse than staying in this state of having no explanation yet, even though that can be uncomfortable. And it's certainly less impressive to most people than saying, I know this, that, and the other thing that is attractive to most people in a way that saying, yeah, I've thought about this a lot, but I still don't have a good answer is, but I've gone a bit longer than I meant to. So we can leave it there for this week. Farewell until next time, take care, and happy reading.