Meno Paradox Analysis
The Meno Paradox starts around page 79, in these pages Meno and Socrates argue about weather knowledge is learnable or merely a recollection. Lets start by reading the “Meno Paradox”. Meno says, “How will you look for it, Socrates, when you don’t know what it is? How will you aim to search for something you do not know at all? If you should meet with it, how will you know what to look for?”(80d) My interpretation of the text is this, if you know the answer to a question you cannot gain knowledge by asking it. But if you do not know the answer to the question, you will not differentiate the correct answer when given. How can I ever truly know if something is true or false? If I could just keep going to the source of the previous answer and question weather that source is true or false? One might respond by
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The main foundational point of the Recollection Doctrine is this, “As the soul is immortal, has been born often, and has seen all things here and in the underworld, (where) there is nothing which it has not learned; so it is in no way surprising that it can recollect the things it knew before, both about virtue and other things.”(81c) The meaning of this is that, we don’t learn per say, we just recollect certain bits of knowledge, as they are necessary. So when examining the “Meno Paradox”, we see it proves false because it try’s to lay claim that we can’t recognize something we haven’t yet learned. But the recollection doctrine says that, in fact we have learned it. We as souls who have had all knowledge prior to this moment, just need to be reminded of it and we will feel the ability to understand. If we have some knowledge we might be able to tell if the answer was incorrect but not be able to tell the correct answer. Which leads us to Socrates’ example using the slave and trying to get him to figure out how to measure and multiply the sides of a
The main foundational point of the Recollection Doctrine is this, “As the soul is immortal, has been born often, and has seen all things here and in the underworld, (where) there is nothing which it has not learned; so it is in no way surprising that it can recollect the things it knew before, both about virtue and other things.”(81c) The meaning of this is that, we don’t learn per say, we just recollect certain bits of knowledge, as they are necessary. So when examining the “Meno Paradox”, we see it proves false because it try’s to lay claim that we can’t recognize something we haven’t yet learned. But the recollection doctrine says that, in fact we have learned it. We as souls who have had all knowledge prior to this moment, just need to be reminded of it and we will feel the ability to understand. If we have some knowledge we might be able to tell if the answer was incorrect but not be able to tell the correct answer. Which leads us to Socrates’ example using the slave and trying to get him to figure out how to measure and multiply the sides of a