Unit 4 Allegory of the Cave Extra Credit Paragraph

Socrates tells the story of a group of men who are chained to a wall their whole lives.
They are trapped in such a way that they can only see shadows and hear sounds created by their
captors. One of the prisoners is freed into the world and slowly pieces together new information
about light and the sun and the sky. Later on he tries to tell his fellow prisoners what he
discovered but they wont believe him.
The prisoners rejected the ideas of the enlightened man because they were never given
concrete evidence of what was going on through their senses. By never seeing how light can
interact with objects, they couldnt reason what its properties were. This is an important aspect of
how people come to new understandings. They compare new information with their previous
experiences. If nothing connects, knowledge that might be useful is likely to be thrown out. In
the storys example, the prisoners even went out of their way to not enter the environment out of
fear (the outside world). Men would say of him that up he went and down he came without his
eyes; and that it was better not even to think of ascending (Platos the Republic). This shows the
dangers of censoring information. After a while people will continue to confirm their own biases.
They believe that they have everything correct in their head already and new information will
just lead to errors.

Works Cited
Plato and Benjamin Jowett. Plato's the Republic. New York: The Modern library, 1941. Print.