Extract And Explain Socrates Argument In Meno That Knowledge Is Recollection

Running head: MENO 1

Extract and explain Socrates’ argument in Meno that knowledge is recollection.

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MENO 2

In Plato’s Meno, knowledge is the key matter of the dialogue. Socrates’ relates the

necessary requirements and logos that justifies a true belief. As I will relate in this paper, all that

secretes does is provide the necessary traits of knowledge, though the traits are completely out of

hand, are objective and really has no use in helping determine the aspects that make the truth into

knowledge (M et al. 1950). And even though it is true that Meno displays clearly that all the

individual has the potential of learning, people should however not put down or strive to

knowledge as it doesn’t help much. According to Plato’s theory of recollection, the things that we

know are the ones that we have had memories about; this means that the things that we already

know or the ones we will know are the ones whose memories have already preexisted in our

memories (Editors, 1991). Plato relates that the soul has always been connected with the body

and somewhere along the line of being brought up, the knowledge gets lost and retrieved. He also

explains that we do get the memories we have through experiences, and this is the reason our mind

tends to obscure our minds thus making us believe that we are actually experiencing something

new that we actually aren’t.

To support the argument that knowledge is a recollection, Socrates in Meno gives a

mathematical challenge to a slave who has never had any mathematical experience before. He

gives him a series of mathematical, geometrical diagrams and questions which he asks him to

solve. The problems that he gave the boy could have been solved correctly with the sixth-grade

geometry teachings knowledge. But it is clear that the slave may not have been taught the months-

long lessons about perimeter, geometry, area, squares and square roots. On asking the boy the

questions and letting him solve them on his own, Socrates was like training the boy to think in the

direction that he wanted him to. Even without any prior knowledge, the boy was able to figure out

and come up with correct answers to some of the questions. After then he brought the boy to a

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deceiving direction, to try and explain to the slave that what seemed like common sense to him

was what made him get the wrong answers.

As Socrates was asking the boy the question, he brought him into the direction of falsehood.

And though Socrates didn't leave the notion that he had intentions of fooling the boy, one can relate

that if he had asked different question, then the boy would have arrived at the answer of the subject

matter in the questions. And this is exactly what he does in guiding the boy to finding the square

of the diagram cut into half which the boy was in this case initially not completely foreign to the

subject. "yet he did somehow know. This opinion was somewhere engraved in him" (85c). In this

case, what he really wanted to show in the demonstration of anamnesis the boy had the potential

of finding the answer and that he possessed the knowledge, he only needed the guidance to

unleashing the information. This sums the basic idea of recollection that people have knowledge

within them due to the soul traveling from one aspect of life to another, but the lack of proper

guidance keep our souls inactive. I agree with the theory of recollection; however, one can never

consciously distinguish something that we learn is actually a new concept or one that is from a

previous life.

However, in meno Socrates says something that is really contradicting to his theory of

recollection or anamnesis. That “the boy possessed the correct opinions” as if the boy” didn’t learn

them in life but he possessed and had learned them from a different period(85c). He makes the

use of words such as “opinions” to show that the boy did not only know the that the square

consisted of all the equals sides, but also the boy had this knowledge somewhere in his head, that

the side of the square of B is double the side of "a". Anamnesis is therefore here not a thing that

compliments the real belief of knowledge but its rather the source of knowledge itself, and this

allows the truth to come to us, though it requires proper questioning and guidance in general. In

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recollection, it is the proper guidance and process of arriving at the justification required that

matters. But anamnesis describes where the ability to follow these directions really comes from

in the first place.

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References

Editors, T. (1991). Rene Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy. Journal Of French And

Francophone Philosophy, 3(1), 56-57. http://dx.doi.org/10.5195/jffp.1991.308

M., D., Plato, Jowett, B., Anderson, F., Plato., Copi, I., & Morrow, G. (1950). Meno. The Journal

Of Philosophy, 47(19), 555. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/2021353

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Extract and explain Socrates argument in Meno that knowledge is recollection

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